Mailbag: Breaking down Detroit Lions’ progress in 2022 OTAs vs. 2021

We’re at the halfway point of the Detroit Lions’ offseason activities with the first two weeks of OTAs in the books. Next week, the Lions will hold a three-day mandatory minicamp, followed by the final week of OTAs (assuming the Lions don’t cancel it like they did last year).

On Thursday, both myself and Erik Schlitt attended the team’s fifth OTA session. We’ve already given a full recap of our observations and picked out 10 standouts from practice, but on Saturday afternoon, we—along with Ryan Mathews—answered any and all questions you had about practices and a whole lot of other things on your mind via the Spotify Live app.

One of the bigger topics was simply comparing this year’s set of practices to last year’s. Despite the Lions bringing back almost all of their coaching staff from Year 1, there was a noticeable difference in the OTAs—specifically the performance of the offense.

“Last year’s OTAs, I cannot stress how horrible the offense was last year,” Schlitt said. “It was unbelievable. It was so bad, we thought the defense may be top-10, and we know how bad the defense was. So, the fact that the offense worked and clicked and moved the ball, had some strategies that they implemented (on Thursday), all of those things were a positive for me. That was the most night-and-day difference.”

We also discuss the differences in Year 2 Jared Goff from Year 1, what we think the quarterback’s ceiling is, and the very promising start from Detroit’s wide receiver class.

If you want to join and ask a question live on our weekly shows, be sure to download the Spotify Live app and follow us @PrideOfDetroit. We’ll announce exactly what time we’ll be live on Friday here at the site and send out a link on Twitter once we’re officially live. Typically expect the showtime to start somewhere between 10-11 a.m. ET on Saturday.

Of course, if you can’t join us live, you can always listen to the show when we upload it the following day to our podcast feed. You can catch this show—and all of our podcasts—on your favorite podcasting platform, including: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or iHeartRadio.