Coaches throughout the NFL will say there is no bad time for a bye week.
For the Detroit Lions, that couldn’t be any truer.
After a difficult 26-0 loss at Lambeau Field, the Lions made their way back home to Detroit with even more injuries than they started the day with.
Already without five starters including 
“I wish we could play another game again tonight to try to get this taste out of our mouth,” said Head Coach Jim Schwartz. “I think that’s important. We need to use that time to get our players back on the field. That’ll be a big thing for us.”
The Lions began this game with just six defensive linemen; White, Hill and defensive end
With all of those linemen out and only three who could play on the inside, the coaches had offensive guard
“We were in the position where three of those (available defensive linemen) were defensive ends and you generally use four defensive tackles (for goal line),” said Schwartz.
“Some of our ends are undersized. Stephen has played defensive tackle in college, so he went in and played for us.”
Though defensive end isn’t the only position the Lions are short at, what’s even more significant is the number of starters currently out of the line-up.
The Lions have been missing Hill and White for quite a few weeks now, but the absence of Johnson was a particularly difficult one. Though he didn’t play for the majority of last week’s game, the Lions were able to gain momentum defensively to put some points on the board.
This week, penalties and an early interception stacked the cards in favor of the Packers, who quickly made it a 14-0 contest in the game’s first three possessions. Playing from behind made things even harder on the team as a whole; Green Bay had the luxury of playing aggressive and taking risks.
“When something like this happens, you can’t sugarcoat it, you can’t blame it on one side of the ball, one phase of the ball: offense, defense or special teams,” said Schwartz.
“You have to take it, you have to move on, you have to find a way to make sure it doesn’t happen again and that’s going to be our objective over the next couple weeks.”
Obviously one big objective will be getting injured players back.
Neither Schwartz nor his players have used injuries as an excuse, but the bottom line is that the Lions are playing shorthanded from top to bottom. While players have come in and contributed, there is no substitute for a player having been with the team from the offseason program on through to the regular season.
"I don't make excuses, but that's a problem; a lot of us are banged up right now,” said linebacker
“To turn this around it's not going to be coaches, it's not going to be game plans, it's going to be our one-on-one match-ups. We have to start playing better individually."
Other players echoed the same sentiments as Foote, pointing the blame to their own performances rather than anything else.
"It's very disappointing, very frustrating and embarrassing to me to not be able to move down the field and put points on the board,” said Culpepper. “We have to be able to do that. It's as simple as that."
The question was raised to Schwartz following the game whether or not this team had taken a step back. After promising performances over the season’s first five games – things to build on – it seems that has stopped for the time being.
“We didn’t play well, but the players battled,” said Schwartz. “I’m not going to sit here and say we lacked effort; we didn’t lack effort at all. We didn’t play well, but is it concerning? Sure it’s concerning. Anytime you lose in the NFL it’s concerning. No matter how good a team you are, you’re going to have times like this.
“We just need to find a way. Like I said, we’ve got to move past this game, we have to identify what we did wrong, we need to find ways to correct it and we need to get injured players back on the field.”
