Lions comeback win!!!!

First off, I watched the entire game, start to finish. I know that it's just pre-season, has no implications on the regular season, and there is not much you can take away from preseason games, let alone the very first one. That being said, here are a couple impressions that I got.

A) Teams already respect Calvin Johnson, before he's played a down in this league.

Detroit's first touchdown in the 2nd quarter was evidence of that. Johnson, this year's number 2 overall pick, ran a deep out route to the sidelines. The Bengals were in a zone, and both safeties bit on the deep out, leaving Shaun McDonald wide open for the TD. This tells me that teams are already concerned about this kid, and that can only help starting WR's Roy Williams and Mike Furrey even more this season.

2) This team is going to fight.

This is a Rod Marinelli team now, and they have been trained to give 100% and not quit. In past years, the team would lie down when they knew they were defeated. But this year, it seems different already. The Lions had to come from 16 down to win in the 4th quarter, and even though they won because of a missed field goal, I still think that this shows heart that the Lions don't usually show.

3) Mental mistakes are minimal.

This first game, this is when you should see loads of penalties, and mostly for dumb stuff like illegal formation, and procedure, and what not. But the Lions only had 2 dumb penalties that I saw - a running into the kicker on 4th and 7 (thankfully not a first down), and an Illegal formation, due to Calvin Johnson not knowing where to be on the line of scrimmage (hey, they guy held out for 8 days of training camp, he's not going to have the plays memorized quite yet). This is quite an improvement. And although there are still some holding calls and what not, that's not bad for the 1st pre-season game.

and finally 4) The starting defensive line better get to the opposing team's QB

Our pass defense looked horrible. And even though it was preseason game #1, and 3/4 of our starting D-line were not playing, it was bad. The secondary got shredded, and unless there is pressure on the QB, we are going to give up a crap load of points. Luckily, I think we can score a lot as well, but that's not the point. The point is we need to play better defense. Quickly. We'll see if we can improve Thursday vs. the Browns.

That's all for now, Arsenal update in the near future. And for my facebook friends, my NYC pictures are now posted on face book. For everyone else, I will try and get my pics onto my blog here.

Later!