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Detroit Lions
And it showed, again, after the Dallas Cowboys got themselves off to a promising start Sunday afternoon at AT&T Stadium.
Dak Prescott and the Dallas offense kicked off the game with a nine-play, 54-yard march that stalled out in the red zone and resulted in a 34-yard field goal from Brandon Aubrey. That made it 3–0, and also marked the last time the Cowboys would hold a lead.
From there, Detroit absolutely smothered the Cowboys, scoring on all five of its first-half possessions, while holding Dallas out of the end zone for the game’s first 30 minutes. It was 27–6 at halftime and 47–9 in the end. And it all started the same way the Lions have finished off so many of their other opponents, with a steady stream of David Montgomery and, perhaps, the NFL’s best offensive line.
That approach closed out the Los Angeles Rams in Week 1, and set the tone in the Lions’ Week 4 win over the Seattle Seahawks. Against Dallas, it was there when Detroit had to respond to that opening salvo, with three Montgomery carries for 28 yards sandwiching a 42-yard dart from Jared Goff to Denver Broncos castoff Tim Patrick, including a physical 16-yard scoring run.
“The opportunity presents itself—and if that means that I’m in when the opportunity presents itself, I know I need to be ready for it,” Montgomery told me postgame. “For me being able to understand and do that, that’s the only thing that matters.”
What mattered this time around was that, by halftime, Montgomery had 58 of the Lions’ 92 rushing yards, and Detroit was well on its way to 4–1.
The rest was breezy, for sure, and certainly a sign of where the visitors to Texas are now. But that doesn’t mean the game was without fireworks for an appreciative audience that needed some on a relatively dull Sunday.
Maybe the best example? How offensive coordinator Ben Johnson called the second half. There was the hook-and-ladder to right tackle Penei Sewell. The play-action pass to left tackle Taylor Decker. The “route,” if you want to call it that, run by swing tackle Dan Skipper. All of those came with the game in hand, each as a sort of reward to vital parts of an offensive line that’s long been among the NFL’s best.
"It’s fun,” Montgomery says. “When you watch football on Sundays, you want to see that kind of fun stuff. The plays we do already are pretty fun, and Ben gets pretty creative in what he decides to do [beyond the more conventional stuff].”
The plays to Sewell, Decker and Skipper didn’t work.
But almost everything else in Dallas did—with one very difficult exception. Indeed, the cost of the trip to Texas, which wound up being Aidan Hutchinson’s season, was heavy. Hutchinson’s leg snapped when his shin whipped around teammate Alim McNeill’s leg on a pass rush, sending the Lions’ star to the ground in pain, and his teammates onto the field to try to console their beloved captain.
“He’s the heartbeat of this team,” Montgomery says. “You can feel the energy coursing through the way he talks and how he carries himself. That’s a big blow, but we’re taking this personal because we know that it means a lot to Aidan.”
The good news is the Lions have a chance to lift Hutchinson’s spirits over the next few months, the same way they’ve lifted up their region the past couple of years.
We already knew, before the season started, that Dan Campbell and Brad Holmes had put together something sustainable. What we’re learning now is that the ceiling on this particular group of players, even without Hutchinson, may be higher than most realized. And next week, they’ll have another chance to show it with a trip to Minnesota to play the unbeaten Vikings on tap.
Montgomery, with a new two-year extension to stay in Detroit now signed, didn’t want to make too big a deal of next week just yet. Mostly because, at this point, being in games like that one isn’t new to him, or anyone else in his locker room.
“It’s just handling our business,” he says. “We know what we’re capable of. If we all connect on all cylinders and we’re playing the way that we play, we’ll be hard to beat.”
Which the Cowboys found out the hard way.
