5 things to watch: Lions-Giants joint practices

Special teams coordinator Dave Fipp has spent a lot of time figuring out the best combinations of personnel for the new kickoff play and who might fit best returning kicks. It will be interesting to see the two teams practice the play during the week.

It’s good to go against another team early on to see how they are strategizing the play and what Fipp and the Lions might need to do to counter.

“There’s a lot of unknown, I think,” Fipp said last week. “At the end of the day what I told our players is, we’ll be ready to adjust on the scheme and all that stuff, but any play in football is going to come down to the same old things.

“It’s going to come down to blocking or evading a blocker, and then it’s going to come down to tackling and it’s going to come down to making somebody miss. So, at the end of the day, we’ll spend a lot of time on fundamentals and technique, and we’ll also be ready to adjust and adapt to any other thing that we see out there that we think is successful.”

This Lions’ defense will be much improved in 2024 if they can get a more consistent pass rush from their front four and better play all around from their revamped secondary. So far the first two weeks of training camp those two areas look to be the most improved on the entire team.

“Man, we are getting off blocks, you even see improvement in players like (Alim McNeill) Mac, (Aidan Hutchinson) Hutch, just taking another step, Levi (Onwuzurike), certainly (Marcus) Davenport’s back out there now and he’s practicing,” Campbell said.

“And then with the DBs, man, you feel us challenge, we’re challenging on the perimeter and they’re covering pretty good down the field, so when you do that, you can’t help but get better.”

It’s looked good so far against Detroit’s offense, which is one of the better units in the league. The hope is the defense really has the edge and gets the better of a Giants’ offense that wasn’t as productive last year and doesn’t have all the weapons both upfront and at the skill positions as the Lions have.