One half of the Lions' dynamic rushing duo is down. The other is poised to step up.
With David Montgomery likely done for the season due to a torn MCL, Jahmyr Gibbs "is going to take on a bigger role here," Dan Campbell said Tuesday on 97.1 The Ticket. "And he’s ready for that. He knows that, he understands it."
Gibbs has averaged 13.3 carries per game this season as he and Montgomery split the workload. He's rather remarkably sixth in the NFL in rushing, despite being 17th in attempts. He's third among running backs in yards per attempt (5.6), trailing only Saquon Barkley and Derrick Henry.
"The trick," said Campbell, "is maximizing the reps that we use him but not killing him."
"We’re still going to need some help out of (Craig) Reynolds and (Sione) Vaki and those guys, and that’ll be the big thing here," he said. "But yeah, he’s about to go up. And look, he’s ready for this, man. He’s gotten better and better all season and now he’s our lead horse. He’s gotta be ready to roll."
Gibbs has galloped in this spot in the past. When Montgomery was sidelined against the Raiders last year, Gibbs turned a career-high 26 carries into 152 yards and a touchdown in his breakout game in the NFL. When Montgomery was forced out of the Colts game this year, Gibbs turned a season-high 21 carries into 90 yards and two touchdowns.
In the four games he's played where Montgomery has been injured, Gibbs has totaled 93 touches, about 23 on average. And he's churned out 496 yards from scrimmage, 124 on average. He's averaged 5.3 yards per touch.
"Yeah, he can handle the load," Jared Goff said Tuesday on 97.1 The Ticket. "We’ll have to spell him with somebody else, I’m sure, but he’s one of the best backs in the league. He’ll be just fine. Obviously losing David hurts, but we’ll overcome it just like we’ve overcome everything else this year."
The Lions' elite rushing attack has slipped of late, but that owes more to the blocking details than anything else. After Gibbs was held to a season-low 31 yards on eight carries in last week's loss to the Bills, he acknowledged, "We’re definitely not playing to our standard running the ball and we know that, so we’re trying to make it an emphasis getting that back up."
After reviewing the film, Campbell said the issues on the ground could be traced back to "one person here, one person there."
"The scheme was pretty good, we felt like. There were a couple things we didn’t like how we designed them, we put our guys in tough positions. But then after that, it was, man, we got everything we need on the frontside and then we don’t get the backside block. Or, we’re late, we don’t get up on the snap count. Or, it’s the receiver here, it’s the tight end here, it’s the guard here, it’s frontside here.
"And literally we took turns, one by one, making those errors and before you know it, the game gets to where it’s at and now you’re out of the run game completely. We only had 15 rushes. And certainly, when you don’t rush it good early in those, you’re not going to continue to go back to them, it’s just hard to do that."
Of the Lions' various issues at the moment, most of them on the defensive side of the ball, the run game seems to be the least of Campbell's worries.
"We will get all that cleaned up, I’m telling you. I’m really not losing sleep over that," he said. "I know we will get those things corrected. Those guys will bounce back."
As for replacing Montgomery in short-yardage situations, the Lions have the perfect candidate in house: "I’ll just QB sneak everything, how 'bout that?" Goff cracked.
"I got a pretty high batting average on that," he said. "Or maybe I’ll just line up back there, who knows."