3 Lions players who might excel with John Morton as their offensive coordinator
Losing offensive coordinator Ben Johnson was inevitable for the Detroit Lions, and this year it happened when he took the Chicago Bears’ head coaching job. The search to replace him landed on John Morton, who most recently spent two years as the Denver Broncos’ passing game coordinator.
Morton will of course be tasked with keeping one of the league’ best offenses rolling like it was with Johnson as the play caller the last few seasons. But he will surely put some of his own stamps on the core principals of the Lions’ offense that head coach Dan Campbell wants to keep in place, leaning into his coaching experience going back to 1998.
Over the course of his career Morton has worked alongside offensive minds like Sean Payton, Jon Gruden and Jim Harbaugh, and each have hired him multiple times. He has only been a play caller for a full season once, as the New York Jets’ offensive coordinator in 2017, but the talent-barren roster that team had is not a reflection of who he is as an offensive mind himself.
No less an authority than Campbell noted how Morton had an influential role in the Lions’ offense in his role as a senior assistant in 2022.
“John Morton, man, Johnny was – Johnny’s a superstar now and there’s a number of things that he did for us last year that are things that we’ve kept,” Campbell said. “And I really feel like that helped Tanner as well. And he took a lot of that, and he learned from that, and he’s grown from that.”
Johnson obviously got a lot out of a lot of players during his time as Lions’ offensive coordinator, but it’s also fair to say there were odd lapses at times and some areas that could have been better/more consistent.
With that in mind, these three Lions players stand to benefit greatly from Morton being the offensive coordinator.
There’s no doubt Jared Goff is most effective as a play-action passer, and he dices up the middle of the field as an obvious corollary to that.
On play-action vertical routes in 2022, the Lions led the NFL with 1.31 EPA per dropback. That’s the highest mark across the 2022 and 2023 seasons in the league on those routes. They also averaged 19.2 yards per attempt (third), and posted a league-best 69.6 percent success rate. Kalif Raymond (169 receiving yards; fourth in the league) and DJ Chark (127 yards;13th in the league) were both proficient on those plays. Raymond averaged 33.8 yards per target on those plays, the highest in the league that season and the second-highest in the past three seasons (minimum of five targets).
