The Detroit Lions became one of the very best offenses in the NFL under former offensive coordinator Ben Johnson. He took over for Anthony Lynn in 2022, and the Lions quickly established themselves as a consistent top-five offense. They finished inside the top five in yards and points in each of Johnson’s three seasons as the play-caller, and they finished third, fifth and third in the league in expected points added (EPA) per play in those three seasons.
Of course, Johnson took the head-coaching job with the division-rival Chicago Bears this offseason, so he’s no longer around to call the plays. He’s been replaced by John Morton, who was a senior offensive assistant on Johnson’s staff in 2022 and spent the 2023 and 2024 seasons as the pass game coordinator under Sean Payton in Denver.
Any time a team’s play-caller changes, there are always going to be things that look a little bit different on the field. Yet Morton doesn’t plan on overhauling the entire operation.
“I’m not changing much,” Morton said, via the team’s official website. “I mean, why?”
There are, however, going to be some things that change. There always are year over year anyway, but it’s also natural that a different person is going to have different ideas and different tendencies, and different thoughts about how to get the best out of the players on hand. Quarterback Jared Goff explained what that might look like.
Lions’ Jared Goff embraces ‘challenge’ of working with new offensive coordinator John Morton
Chris Bengel
“I’m sure the casual fan will notice some of [the changes],” Goff said. “Some of it is different. Some of it is the same. [Morton]’s got a long background of stuff he’s liked that he’s done, and he was here for a year through a lot of our success. There will be a lot of that carryover and some new. To be honest, I don’t think that would have been any different if you’re returning with the same offense. You always kind of add some wrinkles. But, certainly, he has his flavor on the offense and has been doing a good job.”
With that different flavor in mind, we wanted to take a look at some of the things that could be different about the Lions offense under Morton, than they were under Johnson.
To be clear, the Lions don’t have to make any of these changes. They’re plenty good as is, and as Morton said, there’s not much reason to change all that much of what they do or how, given how much success the team had under Johnson. So the things we list below aren’t even really suggestions, just areas of the offense we identified that could potentially change with a new play-caller at the helm.
Passing game
Under Johnson, the Lions were one of the run-heaviest teams in the NFL, even when accounting for game situation. As a former tight ends coach, Johnson has always been just as closely tied into the run game as he is to the pass, and his philosophy reflected that. Morton, though, is a former wide receivers coach and passing-game coordinator, so it’s possible that he could tilt the offense more heavily toward the pass. (We’re not saying that they’d suddenly become the Bengals or anything like that, just that they could have a slightly different split.)
Within the passing attack, there are two areas where things could potentially change as well. The Lions had one of the lowest rates of quick passes in the NFL, according to Pro Football Focus, with only 41.5% of Jared Goff’s dropbacks ending within 2.5 seconds of the snap. Some of that was due to the aforementioned heavy run focus and a corresponding reliance on play-action passing, which takes longer to develop than pure dropback passing. Goff was quite effective in the quick game, though with a 111.5 passer rating that ranked fourth-best in the league and an EPA per dropback figure, via NFL Pro, that ranked third. If the Lions do decide to lean further into the pass, getting the quick game going a bit more often could be the way to go.
The Lions could also attack deeper down the field, more often. Goff similarly had one of the lowest deep-throw rates in the NFL. Just 8.0% of his passes traveled at least 20 yards in the air, according to Pro Football Focus, a figure that ranked 39th out of 43 qualified quarterbacks. The Lions preferred to attack the short and intermediate areas of the field, which obviously worked out quite well for them. They have elite short-area pass-catchers in Amon-Ra St. Brown, Sam LaPorta and Jahmyr Gibbs, each of whom catches the significant majority of the passes thrown their way and is excellent at creating yards after the catch. The Lions averaged the most yards after catch per completion in the NFL, via Tru Media.
If they attack deep more often, though, perhaps by incorporating Jameson Williams into the offense at an even higher rate than before, that will only open things up further for the underneath stuff. Goff improved on the deep ball with each passing season under Johnson, checking in 16th in EPA per play on those passes in 2022, ninth in 2023 and tied for fifth in 2024.
Running game
The biggest thing the Lions could potentially change here is the split between David Montgomery and Jahmyr Gibbs. “Sonic and Knuckles” form one of the best one-two punches in the league, with Montgomery wearing defenses down with physicality and Gibbs slicing through them with his speed and vision. What the Lions get from Montgomery is efficient chain-moving: His 48.1% rushing success rate ranked fifth in the NFL among the 50 players with 100 carries or more, per Tru Media. And what they get from Gibbs is explosiveness: his 13.6% explosive-run rate was more than twice as high as Montgomery’s, and ranked third-best among the same group of 50 players.
Prior to Montgomery’s injury early in Week 15, the two players split carries almost exactly equally. And I do mean exactly. Montgomery had 180 rushes from Weeks 1 through 14, while Gibbs had 178. Gibbs was more effective with his touches, gaining 5.7 yards per rush compared with Montgomery’s 4.3 per carry. With Gibbs heading into Year 3 at age 23 and Montgomery into Year 7 at age 28, we could see the scales tip in the younger back’s favor a bit. Things obviously worked incredibly well in the big picture, but a new coordinator could prefer to shift more work to the seemingly better ball-carrier.
Specifically, it will be interesting to see if the team is at all interested in evening out the split between the two players early in games.
Montgomery received 76% of the team’s opening-drive carries in 2024, per Tru Media, and he averaged 5.1 yards a pop on those plays, with his runs carrying a 52.6% success rate. But if you isolate the games before Montgomery’s injury, he actually out-carried Gibbs 37-1 on the opening drive of the game. That split seemed to wear him down, though, and he gained only 4.0 yards per carry across the remainder of the game, with a 46.9% success rate. Evening things out between the two players early on can help keep them both fresh for the entirety of the game.
Offensive line
Underlying all of these potential schematic changes are the now-significant changes the Lions will be navigating along the offensive line. Detroit saw guard Kevin Zeitler leave for a free-agent deal with the Tennessee Titans earlier this offseason, and on Monday, stalwart center Frank Ragnow suddenly announced his retirement, citing health issues.
Detroit’s offense has been buoyed in recent years by what has been arguably the best offensive line in football, and now, at the very least, there will be two significant changes to that group.
Already, the Lions likely expected 2024 sixth-round pick Christian Mahogany to step into Zeitler’s spot at guard. Now, there will also be a new center. Both second-round pick Tate Ratledge and last season’s starting left guard, Graham Glasgow, have apparently been repping at center in Ragnow’s absence from minicamp and OTAs. If Ratledge takes over for Ragnow, then Goff will be working with a rookie center, and the Lions will be starting a rookie and a second-year player with just 144 career snaps next to each other along the interior of the offensive line. If Glasgow, who has played both guard and center during his career, moves over one spot, then the Lions will technically be working with new starters at all three interior positions and have a pair of very inexperienced guards.
The Lions can, of course, still count on having one of the best bookend tackle duos in the NFL in Taylor Decker and Penei Sewell, and there are few offensive line coaches one should trust more than Hank Fraley to deal with such significant changes up front. But said changes being concentrated in the interior of the line could be sneakily important.
First of all, Goff has long been one of the league’s most susceptible quarterbacks to pressure. When he has time and space, he can deliver throws with just about anybody. But when the pocket is muddy, he is much more inconsistent. He’s also always been more vulnerable to pressure up the middle and into his lap than from the edges, because he’s much more comfortable stepping up and through the pocket than he is navigating side to side or scrambling outside the pocket. The Lions shift the launch point of Goff’s throws with play-action and bootleg action quite often and Goff is perfectly competent within those designs, but he’s much less so when he has to run away from pressure and make plays while improvising on the move.
Ragnow was also a significant factor in the team’s rushing attack, and over the last two years no team was more effective at running the ball up the middle. The Lions had over 150 more rushing yards up the middle than the next-closest team in the league, per Tru Media, while finishing second in the league in both yards per carry and EPA per rush attempt on up-the-middle runs. Ragnow’s ability to execute any kind of block also played a role in the Lions having the most diverse run game in the league, somehow majoring in every type of run concept. Whomever replaces him at center is unlikely to be either as strong or as versatile a run-blocker as Ragnow, which could at least in some way limit the run game, which could then have knock-on effects on the team’s play-action passing attack, which is heavily tied into the run action it uses.
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