After he suffered a left shoulder injury in Week 10 against the Houston Texans, head coach Dan Campbell suggested it would happen. Then Sam LaPorta did not practice all week. On Friday, the Detroit Lions second-year tight end was indeed ruled out for Week 11 against the Jacksonville Jaguars.
LaPorta's numbers are way down compared to his record-setting 2023 rookie campaign, with 25 catches for 366 yards and three touchdowns in nine games. But he obviously leaves a sizeable void in the Lions' offense, with his good work as a run blocker of note almost on a weekly basis (despite a poor Pro Football Focus grade). And he has scored in two of the last three games.
LaPorta will miss the first game of his career on Sunday. So how will the Lions go about replacing him? The Jaguars have been one of the more generous teams in the league to opposing tight ends, so there is something there that can be exploited in their defense.
Who will replace Sam LaPorta in Week 11 vs. Jaguars?
With LaPorta out on Sunday, Brock Wright gets bumped up a spot on the depth chart. He is not a high-volume pass target (nine catches for 58 yards and a touchdown this season, with four of those catches coming in Week 3 when LaPorta left early due to a right ankle injury), but he has played 51 percent of the Lions' offensive snaps so far this season.
Shane Zylstra has played in four games for the Lions this season (44 offensive snaps), the first three after being elevated from the practice squad before he was signed to the active roster before Week 10's game. A training camp injury cost him all of last season, but he had four touchdown catches for the Lions in 2022 (three in one game),
James Mitchell, a fifth-round pick by the Lions in 2022, has spent the entire season to this point on the practice squad. He will likely be elevated on Saturday afternoon to be the No. 3 tight end for Sunday's game. Mitchell has13 career receptions for 141 yards and one touchdown.
In light of LaPorta's expected (at that point) absence, Lions' passing game coordinator Tanner Engstrand talked about the remaining options at tight end on Friday,
"They’ve played plenty of ball before and so they just got to fill in and just one of them will take the role and maybe one of them plays a little bit more on third down and maybe another one plays a little bit more on first and second down," Engstrand, according to Dave Birkett of the Detroit Free Press. "So we’ll just kind of take that as it comes but we have all the confidence in the world that those guys are going to get in there and be able to execute with the guys and what we ask them to do, for sure."
Asked specifically about Mitchell, Engstrand said "It’s going to be nice to see him play" this week.
So the Lions' tight end depth chart for Week 11, without LaPorta, will look like this:
- Brock Wright
- Shane Zylstra
- James Mitchell (pending his practice squad elevation becoming official)