Care/Don't Care: Lions play smash-mouth football & Jordan Love looks shaky | Yahoo Fantasy Forecast
Yahoo Sports fantasy analyst Matt Harmon weighs in with his top takeaways from Sunday night’s 24-14 victory for the Lions over the Packers. Hear Matt’s full conversation breaking down Week 9 with Andy Behrens on the “Yahoo Fantasy Forecast” podcast - and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen.
Video Transcript
Here's what I care and don't care about coming out of the Lions 24 to 14 win over the Green Bay Packers.
What we care about is that in a very messy NFC, the Lions are just ultra clean and while the final score says the Lions beat the Packers by just 10 points, it never felt that close.
What I loved about this game is a lot of what Dan Campbell talked about in the postgame presser.
He basically said that any notion of surprise that his football team wasn't built to win a game like this, a hard nosed contest in the elements is absolutely foolish.
I'm paraphrasing here a little bit, but Dan Campbell all seemed amused at the contrary, simply because they're a dome team.
And he's right.
We talk about the Lions is this high flying offense that produces multiple starting fantasy pass catchers.
They frequently invite teams into shootouts in their home dome.
That's a part of who they are.
It is not all who they are in their heart of hearts, their core beliefs, they are a power run team.
Then Green Bay was just absolutely hopeless to slow down the onslaught of the Lions ground game, both Dave Montgomery and Jamir Gibbs steadily eroded time on the game clock until the final whistle sounded both backs combined for a 5.1 yards per carry and neither one of them ripped off long runs.
They just kind of slowly, slowly ran down the Green Bay Packers and that at the heart of it is Lions football and why they are such a clean offense to project for fantasy and also why they're a clean offense that's gonna go the distance.
I think in the NFL this season, the thing I don't care about is overreacting to Jordan Love's shaky week nine performance.
Look, Jordan Love absolutely was rocky out there.
There's no question about it.
Um Tom Brady didn't have a good time watching Jordan Love and this is usually a guy who likes seeing well designed passing games piloted by an ambitious quarterback.
That's usually what the Packers are, but they were not that this week.
Uh, here in week nine, it, it was honestly, to me, it looked like a guy who shouldn't have been out there.
I get it.
You gotta throw love out there in this game to try to take down a division rival, but two weeks of rest with their buy in week 10 does look a little more tempting in hindsight.
Overall, we know who Jordan Love is.
He's a guy who's a good quarterback, he will take risks.
Sometimes he took some ill advised risk in this games.
But I'm not necessarily gonna go here and say, oh, it's, you know, this is a big referendum on who Jordan love is.
I think we see a better version of him maybe healthier than he's been since week one coming out of there by next week.
And then we can really see what this offense is made of.