Asked two days after the fact about the Lions' failed fake punt in their loss to the Eagles, Dan Campbell cracked, "That didn't go over too well, did it?"
No it did not. The Lions tried a direct snap to Grant Stuard, who needed two yards running behind linebackers Trevor Nowaske and Derrick Barnes on the left, long-snapper Hogan Hatten in the center and linebacker Ty Summers and tight end Ross Dwelley on the right. The Eagles sniffed it out and blew it up, took over on Detroit's 43-yard line and turned the field position into a field goal on a night that points were at a premium.
The play never had a chance against a defensive front that featured Jalen Carter and Moro Ojomo in the trenches, Jalyx Hunt on the left edge and linebacker Zack Baun coming up the middle. Ojomo caved in the left side of the line by taking out Nowaske, Baun stood up Hatten and Carter held his ground on the right, while Hunt crashed in on the play against running back Jacob Saylors.
Asked if the play should have been aborted when the Eagles deployed that front, Campbell said, "No, we wanted that. We felt like there was enough consistent looks to where we were going to be able to get that. We knew it’d be a little bit of a bloodbath, but yet we felt good about the looks going into that week."
"And look, two things: they did a good job, they were ready, and we were not as good as we can be blocking that up front, either," Campbell added.
Special teams coordinator Dave Fipp said Thursday that the Lions had seen a version of that fake succeed against similar defensive fronts over the years and that the Lions thought they would catch the Eagles sleeping based on the personnel on both sides. Essentially: reverse psychology. They'll never see this coming.
They did.
Fipp acknowledged that asking a bunch of linebackers and a tight end to win the line of scrimmage against the likes of Carter and Ojomo "doesn’t sound good, but sometimes what doesn’t sound good actually ends up being good."
"And I think if you look around the league through the years, you’ll see a handful of times where the (starting) defense has been on the field and what happens is, they don’t think that the ball is going to be run on them because they’re out there, and every time they’re out there, (the other team) just punts the ball. And then all of the sudden, you get up underneath their pads and you roll them back for a yard and it happens so quick on a guy that it ends up working out.
"I would just say that there’s a number of examples of that happening through the years in this league where a guy gets caught off guard. The gist of the play was more along those lines, not (failing to) understand that those guys are big players and good players."
Fipp added the Lions could have fit their blocks better, especially on the left side. He also credited the Eagles for being "alert" to the fact that the Lions are "an aggressive team."
"But yeah, I think if you just (went) along with the fact that we’re never going to take a risk or take a chance, well, then you would never ever fake it or do any of that," said Fipp.