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“We just weren’t good enough.”
Detroit Lions head coach Dan Campbell summed up his team’s performance in the lopsided 38-10 loss to the Denver Broncos in Week 14 quite nicely with those five words.
It wasn’t really a fair fight. The Lions were without several key players on both sides of the ball due to a rash of injuries and a virulent outbreak of both the flu and COVID-19 during the week. Then they lost two more critical defensive starters, CB Jerry Jacobs and LB Alex Anzalone, before the first quarter ended. But the coach refused to make an excuse of all the missing players.
“What we had to do was not ideal, but we were prepared to come into this game with the guys we had. We had a game plan ready to go and we knew what we needed to do but we just didn’t do it,” Campbell said after the game. “There were too many mistakes. We’re right there to make the play and we don’t make the play. We just weren’t good enough.
Quarterback Jared Goff echoed his head coach’s sentiment. Goff had a fair start to the game, throwing for 70 yards and a touchdown in the first half and protecting the ball well. But his own play declined after the half as the game spiraled from a competitive 17-10 contest to the 38-10 blowout.
Goff refused to use the dilapidated roster, which included missing RBs D’Andre Swift and Jamaal Williams, TE T.J. Hockenson and two starting linemen on the offense, as an excuse for the poor performance.
“It doesn’t matter,” Goff said. “No one feels bad for us, no one feels sorry for us—including ourselves. We went out here intending to win, and we came up short. Don’t care who was on the field, we had the guys that we believe in. To win, we had too many mistakes.”
Goff and Campbell are right. The team did not play well enough, regardless of what men were wearing the uniforms on Sunday.