Detroit Lions: 8 Winners and Losers from Preseason Week 1

After months of lockout, doom and gloom predictions and general doubt about the 2011 season, we finally have football back.

Granted, it's just the preseason, but seeing the Honolulu blue take the field against a team wearing a different color jersey had to feel good.

Apparently, it felt good, too, as just about every Lions player interviewed after the game talked about how it felt good to hit somebody "other than each other."

It also feels good winning a football game by 31 points, whether it counts in the standings or not. Of course, don't let me start talking about how this is a sign of things to come for the regular season. The 2008 season taught all of us a valuable lesson about that.

Still, Friday night's game was a simple instance of the Lions players executing, and the Bengals players failing to do the same. Regardless of which strings matched up, the Bengals looked outclassed on almost every down.

But the preseason isn't about team performance, it's about player performance. Most of the player groups taking the field this preseason will never play together again, so it's mostly useless talking about anything that involves what a "unit" was able to accomplish in the game, especially if it happened in the second half.

Rather, this is a time to look for players who distinguish themselves above their competition. There were plenty of players who took the field Friday night with something to prove.

Most of them did, and some of them wish they hadn't (I'm looking at you, Derrick Williams). So while opinions may vary, and the list undoubtedly goes deeper than this, here are the top eight winners and losers (four each) from the Lions' first game in the "Season that Might Not Have Been."

Winner: Matthew Stafford

Let me take a moment to say I took offense to all the headlines for this game that acted like Stafford not getting hurt was the big story.

Yeah, sure, the kid has had some trouble with injuries. Does that mean the headline on NFL.com should say "Stafford Effective, Not Hurt?"

If it's a major accomplishment that Stafford plays two series in the preseason without suffering a separated shoulder, expectations might still be too low.

That said, Stafford is still a big winner in this game, and it's not because he got out of it uninjured (though admittedly, that helps a lot). It's because this is the first time we've seen Stafford in a game since surgery on his throwing shoulder.

There was a lot of angst in the offseason about whether Stafford would have the same zip and accuracy in his right arm after going under the knife. He did injure a pretty important part of his throwing anatomy twice last season, after all.

We should have taken a cue from the fact that none of those with doubts were, you know, doctors. Looks like everybody got all upset over nothing. You don't need to see an entire game to see that Stafford has the same arm strength and accuracy he did last season and the season before.

Even better, it looks like that time on the bench wasn't completely wasted. Although he would have been better served learning on the field, he obviously made the most of his time with a clipboard, because he appears more comfortable and in control of his offense than ever before.

Of course, Stafford's command of the offense is something we definitely can't judge from a few snaps in a preseason game. But at the same time, that has nothing to do with his shoulder surgery, and the sooner we can start talking about Stafford without having some form of the word "injure," the better.

Loser: Ndamukong Suh

Okay, good news, bad news time.

The good news is that Ndamukong Suh appears poised to be the same dominant force he was in 2010. That's overwhelmingly good news and outweighs the bad considerably.

The problem is everybody keeps taking about this supposedly egregious hit on Andy Dalton. Now, I can see both sides of this argument. Watching the play from home, it looked bad. Even I can admit that. Suh flipped Dalton to the ground a couple of full seconds after the rookie QB winged the ball away.

The hit was reminiscent of the 2010 preseason, in which Suh appeared to be trying to tear Jake Delhomme's head from his shoulders and offer it as a sacrifice.

This hit wasn't nearly as violent as that (Suh wasn't even the one responsible for knocking Dalton's helmet off), nor could Suh have known that the ball was out of Dalton's hand. From his perspective, he was just trying to get a sack. It's not his fault he's strong enough to pick a 215-pound man up off the turf and bodyslam him, and you'll have to point out the area of the NFL rulebook where that became illegal.

Last year, that hit secretly excited a lot of Lions fans, who were happy to see a Lions defender bring a taste of intimidation to a unit that had been tissue-soft for years. The bad news was, Suh was watched very closely for the rest of the season and was flagged for a number of personal fouls that were undeserved.

It would have been easy enough to chalk that up to rookie enthusiasm, but now we're getting to the point where Suh is going to start developing a bona-fide reputation as a dirty player, when he isn't.

He certainly deserved the flag he got, and the refs had no choice but to throw it in that instance. But the league has (as of press time) been suspiciously quiet about any further discipline on the matter, which should tell you the hit wasn't nearly as bad as the postgame buzz would have you believe.

Still, that buzz is out there. Because Suh is suspected to be a dirty player, he's going to start receiving scrutiny as if he already is, and he'll get personal foul calls on some ticky-tack plays (like pushing Jay Cutler in the back when he's running 10 yards down the field).

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy that way.

Winner: Willie Young

As you can see, there wasn't a whole lot of photo evidence of Willie Young in the game Friday night.

And I'll qualify everything positive I'm about to say by admitting Young isn't the next Dwight Freeney just because he beat some third and fourth-string linemen to get into the backfield.

That said, Young did an awful lot of beating third and fourth-string linemen. It wasn't so much that he piled up stats (one solo tackle, three assists), but he was constantly making trouble for the Bengals' offense, collapsing the pocket, re-directing runners and putting the quarterback under consistent pressure.

Never was this more apparent than when he sniffed out a playaction pass and stormed into the backfield to pressure Bengals QB Jordan Palmer. As Palmer backpedaled and Young rushed after him, the pressure finally forced him into a an ill-advised underthrow off his back foot that was picked off by Ricardo Silva in Bengals territory.

Young is going to have a difficult time cracking a roster that is already full up with talent on the defensive line. But if the seventh-round pick has any shot at making the final 53, he's doing what he must to make it happen.

Losers: Everybody Involved in the Running Game

It seems implausible that a 34-3 victory would have an "uh-oh" element. But that's the nature of the preseason.

If this game is any indication, the Lions' running game, top to bottom, is an "uh-oh," especially when it comes to getting anything between the tackles.

This is something we've all been acutely aware of, and we've all discussed the matter with differing levels of intensity. We had hoped that the talented Mikel Leshoure would help make up for forward momentum-deficient interior line, but that's not happening now. We had hoped a healthy Stephen Peterman would help, but we didn't see much of that either.

If Leshoure were healthy, he might have hit some of those tiny holes and opened them up a bit with sheer power. Instead, we were looking at Mike Bell fumble his first carry of the game, and Jerome Harrison rack up eight yards on six carries.

Even Jahvid Best, the shining beacon of hope, had all of 12 yards on four carries (though he at least showed some kind of ability to run between the tackles, a big question about him last year).

As a team, the Lions rushed for 2.1 yards per carry. That's not going to cut it, unless the NFL decides to give the Lions a first down after five yards instead of 10.

Even more upsetting is that this is the Cincinnati Bengals we're talking about. The stifling run defense that gave up an average of 4.4 yards per carry last year. This isn't an elite unit the Lions had trouble against, it's a decidedly middle-of-the-pack one.

Aaron Brown appears to be the only bright spot, averaging over five yards per carry on four carries for 21 yards. But that stat hides the truth; 17 of those yards came on one run that Brown busted to the outside. Other than that, he had four yards on three carries, including one where he was swallowed up as soon as he got the ball.

I promise I'm not overreacting here; I know it's only one preseason game we're talking about. Not nearly enough for a conclusive assessment. But the line, particularly on the interior, particularly in terms of run blocking, has been a concern for a couple of seasons now.

It has gone mostly unaddressed, with the coaching staff hoping that minor tweaks, full health and intangibles like growth and chemistry would help bring the unit along. I was, for a while, willing to believe that could happen. But if I'm to continue with that, they'll have to show me an awful lot more than they did Friday.

Winners: Offensive Tackles/Pass Protection

I'm sure I wasn't the only one just a little bit uneasy sending Matthew Stafford in to play for the first time in almost a year with Corey Hilliard and a gimpy Gosder Cherilus protecting his flanks.

But have a look at that throw. Nobody in a 10-foot radius of Stafford. That's pretty much what it was like all day, too. Even with two of the Lions' top tackles out with injuries, every quarterback came off the field clean, with the exception of Shaun Hill on his seven-yard "helicopter" run.

The counter-argument to this is that the Bengals aren't exactly a premier pass-rushing team (only three teams had fewer sacks in 2010), so it isn't as though the Lions were trying to hold down Clay Matthews or anything.

Still, Cherilus played snaps and showed no ill effects from his surgically-repaired knee, either during or after the game. Hilliard proved capable of holding down the left side if need be, and Culbreath performed well for a raw seventh-round pick from a tiny FCS school.

The quarterbacks stayed clean and healthy, and though the tackles could have been more effective in the run game, I'll take what I can get from the hobbled group right now. Every player stepped up and answered some of the questions we had about them.

Now if we could just get Jeff Backus and Jason Fox back, we might even have quality depth at the position.

Loser: Derrick Williams

One of the most consistent storylines of the 2011 Lions training camp has been the resurgence and improvement of Derrick Williams.

At about the midpoint of 2010, he seemed all but destined to be Martin Mayhew's first true draft bust. The Titus Young pick in the second round just about sealed it.

Then, suddenly, the man who earned himself a third-round pick out of Penn State showed up at training camp. Williams was quick, crisp, and seemed almost like he knew what he was doing from one moment to the next.

Then he took the field, and his hands turned to rubber coated with Teflon. On back-to-back plays, Williams had balls bounce off him like he was the fat kid in a schoolyard game of dodgeball. One slipped through his hands and hit him in the shoulder, the other bounced off his facemask.

The Lions actually have talent at receiver this year. That is to say, one of the receivers cut from Lions training camp might actually make another team's roster. They're that good right now. Williams can't just coast onto the roster because the team has no better options.

Williams seems to be working hard, but he definitely lost points by not translating it to a solid on-field performance. His disappointing first game makes him a very important player to watch this Friday at Cleveland.

Winner: Zac Robinson

I don't know which of 31 NFL teams Zac Robinson (on the left, in the ball cap) is going to end up on. I do know two things about Robinson's situation.

One is that Robinson is more likely to end up on a UFL roster than the Detroit Lions roster in September.

The other is that if he gets a little more face time in the preseason, it's highly unlikely that he ends up unemployed this season.

Robinson didn't exactly "wow" anybody with his performance Friday night. It's more like he "hmmmmm"-ed a lot of them. The average Lions fan doesn't even know there's a fourth quarterback on the roster right now, much less his name or his career résumé.

And that's exactly why so many eyebrows went up when they saw a no-name kid in his sophomore year come in, take a couple of deep shots and score on a two perfectly-placed balls.

The first was a pass that reached UDFA receiver Marcus Harris despite the cornerback being in relatively good coverage with him. The pass was on Harris' hands and fell incomplete only because the corner could tell he was a half-step behind and interfered to prevent a bigger play.

On the very next play, Robinson took a shot down the other side of the field and laid a perfect pass in to Nate Hughes on the edge of the end zone, 28 yards away.

Watch the play enough times, and it looks like Hughes may have gotten away with a slight push-off, but whatever the circumstances, Robinson laid that ball in about six inches over the defender's outstretched hands, and it hit Hughes in the numbers.

There are more than a couple teams that might find some room on the third string for a quarterback with that kind of capability.

What the Lions have to hope now is that somebody likes his film enough to give something up for him, rather than just pluck him off waivers. That would be yet another coup for GM Martin Mayhew.

Loser: Erik Coleman

Since there aren't any good shots of Erik Coleman in a Lions uniform yet, here's one that symbolizes what is happening to his chances of earning a starting job in Detroit.

Even worse, it's not really his fault. Though he had a quiet game in the secondary, he has been solid throughout training camp.

But solid hasn't been enough to outshine Amari Spievey, who has been one of the standout stars of training camp and maybe the single-most improved player on the roster.

Spievey didn't disappoint in the game, either. He's in better shape, has a better grasp of his responsibilities at safety and seems to be reacting more than thinking.

Coleman is a good player, but he really was just a safety net in case Spievey didn't develop after converting from corner to safety. But develop he has, and he looks poised not only to cement his position as starting safety for the Lions, but possibly grow into one of the better safeties in the league next to Louis Delmas, who already is one.

Meanwhile, Coleman's one-year deal strategy, the one employed by a bunch of defensive players in Detroit who want to look sexy behind the Lions' defensive line, could be about to backfire. The man can't improve his stock for next year's free-agency period if he doesn't play.

And if the third-round pick with upside in his second year is outplaying the 29-year-old veteran already, who are the Lions going to be more interested in giving playing time?