The Detroit Lions are back at home in Week 2, hosting their division rival Chicago Bears. After a loss in Week 1, the Lions will be looking to rebound against Ben Johnson’s team, and to do that, they’ll need to follow the keys to victory laid out in this week’s Honolulu Blueprint.
“I just want to get better from last week. I want to get significantly better from last week,” Lions coach Dan Campbell said on where he’s looking for the team to improve. “I want to cut our MAs (missed assignments) in half, I want to be much more efficient and productive, and find a way to get some takeaways, protect the football, and then we’ll go from there and get better the next week. That’s really what I’m looking for.”
For a detailed look at the opposing scheme, make sure you check out our complementary breakdown piece: Lions Week 2 Preview: Breaking down Bears’ offensive and defensive schemes.
Key 1: Establish the rushing attack
The Lions’ rushing attack in Week 1 was a disappointment. They averaged 2.1 yards per carry (30th in the NFL), with a 31.8% success rate (28th). The Lions rely heavily on the run game to set up their offense, and when the output is so minimal, the rest of their offensive game plan becomes difficult to manage.
“We’re not in panic mode. But, 2.1, that isn’t going to cut it,” Lions offensive coordinator John Morton said on Thursday. “That isn’t going to cut it; that should never happen.“
The Lions plan to reassert themselves in the run game in Week 2, aiming to get their offense back on track, and the Chicago Bears’ defense could help them achieve that.
Last week against the Vikings, the Bears allowed 4.6 yards per carry (22nd), giving up 120 rushing yards in the game. Several factors contributed to the Vikings’ success against the Bears, and the Lions will hope to similarly capitalize on an opportunity.
The Bears keep a light box (53.8%, ninth-highest rate in Week 1), relying on their front four and two linebackers to get the job done. For the most part, the main six held their own, but eventually, they wore down as the game progressed, and in the fourth quarter, the Vikings registered 82 of their 120 rushing yards. Additionally, the lighter boxes and wearing down led to the Vikings getting more push up front, and in turn, the Bears allowed 2.45 rushing yards before contact per attempt (fifth most). Lastly, the extra push opened up rushing lanes for the Vikings, and if they managed to get past the first wave of defenders, there was open space to run; they gave up four rushing plays of 10+ yards in Week 1.
Key 2: Improve OL communication
One of the major flaws in the Lions’ lack of offensive success was their inability to effectively communicate. Far too often, the Lions would check into a secondary play call, and the message would not be properly distributed amongst the players, most notably the offensive line. The Lions insist they have identified the faulty mechanism in their communication and believe they’ve already fixed the issue.
“It’s being addressed, it’s being fixed,” Morton said of the Lions’ communication issues along the offensive line. “Again, taking some of these plays out where there’s not a lot of communication, going on the road, we know we didn’t do a lot of shifting and things like that, so it’s going to be fixed.”
For such a big issue in Week 1, the insistence that it’s been fixed so quickly is a bit surprising. But Morton explained that it’s because they’re leaning on plays that have been drilled into the players.
“Because we’re doing plays that they’ve done,” Morton said. “Now, there’s some young guys, right? So we’ve just got to make sure we give them the right looks, all the different types of right looks, and to make sure they know exactly what they’re doing. And that’s what we’ve done.”
Key 3: Separate and hit the target
The Packers’ defensive scheme and game situation forced the Lions into a lot of checkdowns in Week 1, but the fact that Jared Goff had time to get through his progressions and find the open target is a good indicator that the offensive line held up better than most assumed.
According to NFL Pro, “Jared Goff averaged a 3.09-second time to throw in his Week 1 matchup against the Packers, his longest average time to throw in a game since 2022. Goff completed 19 of 23 pass attempts with a time to throw between 2.5 and 4.0 seconds (82.6%) for 147 yards (6.4 yards per attempt).”
Goff also connected on several tough throws—Amon-Ra St. Brown on the sideline and Isaac TeSlaa for a touchdown, are examples—and had a Completion Percentage Over Expectation (CPOE) in Week 1 that was +8.3%, which was the fourth-highest percentage in the NFL.
However, the Bears are coming off a very solid performance from their secondary, despite missing Jaylon Johnson, who appears on track to return for this game. The Bears allowed a passing EPA of -0.59; best in the NFL in Week 1, only allowing 134 passing yards on 23 attempts.
Potentially working in Goff’s favor is that the Bears defensive coordinator Dennis Allen taught his style of defense to Aaron Glenn, who taught it to the Lions current defensive coordinator Kelvin Sheppard. Therefore, the Lions offense is well aware of how the Bears will likely defend.
The Lions have historically done well against man coverage, averaging “10.1 yards per target (2nd-most) and a league-high 76.4% catch rate when given less than three yards of cushion” in 2024, according to NFL Pro.
Lions coach Dan Campbell typically opens his Monday morning press conference by discussing the team’s strengths and weaknesses from the previous game. This week, he immediately pointed to the team’s struggles on third downs—successful on just five of 15 (33%) vs Packers—as being one of their biggest flaws.
Things won’t be easy for the Lions in this area. Last week, the Bears only allowed the Vikings to be successful on three of 12 (25%) third downs, and they even forced the game’s only interception, which was returned for a touchdown.
The Bears like to bring their linebackers up into the A-gaps on third downs and threaten a blitz. Against the Vikings, they dropped the linebackers into coverage the first two times they showed this look, and then on the third instance, they brought blitz. When the Vikings went to their hot route, the Bears anticipated the throw—a staple of Allen’s defenses—and jumped the route for the pick-six.
“He gets after it blitz package-wise, especially on third down,” Morton said of Allen’s willingness to blitz on third down. “They’re all disciplined—I know that—they hustle. So the bottom line is just for us, we’ve just got to go execute.”
The Lions prioritize stopping the run, and they started off the season doing just that.
“Let’s go into the run game. We held (the Packers) to 3.1 rushing, that’s a good day in the NFL against a back (Josh Jacobs) like that. It’s a good day,” Sheppard explained. “But we should’ve been dominating the run game, we should’ve been at 2.2. Why do I say that? Because one of those was a 15-yard explosive run that should’ve never happened.”
This week, the Lions will face a familiar face in D’Andre Swift. In Week 1, Swift carried the ball 17 times for 53 yards, but he seemed to outproduce his numbers when watching the game. Unfortunately for the Bears, despite looking good, Swift still has the same bad habits he had in Detroit. For example, when he runs to his gap and it’s plugged, he turns the rush laterally instead of north/south. As a result, he gets dinged by the advanced stat community for wasting yards. In Week 1, NFL Pro determined that Swift had 20 fewer rushing yards over expectations (RYOE), due to wasted opportunities. And this is not a new trait for Swift; in 2024, he was charged with leaving 174 RYOE yards on the field, the most in the NFL.
The Lions will want to consistently clog Swift’s rushing lanes and force him into bad habits. But he’s not the only runner the Lions need to keep eyes on…
Key 6: Contain and squeeze
In Week 1, Caleb Williams showed he’s still working on developing his accuracy, but his ability to scramble adds another layer to Ben Johnson’s offense. Williams didn’t have a designed run against Minnesota, but he did scramble six times, gaining 58 yards and scoring a touchdown. The Vikings were actually in a good position to make the tackle behind or at the line of scrimmage on five of the six runs, but each time they made a mistake and Williams took advantage.
When Sheppard was asked about Williams’ ability to escape the pocket and gain chunks of yards, he acknowledged the success the Bears had, but also assured he had a plan to defend it.
“It’s a heightened emphasis if you watched the Monday night game,” Sheppard explained. “So, Caleb was outstanding; he extended a lot of drives, he put points on the board, he gave his team an opportunity to win last year via his ability to escape the pocket and run. We’re very aware of that, and we’ll have a plan for it.”
In the past, the Lions’ defensive plan for mobile quarterbacks has been to execute a “contain and squeeze” approach with their front. The idea is to set the edges of the passing pocket with their defensive ends, then use strength to push the pocket back onto the quarterback, leaving no escape lanes to run to.
The advantage of this plan is that it eliminates a big portion of the quarterback’s rushing production. While the downside of this strategy is that the defensive line is slower to put pressure on the quarterback, allowing him more time to throw.
The Lions will likely take this trade-off, as Williams’ legs are a more polished producer than his arm right now. For example, in Key 3, I mentioned that Goff’s CPOE was +8.3%, and a big reason why he was successful in Johnson’s offense. For comparison, Williams’ CPOE was -13.2%, the worst in the NFL in Week 1.
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