The Detroit Lions’ 24-9 win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Monday Night Football in Week 7 last season was one of their most memorable regular season wins of the Dan Campbell era, and now it’s been immortalized on Netflix of all places.
Bucs signal-caller Baker Mayfield is one of four featured players in the latest season of Netflix’s popular series “Quarterback”. The show takes viewers inside the world of four different NFL quarterbacks — Mayfield, Cincinnati and Cleveland’s Joe Flacco, Tennessee’s Cam Ward and Washington’s Jayden Daniels — as they each navigate the highs and lows of a season playing the league’s most important position.
In a brief segment of this season’s fourth episode titled “Too Much Static”, the show gave a look from Mayfield’s perspective at that frustrating game for Tampa Bay under the lights in Detroit.
Interviewed on the show, Mayfield talked about how the Lions switched up their gameplan to playing heavy man coverage with just one healthy Week 1 starter in their secondary. He insinuated it wasn’t what the Bucs expected at all.
“When you go into a gameplan and you’re feeling like you’re a step behind, it’s never a good feeling,” Mayfield said.
Lions' 'Legion of Whom' get their flowers on latest season of 'Quarterback'
To set the scene again, the Bucs entered that game 5-1 with Mayfield receiving quite a bit of MVP hype, and the team set to return star wideout Mike Evans from injury to pair with then-arguable OROY frontrunner Emeka Egbuka. And though the Lions were themselves 4-2 at the time, Tampa Bay was a popular pick to win because of its passing offense against the state of Detroit’s secondary.
Starting cornerbacks Terrion Arnold and D.J. Reed were both out with injuries. Starting safeties Kerby Joseph and Brian Branch were both sidelined too, with an injury and suspension respectively. It left starting nickel Amik Robertson, who kicked outside to corner for most of the game, as the only original starter in the Lions’ secondary.
It was a gutsy, gutsy move for the Lions to trust their reserves (corners Nick Whiteside and Rock Ya-Sin, safeties Arthur Maulet and Thomas Harper) to hold up in man coverage that often against those Bucs receivers. And it worked.
As the show depicts, it wound up being a very tough game for Mayfield. Against the Lions’ patchwork secondary (later dubbed the ‘Legion of Whom’), he completed just 28 of 50 pass attempts for 228 yards, a touchdown and an interception.
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What’s worse is he was hampered by the Lions’ pass rush. Mayfield took four sacks and was hit eight times. “Quarterback” captures him taking quite the beating, walking around gingerly and reacting accordingly – at one point letting out a four letter word that begins with “F”.
Mayfield said on the show he re-aggravated a bone bruise originally suffered in Week 2 of that season. He admitted it was a particularly tolling game on his body.
“Did not feel very good,” he said. “Kinda was limping to the finish line on that one.”
It could be argued the loss in Detroit was a big turning point for Tampa Bay’s season. Though the Buccaneers would beat up on a bad New Orleans Saints team the next week to get to 6-2, they went just 2-7 after that point and finished 8-9, missing the playoffs.
And of course, that Lions team crumbled down the stretch as well. After reaching 5-2 with the win over Tampa Bay, they went 4-6 the rest of the way to finish 9-8 and last in their division.
Both teams wound up in a very different spot from their perception entering that Monday Night showdown. They’ll meet in Detroit this year again in Week 11 for their fifth matchup in the last four seasons.
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