Jared Goff and the Lions should once again be among the best offenses in the league. Patrick McDermott / Getty ImagesSept. 3, 2026 Updated “The Athletic Football Show” is previewing all 32 teams leading up to the start of the 2026 NFL season. Below are select quotes from the show’s preview of the Detroit Lions. The quotes are edited for clarity. You can watch the whole preview on YouTube and in the embedded video below or listen to the full NFC North preview wherever you get your podcasts.Derrik Klassen on what about the Lions most excites him: The offense is going to be a fireworks show again because it always is. Even if last year was imperfect, the thing that they were still good at was explosive plays. Jahmyr Gibbs was still one of the best backs in the league. Jameson Williams’ taking a step went under the radar a little bit because we didn’t feel as good about the Lions offense overall. Amon-Ra St. Brown is an amazing player. Sam LaPorta is still a really good tight end. This collection of offensive talent is insane. The quarterback is really good, and it feels more like his offense than it did when he got there. I just have a lot of faith that if last year is the floor, when they were still seventh in EPA per drive, I feel pretty good that they’re going to be top seven again at minimum. And if things break right, they could be the best in the league.Dave Helman on what he’s watching the first month of the season: If you’re building a front seven, Aiden Hutchinson and Jack Campbell is about as good a starting point as you could ask for. What you get from the rest of that in Detroit is, I think, one of the biggest inflection points of how good this team could be. Hutchinson and Al-Quadin Muhammad accounted for 40 percent of their pressures last year. Muhammad is gone. There are a lot of guys that you feel good about who can help this, but what does that look like in the first month of the season? Alim McNeil was banged up last year. What does he look like this year? We’ve talked about Tyleik Williams making any sort of Year 2 jump and just being somebody that can be part of that. DJ Wonnum is just a steady Eddie, good football player. You can do this with Hutchinson just sort of holding everything up like Atlas, but you don’t want to, you know? And so what are you getting from the rest of those guys?Robert Mays on what’s keeping him up at night: Right now, it sounds like it’s going to be Chuck Clark and Avonte Maddox at safety, and Christian Izien at the nickel. That’s just not what the Detroit Lions were supposed to look like on the back end. Their biggest issue is that they just gave up an absurd amount of explosive plays, and a lot of that was coming out of base defense. They allowed 60 explosive passes playing base last year. No other team in the league allowed more than 40. Some of that is volume, just the sheer amount of base that you’re playing, but the Lions allowed an 18.8 percent explosive pass rate last year in base. The Vikings and the Raiders, both of whom were very heavy base defense teams, were at about 13.5 percent. There were 73 explosive passes last year in the NFL out of 11 personnel against base defense. The Lions allowed 17 of those 73 plays. That’s obscene.Subscribe to “The Athletic Football Show” on YouTube.