Ben Johnson Reveals His Regret About Lions Pick-Six

Detroit Lions new offensive coordinator wished he would have made this decision prior to Jared Goff tossing a pick-six interception.

The Detroit Lions made more of the mistakes in their Week 1 loss to the Philadelphia Eagles. 

Head coach Dan Campbell indicated last week the team that made the least amount of mistakes in the season opener would walk away victorious. 

Unfortunately for the Lions, mental errors and costly missed assignments derailed the opportunity to start the season with a victory. 

"That’s ultimately what we’ll look at," Jared Goff said following the loss. That’s probably what hurt us the most, those three-and-outs there in the middle in the second quarter. A lot of mental errors mostly, and stuff that could be cleaned up easily, but stuff that can’t happen on game day. Hopefully we can attribute it to first-game stuff and hopefully next week, stuff like that isn’t happening. But just mental stuff that myself, everyone, can clean up and do better.”

New offensive coordinator Ben Johnson laments a decision he could have made that may have prevented the Philadelphia from scoring points and extending their lead. 

Johnson had a suspicion that prior to Goff tossing a costly pick-six interception midway through the second quarter that something didn't necessarily feel right. 

The first-year offensive coordinator laments not getting on the headset and telling Campbell to call a timeout. 

"Once again a number of guys could’ve helped fix the situation. I think in hindsight on my behalf I need to get on the headset and tell the Head Coach, let’s go ahead and call timeout here. I think that could’ve helped the whole thing just how I could’ve influenced that play. And then, there’s other guys that were on the field that could’ve helped fixed it as well."

Johnson continued, when asked to elaborate, "I could kind of tell when -- there’s just more communication coming out of the huddle than what we had seen in practice. So, I kind of just had a feeling that something was up, but yeah, I’ll leave it at that.”