Dan Miller has been the voice of the Lions for nearly 20 years. Inevitably, he's seen a lot of bad football. “I’ve called many Lions games and in some dark times," he said during Detroit's ugly loss to the Panthers on Saturday. "I have never seen them get run on like this."
With due respect to Miller, the Lions weren't run on. They were run through. The Panthers ripped them apart on the ground from the opening snap, a 30-yard run around the left edge by Chuba Hubbard. He went up the middle for 35 more two snaps later before D'Onta Foreman plowed into the end zone three snaps after that.
Hubbard and Foreman combined for five runs of 20-plus yards. They both went over 100 on the day, Hubbard averaging over 10 yards per tote. The Panthers rushed for 320 yards as a team. Even quarterback Sam Darnold ran for a touchdown. Dan Campbell could do nothing but tip his cap to Panthers interim head coach Steve Wilks when they met at midfield after the game.
"That was an absolute ass-kicking!" Campbell told Wilks. "That's a fuc*ing great job! Seriously."
Detroit's defense had come a long way from the first half of the season. After leaking yards on the ground for the first two months, the Lions had held opponents to just 3.7 yards per carry over their prior five games. They allowed 7.5 per carry on Saturday. They knew the Panthers wanted to run the ball and could do nothing to stop them.
"We got hit in the middle, we got hit on the perimeter, we got hit everywhere you can get hit in the run game," Campbell said. "Darnold hit us on the read run. We just didn’t handle it well. We weren’t physically or emotionally ready today."
Campbell credited Wilks and the Panthers for doing "a good job with some of the things they did scheme wise."
"They hit us on some early runs that gashed us, they hit us on a trap and then they just ran simple gap-scheme double teams and bounced it out and we had no support," Campbell said.
The result was a mauling of the sort the Lions thought they had put behind them. In Campbell's words, "an ass-kicking."
"We got hit a couple times and we could never stop the bleeding," he said.
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