Big play breakdown: They have hurt the Lions since opening day, and Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow exploited that weakness. His five longest completions gained 174 yards. The longest one was 54 yards to rookie wide receiver Ja'Marr Chase in the third quarter. Chase and Burrow were teammates on the LSU team that won the national championship in the 2019 season. – Mike O'Hara
Big play breakdown 2: On the other side of things, Detroit struggled to generate big plays of their own. Detroit's five longest plays generated just 87 yards. Lions quarterback Jared Goff was 1-for-7 for 33 yards on throws that traveled more than 10 yards. – Tim Twentyman
Short stuff: The Lions didn't get much impact out of their passing game. The top wide receiver was Kalif Raymond. He had six catches for 37 yards, an average of 6.2 yards per catch. Next was rookie Amon-Ra St. Brown, with five catches for 26 yards. The long catches were for 10 yards for Raymond, nine for St. Brown. – Mike O'Hara
Barnes progressing: Rookie linebacker Derrick Barnes gets better and better the more opportunity he gets to play. He was Detroit's highest graded defender by Pro Football Focus Sunday. He led the team with eight tackles. He defended the one pass thrown his way and also had a tackle on special teams. – Tim Twentyman
Sack time: Outside linebacker Julian Okwara got one of the Lions' two sacks. He got to Burrow unblocked, but he got there in a flash, giving the QB no chance to react to avoid him. – Mike O'Hara
Stuffed: Head coach Dan Campbell was pretty spot on when he said just about every aspect of the game was bad in Sunday's blowout loss. Heading into the game, Detroit's rushing offense had been pretty consistent, averaging 4.3 yards per carry and better than 100 yards per contest. Sunday was a different story. D’Andre Swift rushed 13 times for 24 yards (1.8 average) and Jamaal Williams ran four times for 11 yards (2.8). – Tim Twentyman
Better start needed: Teams have a good idea of how they want to start a football game offensively with scripted plays and a plan schemed up of how they want to attack a defense. For whatever reason, and there's been a lot of different ones for the Lions, they haven't been able to start games how they want, maybe outside of Week 2 in Green Bay.
Detroit was shut out in the first half Sunday against the Bengals, which is the third time they've been shut out in the first 30 minutes of a game this year. For the year, Detroit's been outscored 92-33 in the first half of games. – Tim Twentyman
