This one warrants a Game Week Thread. packers at Lions Thursday 12/5/25

[CGVT]

With all of the injuries on defense, if I were a betting man, I'd take the packers and the points.

[Meano.Culpa]

If that’s not the highest O/U on the season, it’s close.

Lions have been giving up about 18ppg and the Packers have been giving up 20. Bookies must be looking for a track meet.

[dsred]

I'm not a betting man. And fuck the Packers.

[CGVT]

I'm not either. I was just surprised at the spread.

I'm not sure that the talking heads that say the Lions are the best team in football are watching the Lions and understand how many players they have lost to injury.

But the wise guys usually know what they are doing.

I think the Lions offense is going to need to be clicking to win this game. I think the decimated defense is going to give up some points.

[DanO]

I'm betting the Packers all day. This game could get ugly the bad way. Love had to have a special drool cup installed under his chin to catch all the drool thinking about going against this "D".

[froot loops]

The defense will be fine.

[chemiclord]

The defense the Lions are going to roll out next Thursday should be effectively at a similar level to the defense that led to a 12-5 season just last year.

The team hit a very similar wall last year right around this same time. The offense is probably going to need to score around 30 to win, but they are more than capable of that. It's gonna be okay.

[Mainevent]

I’m a little more concerned about the offense next week. 3 of the last 4 games have been clunky. But we’ve also seen when that happens they come out with a really well executed game. Let’s see what DC and Johnson come up with.

[DanO]

The defense the Lions are going to roll out next Thursday should be effectively at a similar level to the defense that led to a 12-5 season just last year.

The team hit a very similar wall last year right around this same time. The offense is probably going to need to score around 30 to win, but they are more than capable of that. It's gonna be okay.

That's my point. They talk about complimentary football well he offense is going to have to heavily "compliment" the defense for the rest of the year until we can get some bodies back. They are more than capable of doing so. How consistent they can be is the question and as we have seen they have games, or parts of games, where they go into funks. The offense has to be more consistent from here on out.

[froot loops]

The defense they roll out there Thursday will be better than last year's defense.

The word is actually complementary.

[froot loops]

I’m a little more concerned about the offense next week. 3 of the last 4 games have been clunky. But we’ve also seen when that happens they come out with a really well executed game. Let’s see what DC and Johnson come up with.

Was it really clunky or did it have a couple well timed mistakes that resulted in field goal attempts or a turnover?

To me the game turned on that Gibbs fumble. Which Gibbs got criticized for but was also a really great play by the d-back

[DanO]

The defense they roll out there Thursday will be better than last year's defense.

The word is actually complementary.

I hope so Loops. I'm not sure but hope like hell you're right.

[Mainevent]

Was it really clunky or did it have a couple well timed mistakes that resulted in field goal attempts or a turnover?

To me the game turned on that Gibbs fumble. Which Gibbs got criticized for but was also a really great play by the d-back

Bad timed penalties are part of being clunky. The fumble sucked but they also settled for 3 FGs. And the second half wasn’t great outside of the one TD drive. Granted, Bears D is good and plays the Lions well (I believe they are one of the best at not giving up TDs in the red zone). It was clunky last week and also against Houston. And it felt like Johnson got too cute at times early when it looked like they might blow them out.

Part of this is raised expectations with this squad, so when they don’t put a team away when they have a chance it looks off.

[froot loops]

If you look at the PFF grades of the defenders that are plausible starters they have still have a lot of high quality starters. They have a ton of injuries but most of the injuries are at linebacker and of all the positions they had the most depth at linebacker. Since they had injuries at linebacker they have went out and gotten Ezekiel Turner, David Long Jr. and now Kwon Alexander. Turner played really good in his snaps on Thursday. Long and Alexander are solid NFL vets that should be fine.

The other position is they've suffered injuries at is edge. Za'Darius Smith is not a total replacement for Hutch but he has been massive in his time with Detroit. Al-Quadin Muhammad has been a sneaky good signing this month, he was massive in Thursday's game. The front office has been on their game during the season quicky addressing needs. PFF has the Lions as the #1 team in overall defensive ratings and the defense has only given up more than 20 points 3 times.

The Lions were the better team Thursday but they also maybe should have lost the game. They missed a lot of opportunities during the game to put it out of reach. The Bears to their credit pulled out of their funk mid second quarter and started putting the screws to the Lions. They were fighting for their playoff lives.That's the NFL, no reason to run for the tall grass.

They might lose a couple games but needing to be 16-1 should never be expected.

[SnowMeiser]

I expect the Lions to come out better this week offensively. I think that the short week may have limited the offensive game plan somewhat and expect both the offense and defense to have a better game plan with a full week to prepare. I don't really know about the in's and out's of football strategy (more knowledgeable people on here would know more) but it would seem on a short week that you would go with a more vanilla offense/defense than if you had a full week to prepare.

I felt the Lions last year had a terrible game against the packers. I don't expect that to happen next week. Just get out of this game with a win, no more injuries and head into a little bit of a break to get people healthy and fully prepare for the Bills.