The Downfall Of the 2024 Lions Didn’t Seem Possible
Credit: Kimberly P. Mitchell via Imagn Images
As the cameras in Ford Field kept cutting from reaction shot to reaction shot of Lions fans in the fourth quarter, you didn’t need to have them mic’d up to know what they were thinking. How?
How does a 15-win season end with a thud like this? With a 6-seed Washington Commanders team coming into Ford Field and whooping the NFL’s No. 1 offense by 14 points? How is a rookie quarterback the only hurdle the Lions weren’t able to overcome after a regular season that saw Detroit do nothing but overcome adversity over and over again?
It’s not like the end of last season wasn’t painful. But at least it was painful in a way that made sense. An inexperienced team blowing a second-half lead against a team that had back-to-back Conference Championship runs? That’s a story the NFL has heard before. But that team coming back with a 15-win season and getting dropped in the Divisional Round? A 15-win team had only done that once: The 2011 Green Bay Packers, and even in that case, they faced a New York Giants team that had a Super Bowl-winning quarterback in Eli Manning.
Again: How?
Dan Campbell following the loss:
"The whole point of doing what you do is to get to The Show, man. It's why you play this game. We fell short."
🎥: @Lions pic.twitter.com/G0zNilTTxG https://t.co/GrkayxdFSL
— The 33rd Team (@The33rdTeamFB) January 19, 2025
It’s hard to totally go with the injuries caught up to Detroit narrative that we saw in the postgame shows. Shouldn’t there have been warning signs before this? Sure, Josh Allen ran roughshod over the Lions in Week 15, but that was a game where the Lions suffered three or four major in-game injuries, and even then, Buffalo won by only one score. Their other major challenges — in beating the Packers twice and crushing the Minnesota Vikings — saw Detroit pass with flying colors.
The obvious culprit is the five turnovers the Lions made against zero from the Commanders. But even that seems to defy logic. The Lions had just 15 turnovers for the entire regular season and committed 33% of that total in one game. It happened once before this season, with Goff throwing five picks against the Houston Texans, but that looked like a freak occurrence, not a preview of the offense in what was supposed to be the third-biggest game of the year (after the Conference Championship and Super Bowl).
It doesn’t feel like the Lions would have slept on a team like the Commanders. It’s hard to see Campbell allowing that, and it’s hard to see the team buying into their own hype that hard after knowing how easily things can be taken away after last year’s experience.
Maybe Jayden Daniels is really just That Dude. He looked like that might be the case last week, and it sure as hell looked like it tonight. The No. 2 overall pick performed better than any rookie should have been able to tonight, going 22-for-31 for 299 yards and two touchdowns. Maybe he goes on to win a Super Bowl, and at the very least, tonight will make a little more sense in hindsight.
If Daniels is That Dude, though, what does it say for the Detroit model? Most Super Bowls are won with an All-World quarterback. Sure, sometimes Nick Foles or Trent Dilfer sneaks through to lift the Lombardi Trophy, but no regular Super Bowl team gets there without a signal-caller who lays claim to being one of the best in the world. Goff is a lot of good things when he’s on his game: efficient and capable of making big throws and putting up stats. But he’s not That Dude.
Detroit looked poised to become that team that became perennial contenders without having a true equal to Patrick Mahomes, Allen, and Lamar Jackson. Their edge was the rest of their team, a young, explosive offense with a premier offensive line and a mindset to beat other teams into submission on both sides of the ball. It looked unstoppable. Until Daniels and the Commanders stopped it.
That’s a scary thought for the Lions and the city of Detroit generally, but even more frightening is this: When is this team ever getting a better shot? Can they expect to win 15 more games next year and get home field advantage again? Regardless of whether this game was a fluke or the exposure of a fatal flaw, Detroit might have as clear of a path to the Super Bowl as they did. It took about 1.23 life expectancies worth of years to see them become this good in the first place.
Can they count on the NFC being this ripe for a Super Bowl run? The San Francisco 49ers could easily get healthy again and go back to being a premier threat. The Philadelphia Eagles just won 14 games themselves. The Vikings and Packers might not implode next season. And now, we might have to worry about Daniels improving from his rookie to sophomore season in Washington.
It’s hard to feel anything but stunned. This had to be The Year. Nothing had stopped the Lions before, and there was no indication their playoff run would last 60 minutes. It seemed impossible, but unfortunately for an entire city reeling from a gut-punch, this is the reality that the Lions now must deal with and move past.
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