Welcome, the Athletic Football Show, brought to you by Thursday Night Football only on Prime Video.

I'm Robert Mays. Joining me tonight.

It is my co-host here at the athletic football show, Derek Klaas. And Derek, how you doing, man?

It is springtime for the soul. You know, I can hear the birds chirping, the trees, they're growing,

the flowers are blooming. It's a good time to be a football fan, man. What a great day. We had three really close, really good prime time

games just all weekend, a lot to be excited about. And we finished it off with one heck of a Sunday

night opener. We weren't sure what we were going to do with this game and where it was going to fit in.

And when you have an overtime game to start week one, I think that we have to start the show

with it, because there's a lot to chew on here. Let's start with that final drive by the Lions who just decided, you know what, we're going to win this our way. And that just feels like a perfect period to put on the end of the sentence that was today. This is what you built the team for. Like when you hired Dan Campbell, this is the type of game that you thought you were going to win.

And then every move that you've made since then, whether it's drafting Pena Sewell, whether it's, you know, going and getting a guy like David Montgomery to be a running back and just hammer guys for an entire overtime period.

Signing Kevin Zitler this offseason like Frank Ragnow.

This is the game you wanted to win and you went out and won it.

It was perfect. What did you think about the Lions overall tonight? Because I picked them to go to and win

the Super Bowl. I think there's a lot of collective excitement about what this team was supposed to be this

season. What were your initial impressions about the 2024 version of this team? I think offensively,

it looked basically the way that it was supposed to, where I think they ran the ball well for certain parts of this game, especially at the end, which you expect to be able to grind your opponent down and eventually have these big runs at the end where you're able to close it out. They were able to get some explosive plays out of Jamison Williams, which was kind of what we really needed from this offense, because we talked about on a bunch of different preview shows, they were kind of missing explosives last year, especially down the field. And they were sure able to hit one with Jameson Williams, and then they got a couple of other plays to him. So I thought in that sense, like the construction of it looked good. And then the defense, I think they looked good. They They kind of got a little bit bailed out in the sense of, you know, Matthew Stafford was playing behind a very clearly hobbled offensive line. But they still, other than Matthew Stafford going nuclear a little bit in the second half, I thought they mostly played up to their level. Like if they can play to that level consistently, the offense is going to be good enough for this team to get where they want to go. Yeah, that's kind of how it feels. And I think that they ran into a guy playing exceptional football

for most of tonight. The fact that Matthew Stafford and Cooper Cup were collectively able to

keep the Rams in this game after Pukunakua went out, after Steve Avila went out, with their

two starting tackles, not even coming into the game healthy or playing.

It was kind of a minor miracle that the Rams were even willing to stay in this game, and it

included and required a few miraculous plays from Matthew Stafford specifically.

So the fact that the Lions were even able to withstand that sort of onslaught from the rebirth

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