5 Thoughts on Lions at Cowboys, December 30, 2023

If you weren’t watching the Lions and Cowboys on Saturday night, you might have come away thinking the game was 23 seconds long. But it turns out a whole lotta football was played before that.

We’ll talk about the controversial 2-point play and its many facets, but first, a rundown of some thoughts on the rest of the game.

Or click the anchor below and skip right to the juicy bits.

1. Send Mike McCarthy to the Locker Room the Last 2 Minutes of Every Game
2. Someone Help Cam Sutton
3. Dak has Never Looked This Good
4. Aidan Hutchinson and Donovan Wilson
5. Someone is Lying About the 2-Point Play, feat. Kick the Damn Ball
   • Kick the Damn Ball

Send Mike McCarthy to the Locker Room the Last 2 Minutes of Every Game

This isn’t a new take for me. It’s probably one of my more consistent takes. So much so that I didn’t even bat an eye when Dak Prescott dropped back on 2nd down during grind the clock and slung one downfield for, I guess Brandin Cooks? The play was so broken it should’ve been grounding.

This has been McCarthy’s Achilles heel his entire head coaching career, something I vividly remember from his years with the Packers. He’s an incredible QB coach and developer, he’s a creative playcaller, and his coaching attitude is the perfect combination of swag and aw shucks.

But with 2 minutes-ish left and the game on the line, the aw shucks part of him that manages the clock is nowhere to be found and the swaggy confidence quickly morphs him into a complete chotch.

Someone Help Cam Sutton

Anyone, really. Despite all that happened at the end of this game (don’t worry, we’ll get there), at some point Dan Campbell and his players will reflect on all the ways they might have prevented themselves from getting into such a position.

And one of those has to be leaving Cameron Sutton on an island with CeeDee Lamb, over and over. It’s one thing in 1st and 2nd down, but how many 3rd and longs did CeeDee run a quick slant and leave Sutton in the dust?

Sutton isn’t some overconfident rookie. He’s a 7-year vet who cut his teeth over 6 seasons in the Steelers hard-nosed tradition. He got no jam at the LOS, Lamb’s crisp breaks had him stumbling, and he’s never had the speed to catch up.

If the Lions had lost in a non-controversial way, this would and should be a a topic on Detroit sports radio waves.

Dak has Never Looked This Good

Not before his injury, not after it. He’s playing on a different level this year than we’ve ever seen from him. He turned a safety into a 92 yard TD to Lamb, and his throws to Brandin Cooks on the game-defining drive were immaculate.

Before his injury, he might have made the escape play, but he didn’t quite have the other throws. After his injury, he had the throws, but the escape was missing. Now he seems to have both, and it’s hard to stop.

Part of the reason I bring this up is that I often hear analysts say Jared Goff has a limited ceiling and he’s already reached it. I don’t think that’s fair, and Dak is a perfect example of someone who everyone thought had reached his ceiling. Yet here he is, 30 years old and pushing right through it.

Goff is 29, and the Lions offense still has room to grow, which means Goff does, too.

Aidan Hutchinson and Donovan Wilson

Lost in the hubbub were 2 incredible defensive plays at exactly the right moments.

On 3rd down, with just over 2 minutes left in the game and his team down by 4, Aidan Hutchinson put on a spin move that you just know he’d been preparing all week knowing it would work so flawlessly. And like a savvy vet, despite being in just his 2nd season, he waited to use it until the perfect moment, when his team had to have a big stop.

Unfortunately, it only took 2 plays for the Lions to spoil the opportunity when Dallas’s Donovan Wilson dove for an incredible interception on a ball underthrown by Goff. That throw would ultimately be some exposition for another missed throw on the 2-point play that actually happened.

Someone is Lying About the 2-Point Play, feat. Kick the Damn Ball

So many things were going on with this play. Starting from the beginning, it wasn’t their first playcall. Remember that the Lions originally lined up, Sam LaPorta went in motion, and McCarthy called timeout. That was the first play, and it’s doubtful that Ben Johnson would run the same formation out there after giving Dan Quinn a chance to sort it out.

That’s when it got messy. First, background rules:

• Any player that wants to be an eligible receiver and with a number between 50-79 or 90-99 must report as eligible.
• Sometimes players will signal this to the ref by swiping their hand over their chest, as if to “erase” their normally ineligible number.
• The line of scrimmage needs a minimum of 7 players on the line, with an eligible receiver on both ends.
• To remain eligible, any player inside or outside these end eligible receivers must be off the line.

Here are all the things that may or may not have happened during that timeout leading up to the play.

• Taylor Decker (68) and Penei Sewell (58) for some reason, walk up to the official.
• Dan Skipper (70) runs towards this huddle (again, for some reason) while patting his chest, perhaps some subterfuge to throw off the defense because Skipper regularly reports as eligible for 6-lineman plays during the game. In other words, it somehow takes 3 linemen to tell the official that 1 of them is eligible, a tactic teams will sometimes use on trick plays.
• The official goes to the defense and tells them Skipper (70) is reporting eligible. The same is reported over the loudspeaker, which can be clearly heard from the background of the Spanish broadcast.
• Once the Lions formation is set, it appears that Decker is on the line and WR Josh Reynolds (8) is off the line. If Reynolds is on the line, then he’s covering Decker and Decker is ineligible. This was brought up by the network rules analyst to point out that there were multiple fouls if you assume Reynolds was on the line.
• Reynolds and Decker both run routes, and Decker catches the 2-point conversion and for about 5 seconds, the Lions had the lead. Then the flag comes down and Decker is penalized with an illegal touch, a penalty which absolutely needs a new name.
• Dan Campbell says “I told you!” about 50 times, presumably because he had alerted the refs before the game what might happen if they ran this play.

There’s really no way around the fact that Detroit got jobbed. However, it’s also not as simple as saying Detroit should get the points and the win.

Remember, right or wrong, the official and the loudspeaker both reported Skipper as eligible, which means the defense had no reason to think Decker would run a route. Based on what they were told, they would set up their defense to cover Reynolds only on tat side.

Kick the Damn Ball

That brings us to the final bit of weirdness, where Campbell is apparently so furious he loses any sense of how to best win this game.

I was with him 100% to go for 2 the first time, and again after the timeout. But the penalty killed momentum and pushed them back to the 8 yard line. Kick the ball and go to overtime.

Then Micah Parsons jumps into the neutral zone to give the Lions another chance. Back at the original line, they’re on their 4th play formation, and each additional play is a play you’re a little less confident in than the last. Goff underthrows his tight end (again) on a play that may or may not have worked if he’d thrown it better.

A lot of people made a lot of solid points about how the end of this game should’ve gone, but Dan Campbell’s end of game management after the penalty made McCarthy look like an end of game savant.

If these teams meet in the playoffs, Campbell needs to be more coach, less player in these moments. And I think he knows that.

As always, may all your teams win or lose and then win and then lose again.