By Cody Queen
Queen Media Sports Report
Nobody enjoys being right about this kind of thing. In the preview, I said Ollie Gordon II would have his hands full against a Detroit run defense sitting in the top 10 and giving up just 96.6 rushing yards a game. Sunday at Hard Rock Stadium, he had his hands full. The Lions won 19-9, Miami dropped to 1-7, and the box score reads like somebody went back and graded the homework.
Sixteen carries, 55 yards. That's 3.4 a pop, and nothing longer than 11. Gordon also caught his only target for nine yards, which was about as much open grass as he saw all afternoon. The rest of the run game wasn't any better. Miami ran 21 times for 77 yards as a team, and 16 of those came on one Kevin Coleman carry, so if you peel that off, everybody else combined for 61 yards on 20 tries. You don't build a Sunday on 61 yards.
What makes it sting is who Detroit didn't have. No Jack Campbell at linebacker. No Kerby Joseph or D.J. Reed in the secondary. No center Cade Mays, no edge rusher DJ Wonnum. Didn't matter one bit. Alim McNeill ate up the middle, Aidan Hutchinson pulled blockers toward the edge, and the Lions held Miami about 20 yards under what they had been allowing on a normal week.
One bad game I could shrug off. This is a slide. Gordon went for 103 against the Jets in Week 7, then 69 against New England, and now 55. RotoWire pointed out that he has logged at least 16 carries in four straight games while his yardage has dropped two weeks running. So the coaches trust him (and with Jaylen Wright inactive again with a quadriceps injury, who else are they handing it to?), but the lanes keep getting narrower. Defenses have done the math. Crowd the box and make Malik Willis beat you.
He didn't. Willis was 13 of 25 for 128 yards with an interception, and he went down three times for 23 yards, twice courtesy of Derrick Moore and once by McNeill, who apparently had time left over after clogging the run lanes. When you can't stay ahead of the chains on the ground and can't punish anybody through the air, third down becomes a coin flip you keep losing. Miami went 4 for 12. Throw in 11 penalties for 87 yards in a game decided by 10 points, and the Dolphins were doing a fair amount of Detroit's work for it.
I don't want the offense to bury what the defense did, because it was the best thing about the afternoon. Detroit walked in with the league's No. 1 offense and went to halftime without a touchdown. On the opening drive the Lions reached first-and-goal, and Josh Uche sacked Jared Goff on third down to stall it. Zeek Biggers got Goff on another third down. Rookie corner Chris Johnson picked him off and brought it back 21 yards, and according to the team, that makes this the first season in franchise history with three rookies recording an interception (Johnson, safety Michael Taaffe and linebacker Jacob Rodriguez). Rodriguez added 10 tackles and a sack. Jordyn Brooks had 12.
Goff finished 17 of 25 for 170 yards and no touchdown passes, which ended his streak of 30 straight games with one. Thirty games, and it ended against a Dolphins team that's now 1-7. Somebody in that secondary should frame the box score.
The Lions had to settle for four Jake Bates field goals. Jahmyr Gibbs scored the only touchdown, in the third quarter, but needed 20 carries to get 74 yards, and Detroit averaged 3.6 a carry as a team. The run defense did its job. The run offense is the one that needs a meeting.
A sentence you never want to write about your offense: Miami's longest play came from the punter. Facing fourth down, Bradley Pinion faked it and found Kaytron Allen for 46 yards, and Zane Gonzalez turned that into a 34-yard field goal to make it 16-9. Gonzalez also hit from 52. The kick he'll think about this week is the 38-yarder he missed right before halftime, because the game stayed within reach until the end and those were points Miami couldn't afford to leave on the grass.
If you want a reason to keep watching, his name is Caleb Douglas. Six catches, 70 yards, and 296 receiving yards, the most by any Dolphin through the first five games of a career. On an offense this stuck, he keeps showing up in the box score for the right reasons.
So, back to the preview. Gordon wasn't the problem Sunday. He ran hard, held onto the ball and took every carry they gave him. But 3.4 yards a carry against a top-10 front, with no passing threat to pull a safety out of the box, is about what the numbers said it would be. Until Miami gives defenses a reason to respect the pass, Gordon is going to keep running into the same crowded fronts.
Next up is a road trip to Indianapolis on Sunday, Nov. 15, at 1 p.m. ET.
Don't just watch the game. Understand it. Queen Media Sports Report.
Cody Queen is the lead columnist for the Queen Media Sports Report, bringing you the hard hitting facts, the deep dives, and the unapologetic truth about the teams you love. Queen Media Sports Report is brought to you by Backwater Royalty.
