While NFL defenses have been zigging toward playing more nickel, Kelvin Sheppard and the Lions zagged last season by playing base more than any team in the league.
The Lions employed their 4-3 base defense, built around linebackers Jack Campbell, Alex Anzalone and Derrick Barnes, on about 60 percent of their snaps, while the NFL average, depending where you look, was closer to 20 percent. They employed nickel defense on about a third of their snaps, the lowest rate in the league.
The Super Bowl-champion Seahawks, meanwhile, played nickel on more than three-quarters of their snaps, the highest rate in the league, and finished with the NFL's top scoring defense.
But Lions defensive coordinator Kelvin Sheppard contends that his unit, which finished 22nd in scoring amid a rash of injuries in the secondary, and Seattle's unit weren't all that different.
"I keep hearing this Seattle nickel thing. Do you guys know who their nickel is? He's 6-foot-3, 225 pounds," said Sheppard, referring to rookie safety Nick Emmanwori, a second-round pick who's quickly blossomed into one of the league's top young players. "They're pretty much playing 4-3. It's actually a very similar system to ours."
Sheppard said that he talked the other day to Seahawks head coach and defensive whiz Mike Macdonald, who told him jokingly, "Yeah, I'm a guru."
"But he actually is," said Sheppard.
Sheppard went on to say that he's been told by "every offensive coordinator," including Lions head coach Dan Campbell and the team's new passing game coordinator Mike Kafka, who was offensive coordinator of the Giants when they hung over 500 yards on Detroit last season with backup quarterback Jameis Winston, that the way the Lions deploy their defense is "an absolute nightmare, because you're able to dictate to the offense."
"And that's what the offense tries to do to us by personnel. That's why they're in and out of personnel," Sheppard said. "And to be honest with you, a lot of offensive coordinators drool when you put nickel out there against 12 personnel because the run game now is so creative with these guys."
The Lions' reliance on base defense typically gives them an advantage in stopping the run, but even that part of their defense stumbled down the stretch last season despite a healthy front seven. It started with a poor performance in a 41-34 loss to the Rams. Sheppard credited Sean McVay for "switching the trend" from lighter personnel last year by deploying more 13 personnel to outmuscle teams on the ground. Other teams will follow suit "because the guru did it," Sheppard said.
"To each his own, but it's just the creative ways you're able to attack people and trying to stay ahead of that curve and not necessarily following anybody because the Seahawks just won the Super Bowl and they play 60, 70 percent nickel with that freak from South Carolina. I probably would have played it too if I had him," said Sheppard.
The Lions have a potentially similar, albeit smaller chess piece to Emmanwori in Brian Branch, who has thrived at nickel in the past. But Branch has played the majority of his snaps the past two seasons at safety. Asked if he sees an Emmanwori style role for Branch in Detroit's defense, Sheppard said, "I see Branch as probably one of the best safeties I've ever seen or been around in my life."
Sheppard will always try to bend his scheme to his personnel. He mixed in more zone coverage, for example, as last season wore on to account for a depleted secondary -- but still not nearly as much as the Seahawks, one of the most zone-heavy defenses in the NFL. He rolled with base defense so often partly because of Detroit's losses in the backend and partly because he felt his linebackers corps was a strength.
But Sheppard also said, "We have a way we do things," and it sounds like the Lions are sticking to them.
"We're not going to start to follow trends and follow people, because this league is up and down," Sheppard said. "The last two years the Super Bowl was won by defensive football. For the five years prior to that, you had to have a quarterback or you couldn't play in this league, right? You start to follow people and you lose your identity.
"We have a certain identity, a way we believe in playing, a way our head coach stamps and believes that you should play, and that's what I'm going to continue to do."