For much of the offseason, the Lions have been the darlings of the betting market.
They drew upwards of 99 percent of over bets on their preseason win total, and they were among the most-bet teams to win the Super Bowl, the NFC, and the NFC North.
A year later, betting itself may end up being their undoing.
Detroit was the biggest loser of Friday’s bombshell news from the NFL league office, which suspended five players — including four Lions — for violating the league’s gambling policy.
The headliner was 2022 first-round receiver Jameson Williams, who will miss the first six games of this upcoming season for betting on college football while at the team facilities.
The same punishment applies to fellow receiver Stanley Berryhill, while receiver Quintez Cephus and safety C.J. Moore were suspended for the entire season for betting on NFL games during the 2022 campaign.
The team has since released Cephus and Moore.
None of that has deterred bettors from once again tripping over themselves to back Detroit in the futures market.
Entering last week, the Lions were the most significant liability to win the Super Bowl (20/1) at BetMGM, where they’d also drawn nearly 50 percent of all bet slips to win the NFC championship (+850) with the shortest odds to win the NFC North (+130).
Those odds remained unchanged in the wake of Friday’s news, as Detroit looks poised to be the bettors’ choice for the second straight offseason.
That doesn’t mean you should join the fray.
On paper, the Lions seemingly didn’t lose much: Williams, Cephus and Berryhill combined for three catches for 56 yards in 2022, while Moore (12 tackles) did most of his damage on special teams.
Still, Williams was expected to take a sizable leap in his second season for an offense that ranked fifth in DVOA in 2022.
Now, he’ll have to endure a delayed start for the second consecutive season, which will put undue pressure on spot starter Kalif Raymond (616 yards) and recent signee Marvin Jones (529) — whose output last season was his worst in five years — to fill the void left by Williams and offseason departure DJ Chark (502).
This team will also have to account for the loss of running back Jamaal Williams, a locker room favorite whose 1,066 rushing yards and NFL-best 17 rushing touchdowns helped propel this offense to new heights in 2022.
He’s since been replaced by David Montgomery, whose career 3.9 YPC average highlights his inability to break through as a true impact player through four professional seasons.
Here’s the dirty secret about this team: Detroit was a fade candidate even before those suspensions, which have lessened the margin of error for a group that was already being priced near its ceiling by an overzealous betting market.
While the Lions finished with a respectable 9-8 record, they actually finished the season with negative net yards per play (-0.3), a common way bettors assess a team’s relative power rating.
That’s entirely due to their lousy defense, which ranked dead last in opponent yards per play (6.2) and 31st in opponent drive success rate (75.1 percent).
It was a similar story with their overall DVOA ranks: Detroit finished fifth on offense and 28th on defense, and ranked dead last in game-to-game variance.
The Lions also scored six of their nine wins against non-playoff teams in 2022, finishing with a 3-6 record against the 14 teams in the postseason field.
All of that paints the picture of a team with a dramatically wide range of outcomes, and bettors seem entirely concerned with just one side of that spectrum based on the Lions’ current pricing in the futures market.
That’s a classic way to fall into the pitfalls of public betting hype, especially with those prices remaining unmoved by Friday’s shocking news.
It’ll take an inspired effort for this offense to sustain top-five production, especially after losing three receivers in one fell swoop.
And I’d rather not be among those swept up in Detroit’s betting bonanza.