Matt Patricia bringing Patriots' running back outlook to Detroit. The Detroit Lions could have one of the most explosive offenses in football but to the chagrin of fantasy football players around the country, the team will continue to lean on a committee approach at running back despite fielding the worst running game in the NFL in 2017.
Look, I get it. Matt Patricia is bringing the "Patriot Way" with him to the Motor City, which means the team will play a weekly game of roulette at running back with a different player shouldering the load as the lead back each game. This is how the Patriots have operated since Corey Dillon helped them win Super Bowl XXXIX but we're talking about the Lions. This is a team that hasn't had a 1,000-yard rusher since Reggie Bush barely eclipsed the mark in 2013 and that's after the team waited almost a decade for another runner to join the VIP section after Kevin Jones hit the mark in 2004.
Think about that. A franchise that once featured arguably the best running back in football (Barry Sanders) hasn't been able to find a dominant RB1 or the right combination of backs to spark a running game that's failed to produce a 100-yard rusher in 68 straight games. That's only four games shy of the NFL's all-time record of 72 set by the Washington Redskins in the 1960s.
To make matters worse, the Lions have had the least-prolific running game in football since 2014. The Lions have finished 28th, 32nd, 30th, and 32nd in rushing offense during that span with the team failing to discover a credible threat in the backfield. Thus, the thought of the Lions entering the season without a dominant runner in the rotation leads to concerns about their ability to compete in a competitive NFC that's loaded with championship-caliber defenses.
Patricia doesn't necessarily see it that way. He recently told a group of season ticket holders at the team's annual member summit at Ford Field that diversity in the backfield will give the Lions an advantage despite going with an unestablished pecking order in the running back rotation.
"That sounds like a good thing, right?" Patricia said. "I mean look, anything that we do, we certainly don't want to give our opponents any advantage. So again, we're always going to try to work harder than they are, we're always going to try to come up with a scheme that gives us an advantage and put our players in a position to make plays. It's not necessarily the Xs and Os, it's who's the X and who's the O and what's the matchup and how does that work. So that's something we're definitely trying to do."
Looking at the Lions' current roster, the presence of a power runner (LeGarrette Blount), a pass-catching weapon (Theo Reddick), a combo player (Ameer Abdullah) and a handful of experienced ball carriers with versatile skills (Zach Zenner, Tion Green and Dwayne Washington) on the depth chart with the possibility of adding another playmaker in the draft, suggests the team will definitely take a "toolbox" approach into the season. The coaches will decide which tools are needed for the job each week and feature those instruments prominently in the game plan.
"I think for us it's all about competition, but when we get into the game plan mode and we actually have our team and we're working against a particular opponent, then it becomes into a matchup situation," Patricia said. "Is it a running situation? Is it a passing situation? How can we use these guys in different ways to create mismatches or advantages for us based on the situation and the team that we're playing from that standpoint?"
That's certainly a reasonable plan if you can put together a stable of running backs with versatile skills that allow them to attack the defense in a variety of ways as runners and receivers. Remember, the Patriots had three running backs with at least 500 scrimmage yards in 2017 due to their flexibility as hybrid playmakers. With that in mind, we should probably ignore the Lions' rushing totals and place a greater emphasis on the scrimmage yards amassed by their running backs. The combination of rushing and receiving yardage will better reflect their impact on the game and how the team views their running backs as more than just ball carriers.
"I know people tend to look towards those teams that have just one consistent runner because it makes it easy to evaluate," Patricia said. "But I think that position, in general, has a lot of different degrees of variance to it, and if you can have that in that position, and quote-unquote call them running backs, but yet their jobs that they do are so vastly diverse, it makes it really hard on the defense. People don't understand that. It's kind of a combination of run and pass game."
NFL.com
