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First down

At what point does the luster of a 5,000-yard, 41-touchdown season start to wear off when it comes to Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford.

• It starts to wear off when you’re 0-2 in the division and 2-4 on the season after losing 13-7 on Monday Night Football.
• It starts to wear off when the touchdown passes are less than the amount of games played and are less than the interceptions.
• It wears off when the franchise quarterback has yet to throw for two touchdowns in any one game yet this season.

The stats after Monday’s loss show the Lions still have the No. 2 passing offense in the NFL, but let’s be clear about something, there is such a thing as shadow stats in the NFL and the yards Stafford continues to put up are meaningless unless they eventually start equating to points.

To steal a line from Lions head coach Jim Schwartz: If how many yards a quarterback threw for were the tiebreaker to get into the playoffs, then yards would start to matter.  

Right now, trying to figure out a way to put the ball in the end zone should be the only thing that matters for the Lions.

“I’ve got to play better,” said Stafford, who finished 28-of-46 for 261 yards with a touchdown and a quarterback rating of 74.6.

“There’s opportunities for me to do it, I just haven’t done it. I told those guys in there: ‘talk is cheap right now. You can say everything you want, but actions are going to speak a whole lot louder than words. We can talk about taking care of the football, we can talk about making sure we’re on the same page, we can talk about making plays, but just got to go out there and do it.”

Second down

It was good to finally see second-year receiver Titus Young lead the way for the Lions receiving corps Monday with six catches for 81 yards. The Lions have been looking for a receiver not named Calvin Johnson to make an impact, and we could see a lot more of that from Young moving forward this season with veteran receiver Nate Burleson out for the remainder of the year with a broken right leg suffered at Chicago.

“It’s a big loss and all it means is the guys that are stepping in need to put in more effort and more time because our number is going to be called now,” Young said after the game. “When our number is called we need to be ready.”

The Lions will also need some help from rookie receiver Ryan Broyles, who caught his first NFL pass in the third quarter and then got his first career touchdown at the end of the fourth quarter on a 12-yard connection with Stafford. He finished with three catches 51 yards.

Broyles, the Lions second-round draft pick, is starting to feel closer to 100 percent after having ACL surgery last November, he recently said.

“We’ve got guys that can step in and make plays,” Stafford said. “I thought Broyles did a good job tonight kind of getting thrown into the action and kind of a tough spot. We’re going through all our two-minute offense and he hasn’t gotten a lot of reps at that. But I thought he made some plays.

“Titus had a good game. Titus was working the whole game, trying to get open and doing a good job of getting open and making some catches. Obviously we lose Nate, that’s tough, but I think those guys are going to be ready to step in.”

Third down

The Lions wasted a perfectly good defensive effort Monday night with three offensive turnovers inside the red zone and four total turnovers on their side of the field.

Particularly good for the Lions again on Monday was the play of their defensive line and the pass rush. The Bears were held to just 125 yards passing thanks to constant harassment by the Lions front. In all, the Lions sacked Bears quarterbacks five time and registered five quarterback hits.

"I think we got a good amount of pressure,” defensive tackle Ndamukong Suh said after the game. “The great thing about our defense is that we have versatility to rush all four, we have the versatility to blitz as well. I think both ways we'll be able to get home. I think for the most part we were pretty successful with that in this game.”

The Bears did rack up 171 rushing yards and controlled the time of possession by nearly 10 minutes. But the Lions defense did enough to win the game allowing 13 points – they simply got no help from the offense.

Fourth down

For all the talk leading into this game about how much these two teams didn’t like each other, tempers ran fairly timid in Chicago. Even Suh stood over fallen Bears quarterback Jay Cutler near the end of the first half after he had just pile-drived him into the ground shoulder first to see if he was okay.

"I went over to check on him, yes,” Suh said.

All of Suh’s 300 pounds game right down on Cutler on the play, who laid on the field for a few moments before jogging off under his own power.

"I asked him if he was fine and he patted me on my stomach and said he was good,” Suh said of an exchange he had with Cutler when he was coming off the field.

Cutler told reporters after the game that he thought it was a clean play.

Remember the incident last year when Suh shoved Cutler and incurred a $15,000 fine.

 As revenge games go, this one was pretty docile.