{"id":748556,"date":"2026-02-13T05:35:42","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T05:35:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/748556\/"},"modified":"2026-02-13T05:35:42","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T05:35:42","slug":"lions-oc-drew-petzing-shows-off-importance-of-adaptability","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/748556\/","title":{"rendered":"Lions OC Drew Petzing shows off importance of adaptability"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Thursday afternoon, the Detroit Lions\u2019 new offensive coordinator, Drew Petzing,<\/a> spoke with Pride of Detroit in a 30-minute interview<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Obviously, a huge topic was what kind of offense he would bring to Detroit. The Lions have already insisted that this will be his offense<\/a>: not Dan Campbell\u2019s, not Ben Johnson\u2019s, his. But what exactly is that going to look like? Petzing wasn\u2019t going to give full details on what the Lions plan on doing\u2014he specifically said he wasn\u2019t going to get too specific until the tape is already out there\u2014but one constant throughout the entire interview was Petzing\u2019s insistence on molding the offense to the talent he has.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe key to any offense is, it\u2019s got to be built around the players you have,\u201d Petzing said. \u201cYou\u2019ve got to highlight their ability and what they do best. So that\u2019s going to be different game-to-game based on who is available. Every roster I\u2019ve been on, it\u2019s going to be a little different.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most coaches are going to say something similar to that when talking about rebuilding their offense. But Petzing also offered two examples of needing to shift his offensive identity based on his personnel.<\/p>\n

The first example came in 2023, his first year as the Arizona Cardinals\u2019 offensive coordinator. He went into training camp thinking the team would excel at more outside zone runs. But as he learned more about his team, his strategy shifted.<\/p>\n

\u201cI thought we were going to be a wide-zone team in Arizona, and a lot of that first offseason, it was emphasizing wide zone and certain techniques that go with that: running off the ball, displacement, we just can\u2019t allow penetration\u2014those types of things,\u201d Petzing explained. \u201cAnd as we got going, I just didn\u2019t feel like we were good enough at it to make it our foundation.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo me, any good coach, I have to adapt to who we have and what we\u2019re good at. In Arizona, it was emphasizing James Conner and emphasizing the guys we had on the line and what I felt like they did well.\u201d<\/p>\n

The second example came in 2025, his least successful season with the Cardinals. Things fell apart early in the season when Arizona\u2019s roster was ravaged by injuries<\/a>, including Conner missing 14 games, Kyler Murray missing 12 games, and four starting offensive linemen missing at least five games. While the team previously held a strong rushing identity, in the wake of the injuries, Petzing shifted to a heavy-leaning passing attack, ending with the team finishing with more passing attempts than any other team in the NFL.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn that process\u2014like anything you do\u2014you learn a lot about yourself, you learn about the game,\u201d Petzing said of the tough 2025 season. \u201cWe changed dramatically, philosophy-wise, in terms of what we felt we needed to do to be successful based on who we had available on gameday.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think as a play-caller, as a coordinator, as a coach\u2014not that you want to be a part of a lot of those\u2014but there\u2019s a lot of learning to be done when you\u2019re forced with a task like, \u2018Hey, what we did no longer fits who we have. And it\u2019s Week 6, and we\u2019ve got to figure out a way to score points and try to stay competitive.\u2019 And we did. We had to pivot and obviously became a little more pass-oriented, because of who we had and who we needed to highlight.\u201d<\/p>\n

When it comes to what he\u2019ll do in Detroit, he obviously doesn\u2019t want to stray too far away from the things that were working and things that quarterback Jared Goff likes, but he also promised there are plenty of ideas he\u2019ll be bringing to the table, too.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not going to completely depart from anything that they\u2019ve done very well. There\u2019s things that I want to introduce that I think we\u2019re going to do well,\u201d Petzing said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On Thursday afternoon, the Detroit Lions\u2019 new offensive coordinator, Drew Petzing, spoke with Pride of Detroit in a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":748557,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2071],"tags":[146,113,153,1889,2506,7,147,6],"class_list":{"0":"post-748556","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-detroit-lions","8":"tag-detroit","9":"tag-detroit-lions","10":"tag-detroit-lions-news","11":"tag-detroit-lions-quotes","12":"tag-detroitlions","13":"tag-football","14":"tag-lions","15":"tag-nfl"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116061702137615598","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=748556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/748556\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/748557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=748556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=748556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=748556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}