The Lions ran a double-reverse flea flicker for a touchdown to Sam LaPorta. They ran a hook and ladder to right tackle Penei Sewell for a touchdown that was wiped out by a penalty. They threw to left tackle Taylor Decker in the end zone. They even had swing tackle Dan Skipper run a few routes as a receiver.
The Lions emptied the clip in their blowout of the Cowboys last week, and at least some of it, said Jared Goff, "might have been tongue in cheek" after the way they were robbed in Dallas last season. "But it was part of the game plan that we thought was going to work."
"We were just going out there trying to execute our plays and we hit on a lot of them," said Goff. "At the end we were just running the plays that were presented by their defense."
The Lions' offense keeps upping the ante under coordinator Ben Johnson. It has no plans to stop. In Week 3, we saw a hook and ladder called Shake and Bake from Amon-Ra St. Brown to Jahmyr Gibbs for a touchdown against the Cardinals. In Week 4, a reverse pass called Alcatraz from St. Brown to Goff for a touchdown against the Seahawks. The touchdown to LaPorta last week was called Boilermaker, because former Lions backup QB David Blough brought it with him from Purdue.
"Unreal!" Tom Brady exclaimed on the NFL on FOX broadcast.
And those are just the trick plays that have made it from Johnson's call sheet onto the field. There are plenty of others that have yet to show up in games.
“Oh yeah," Johnson said. "Each and every week we stock up, and that’s been constant. It just so happened last week that we wanted to unload them.”
Dan Campbell said that the Lions went into the Cowboys game "saying, 'Man, we’re using everything in our arsenal.’ We had told the players that, that’s the way we worked all week, and we were using it. We were playing football and we were pedal to the metal."
"And then our job, every week, is come back up with something more creative and find a way to continue to push the limits here. Ben does a great job and the offensive staff. So now it’s, ‘Let’s go find something else,'" said Campbell.
Stasis is the antithesis of Detroit's offense, which leads the NFL in points per game. It's not trying to adapt so much as evolve before everyone else. Asked if he thought about saving some of their bullets last week instead of firing them in a rout, Johnson said, "I’m not worried about putting things on tape. If anything, it’s just going to help set up the next thing down the road. The well is deep in terms of the thoughts.”
"This game’s been around for a long time," Johnson said. "Our challenge as a coaching staff, and I say it to the offensive staff quite a bit, is we can run a million different types of plays and because of that, I don’t like to run the same one twice. I don’t like to do it within a game, I don’t like to do it within a season. Defenses are doing their film study, they’re looking at things, they’re finding, ‘Hey, out of this formation, they’re doing this, that and the other.’ And we try to mix it up."
Johnson, in his third year as offensive coordinator in Detroit, said the Lions "do have some some staples that I will repeat at times," like the trick play to LaPorta that they also ran for a touchdown against the Panthers early last season. "But we’re charged with, let’s have a little creativity."
Last week, Johnson stressed the three tenets of the Lions' offense: physical, detailed and explosive. Executing trick plays places a premium on the details. From the start of spring workouts, Johnson and his coaching staff "are very demanding of our players," he said.
"So when you get into a game week and we have more volume, or we have nuances that maybe we don’t get a ton of reps on, they have to decipher it and handle it and they do a great job of it," said Johnson.
As St. Brown explained, the offense is so layered that the Lions are "running plays off the plays that we like, and turning them into trick plays. Trick plays that we’ve already done, we’re making them different. ... Hopefully it’s something the defense thinks they know is coming, but it’s something else.”
Johnson likely called even more trick plays than the Lions ran on Sunday. That's certainly true over the course of this season. Johnson might dial one up if he sees something he likes, but Goff will check out of it at the line if the defense isn't showing exactly what the Lions are looking for.
Johnson referenced the touchdown pass from St. Brown to Goff and said the Texans ran the same play that week against the Jaguars, "but it wasn’t quite a premier look, in my opinion, so Stefon Diggs had to run for the touchdown" instead of tossing it to C.J. Stroud.
"We have to get the right look," Johnson said. "We’re not just calling plays to call plays because we think they look cool. It’s really by design and intent, and then our guys carry it the rest of the way.”
The Lions have only dipped into the well.