Detroit Lions Weblog

Injury Bug Becoming the Lions Undoing, Impressions of 1st Pre-Season Game

The Lions are becoming increasingly dogged by injuries, at a very early stage of the team’s development, with the ‘09 NFL season rapidly approaching. Backup linebacker and special teams ace Cody Spencer is done for the year with a knee injury, the Lions receiving corps have hardly played and the team has had to release players (Kirk Barton, Curtis Gatewood) that it might consider retaining, or at least wanted to take a look at, due to the depth issues created by the team’s litany of injuries, according to the Detroit News.

The Lions are trying to rebound from the worst season in professional sports history and they can ill-afford to squander crucial developmental time in their attempt to establish some much-needed continuity and credibility while awaiting the returns of players whose presence would only serve as a complement, rather than an essential component of the final 53-man roster when they break camp. If that reality necessitates them making cold, hard decisions regarding a veteran like Casey FitzSimmons or Daniel Bullocks, unfortunately, well, so be it.

Every team has to overcome the injuries which inevitably occur throughout the course of every NFL season. The Lions are no different. At this early juncture, the one injury that stands as most painful, in my eyes, is the one sustained by rookie TE Brandon Pettigrew.

Pettigrew was a 1st round draft pick who would seemingly comprise an elemental piece of new Offensive Coordinator Scott Linehan’s offense, provide a valuable safety-valve for both Daunte Culpepper and Matthew Stafford, as well as giving the team an additional capable blocker when the situation warrants it. Adding the painful fact that the pick of Pettigrew seemed frivolous to me at the time it was made, and considering the team’s voluminous personnel concerns, my Lions fatalism is shifting to high alert in regards to the selection of Pettigrew. They absolutely need to justify his selection with his becoming a productive member of the roster, immediately.

The Lions could have utilized the pick that they used to add Pettigrew by addressing other glaring personnel needs with players at positions whose value could provide a more immediate, if less glamorous impact than a “skilled” player. The Lions are now facing some increasingly difficult realities, in regards to their roster.

The Lions did add some additional veteran roster help by signing both WR Dane Looker and OL Terrence Metcalf. Looker would seemingly possess some familiarity with the Linehan offense, in it’s post-Martz Rams configuration and provide the Lions with some more competition at the slot receiver position, given the rash of dropped passes by WR Keary Colbert during the team’s first pre-season game.

Metcalf’s presence could eventually endanger a player like Manny Ramirez or another interior lineman, since he has survived hard-fought roster battles before in the past. In any case, I believe that the Lions continued roster tweaking is both ominous, since there offensive line is far from settled nor can be construed as anything approaching stellar, and beneficial, since, in the end, the team’s players will have to have staved off numerous viable competitors for the team’s few available roster spots in order to make the team.

Other than the overwhelmingly vast emptiness of the Ford Field seats last Saturday, and the incredibly shameless and unmitigated audacity of the entire Lions organization for demanding full-price on tickets for a pre-season game featuring a team coming off of an 0-16 season, the Lions initial pre-season game was exactly what it would seem to be to both the die-hards and casual observers, a mixture of exciting promise and the overwhelmingly fatalistic woe-is-me, the “Same Ol’ Lions have returned, yet again” hand-wringing which is a familiarly shared sentiment among many Lions fans every fall.

That being said, Matthew Stafford appears to possess all of the raw talent and leadership ability that he has been touted for, and his unveiling should melt even the most implacable of Lions naysayers since, plain and simple, his arm will eventually be a difference-maker for this franchise.

I experienced a heightened sense of anticipation as the untapped potential of Stafford was finally unveiled. The entire Lions game, pre-Stafford, appeared to be like the often boring, but crucial setting and plot development aspects of a movie. Although providing necessary context, it is hard to contain the urge to skip forward to the “big payoff”, in this case, Stafford trotting onto the field turf to a loud and resounding, given the few game attendees, applause.

The difficult part was, as Stafford received his first NFL snap, dropped into the pocket and zipped among the prettiest and most on-target passes seen by Lions fans in years, was fighting the sense of anger and frustration over the familiarity of seeing Stafford’s pass sail to his intended target, Keary Colbert, who is desperately clinging to his limited NFL life by a thread, and watch the ball fall to the turf, out of Colbert’s hands. Hopefully, that moment doesn’t hold any portent about Stafford’s future in Detroit.

Stafford’s game was still flawed and he made some costly errors. His touch wasn’t entirely great on passes which he should have feathered into his receiver rather than darted, and his interception on an ill-advised pass into coverage which was returned for a touchdown should serve as a valuable “teaching moment” as well as a stern reminder that his margin for error is significantly smaller than it was playing on Saturday’s in the SEC.

Besides Stafford, and the reality that Aaron Brown will make the Lions 53-man roster after his two touchdown performance, the Lions first pre-season game was an unremarkable and by-the-numbers affair. They were lucky to sustain few additional serious injuries and hopefully, the game will serve as a springboard to additional steps forward this weekend.