Monday Overreaction: 'The Lions need to end the John Morton experiment now and not later'

If there's one thing I'm not going to do, it's make an excuse for the Lions offense. That was incredibly bad. I'd go even further to say that Morton deserves a lot of blame, and I think he called an overly conservative game and didn't move off of what was clearly not working. Having said that, there are several contributing factors here, and Morton's conservative play call is just one of them.

The other is that this offensive line was not ready for this game, and it showed. They couldn't stop pressure from coming in, and they couldn't open holes. It shut down the entire offense. Which might have been a reason that the Lions looked ot be a little more conservative and go with things that were safer to try to avoid turnovers. At a certain point, chances needed to be taken, and the Lions didn't do that.

But come on, a firing? For that? In the grand scheme, that wasn't even that bad. The Lions had far worse games with Ben Johnson early on in his run and even during it, too. Did everyone forget the Lions losing to the Bailey Zappe-led Patriots 29-0 in 2022? What about the 24-6 loss to the Cowboys the next week? Or the 38-6 loss to the Ravens in 2023?

Nobody got fired for those games, and as Lions head coach, Dan Campbell brought up after Sunday's game, people wanted Johnson fired early in the season in 2022. Look what happened when the Lions gave him more than one game or gave him more than a few games.

With all that said, we know the Lions aren't totally against letting an OC go during the season. They did that with Anthony Lynn in 2021, but that was a much different story with a much different team. But if the Lions get to late October or November and things have gone super downhill, maybe they'd make a change. But they're not going to do it after one week, and they definitely shouldn't do it after one week. This is a major overreaction.