🦁Lions Hype Train is at Unsustainable Speeds

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On my quest to place a future bet on each of the 32 teams before we hit the preseason, I’ve finally landed on the toughest nut to crack in the NFC North. The Detroit Lions have been the offseason darling for many and that doesn’t always go wrong, right? The Eagles lived up to the billing last year, why not another wild ascension in the NFC this year? Let’s do a quick reset before I look at the Lions and pick a wager. So far I’ve bet on:

Kind of painted myself into a corner here, forcing my hand into an anti-Lions bet! We’ll just see about that.

While they just missed the playoffs, I think 2022 should be graded as a bit of a qualified success for the Lions. If nothing else, they had some exciting games and weren’t regarded as an afterthought. As for the exciting games: this is what you get when you have a top-five offense and a bottom-five defense.

I went over the results, dug into the stats a bit, and…

My final verdict on the Lions: this is just the Vikings without the good luck. The similarities are kind of staggering

So, before I force-feed my portfolio another future bet, I have some thoughts.

Offense

There are some factors that surely point to the offense regressing a bit, but I will be putting my faith in Ben Johnson to put forth his best work this season (and then essentially pick a head coaching spot next spring).

Some of the really effective stuff the Lions were able to do on offense was just so beautifully worked into their strengths from what I’ve watched. From just great play sequencing and the use of the formations to force defenses into bad guesses, I don’t buy into the league “figuring Johnson out” over the offseason. I really like what he did with Goff considering the weapons around him, and taking advantage of a good (and huge) offensive line group with his gap run schemes.

Drafting a running back early was panned a bit by the media and while I don’t disagree, I like how Gibbs figures to fit in as a nice 3rd down back who can also get involved in the passing game. David Montgomery doesn’t get a ton of respect for some reason but should be able to continue to just produce pretty solid numbers in his new home. With Jameson Williams sitting for a gambling suspension, and DJ Chark in Carolina, the receiver depth is a little suspect and will rely on the return of Marvin Jones Jr. a bit more than I’d like.

Something I’ll be very interested in seeing is how rookie tight end Sam LaPorta will be used in the offense with the lack of a great #2 receiver to start the season. He put up two very solid seasons in college before being drafted in the second round leading Iowa in receiving last year (was responsible for 32% of its total receiving yardage, meager as it was). In 2022, T.J. Hockenson saw 6+ targets per game before being sent to Minnesota in Johnson’s offense. Maybe we see the newer, younger Hawkeye make a similar impact.

Schedule-wise, the 9-8 Detroit squad actually had a pretty had strength of schedule last season and outside of a really nasty opener in KC have a bit of what looks like a soft landing this year and will be short to medium favorites in 10+ games. I guess Minnesota was lucky last year, but Detroit got the last laugh by not having a 1st place schedule this year.

Defense

I’m not 100% sure I liked the offseason from a standpoint of fixing the defense, which again, could turn out to be fun for the casual observer if you want to see more of what the French apparently call a “duel incroyable!”

Completely rebuilding the secondary with the additions of Emmanuel Moseley, Cam Sutton, and CJ Gardner-Johnson was the right move, but not really addressing the pass rush is worrisome. Pass rush and coverage work in tandem and the transition of all these new players in the secondary would go a lot more smoothly with another good edge player opposite Aiden Hutchinson.

I like Moseley as a #1 cover guy for sure, but too many times I’m hearing how “versatile” all the signings are since they can play multiple positions. Sometimes versatile is just code for “we have to move him around because he can’t even hack it as a slot corner full-time”. We’ll see.

TL;DR: Offense regression may not be big if at all, lack of a pass rush might screw over the DB rebuild, Ben Johnson will be coaching Caleb Williams and the Buccaneers next year.

2023 Betting Odds

If you handed me $100 and forced me to bet on the Lions from the choices above, I guess I’d take the 10/1 price on NFC, but I wouldn’t feel great about it. If they can fulfill their expectations and win the division, they’d have a home playoff game and a chance to go on a run, but the prices really have jumped the shark at this point I think.

For a future bet I like, I’m going all in on a player’s upside. I want to ride the hype train with everyone, but again, can’t bet a team with no real playoff experience to win the NFC or Super Bowl, even in a weak year for the conference.

Am-Ra St. Brown finished last year with 106 catches on 146 targets for 1161/6. He did all this while having a couple of setbacks during the season that kept these numbers in check a bit. Similar to Jefferson’s Jump from ‘21 to ‘22, I don’t think we’ve quite gotten to his ceiling, despite having a damn fine year.

He sustained an ankle injury vs Minnesota in week 3 causing him to miss the following game and look like hot garbage in week 5 coming off of the rehab (maybe a bit too early). He was also forced to sit out most of the game against Dallas after pulling in his first catch and taking a hit that put him in the concussion protocol.

If you toss out those four games, he was on roughly a 125-130 catch season.

Injuries happen and it’s hard to predict, but in an offense I like to keep humming right along and with Jameson Williams starting the season away from the team again, I really think ARSB is in line for 160+ targets this year and this market is giving you some value on everyone not named Cooper Kupp.

It is with great pleasure that I can announce that the lead-up to the season is officially, finally here. The always resourceful Drew Dinsick has put together the 2023 schedules with even more context than ever. They might be a little small to really look at in an email, but I would strongly encourage a right-click + save on these as a nice reference for each team’s rest & travel advantages and disadvantages throughout the upcoming year.

We did a full podcast on these, going through some of the unique spots and looking into who the schedule makers did dirty this year. 

I asked Drew if he had a couple of bullet points to toss in with the charts and of course, he came through in spades with his biggest takeaways from building and analyzing the schedule matrices for the year:

• Situational spots remain useful to contextualize team schedules, despite not being any kind of answer key. From a game betting standpoint, there is still valuable signal in these, particularly when a team is facing adversity with respect to multiple angles including travel, rest, time, and weather.

• Bye-week rest is complicated by new CBA rules and continues to be overpriced by the market a bit while mini-byes still give teams about an 8% bump in win probability, less so when a team off the bye hits the road

AFC:

• AFC teams face fewer travel and rest disadvantages this season than the NFC broadly (the NFC is saddled with the 9th road game this year)

• Among the AFC teams, LAC got the most disadvantaged schedule, BUF got the worst single-game spot (losing a home game to the Jags in London), and KC has a crazy streak of playing teams with extra rest in six straight games at the end of the season.

NFC:

• NFC teams all start with one fewer home game AND bear 16 of the 21 big rest disadvantaged spots facing teams off a bye

• Among the NFC teams, LAR somehow drew four teams off the bye including back-to-back weeks twice. SF has several rest-disadvantaged spots and aggressive travel disadvantages. ARI is disadvantaged in 8 of 9 road games. DET and TB also have multiple instances where they face teams with extra prep time. PHI has the toughest four-game stretch of the season.

• Scheduling winners relative to the teams they are competing with for playoff spots include JAX, DEN, CHI, NYJ, NOR, CAR, IND, and WAS. But again, no one was truly gifted anything besides JAX getting an extra home-away-from-home game vs Buffalo

See Something, Say Something!

We always enjoy the feedback that goes with these from others that love the NFL as we do. If you found something you want to chat about in the upcoming schedules or think you discovered a betting angle to tuck away for later in the season, I’d love to hear about it. So hit us up on Twitter, drop an email, or join the degens in the Discord.

Already had a mainstay of NFL Twitter chime in with a situational spot that’s been 32-21-1 against the spread as a bet against over the past ten years:

and of course, give the Podcast a listen if you haven’t already:

There really isn’t any. Even the people who do nothing but post screenshots of Instagram stories linking free agents to potential landing spots seem to have stretched the holiday weekend into a 10-day reset.

Scrolling some Twitter lists of beat reporters and official team accounts has just been a ton of players being wished happy birthday and people letting you know they are starting an account over on Threads. The NFL is a 24/7/365 sport, but this is surely the quietest time of the year.

Even the blue bloods know you’ve gotta invent your own news in July. I’m not saying he’s doing it just for the bit, but Will Brinson does love a good offseason of fighting with an entire fan base (looking at you Chicago), and putting Kyler Murray in the bottom non-rookie tier is probably enough to do just that with Cards fans for the next few months.

Want to help out? It’s a free newsletter, so your money’s no good here, but you can do a couple of things if you’re feeling up to it. I’ll be finishing up some research into the Raiders and the Women’s World Cup in the meantime.

Things that help me: Click a link, send me a reply, add me to your email address book, or best of all, share this with someone who likes football.