In his Pro Bowl rookie season, Sam LaPorta was a focal point of the Lions' potent offense. He averaged about seven targets, five catches and 50 yards a game, second on the team in all categories to Amon-Ra St. Brown. Those are essentially his totals through two games this season.
Why hasn't LaPorta been more involved?
"I think some of Sam is, he had the injury coming out of camp so we were trying to be smart with him for the Rams game, for sure," Dan Campbell said Tuesday on 97.1 The Ticket. "I was actually worried about him getting too many reps for the Rams game. You start trying to build a huge game plan for a guy and you don’t know if he’ll be able to make it all those reps and then he gets hurt or something happens, you just lost 40 percent of your game plan. So you gotta be smart about that."
LaPorta injured his hamstring the third week of training camp, and the Lions were careful not to rush him back into action. He played 48 snaps (including overtime) in the team's season-opening win over the Rams, after averaging about 60 in games for which he was healthy last season. He jumped to 75 snaps in the Lions' Week 2 loss to the Bucs, but caught just two passes on three targets for 13 yards -- the same stat line as Tim Patrick.
Campbell said the Lions wanted to get LaPorta more looks, but the Bucs forced the ball to go elsewhere.
"Last week we had some things in for him," said Campbell. "Hell, we had a couple plays down in the red zone that they took away, defensively they did a good job, we dumped it down, so the ball just didn’t really find him for this game."
Through two games, LaPorta has six catches on eight targets for 58 yards -- and no touchdowns after pacing his position with 10 last season. But as Campbell assured, "He’s not someone we don’t think about."
"We want to get all those guys more touches," he said. "We want to get Saint more touches, and Saint had a lot (last week), let’s get it in his hands. We want to get Gibbs more touches, Montgomery, we want to get LaPorta, we’d like get Leaf going more, Jamo. We got a lot of mouths to feed and we’re going to use everything at our disposal to help us win here."