When his team’s fate hung in the balance, Aidan Hutchinson was determined to remain in the thick of the action.
“Overtime, I’m not coming out,” the Detroit Lions star defensive lineman said last week. “It’s the fourth quarter, I’m not really coming out.”
But truth be told, Hutchinson rarely left the field at any point last season. He was between the white lines on 91% of the Lions’ defensive plays and logged the second-highest snap total among all NFL edge defenders, according to Pro Football Focus. Only Jared Verse, then a member of the Los Angeles Rams, recorded more. Hutchinson’s inordinate workload became a topic of conversation during the season, considering the star pass rusher was a mere year removed from fracturing the tibia and fibula in his left leg. To wit, some wondered if he should take a rest every now and then. Lions defensive coordinator Kelvin Sheppard said it was a reasonable suggestion, noting last October it’s “a long season” and that the threat of attrition was something “we do have to be kind of conscious of.”
But Sheppard indicated that Hutchinson didn’t necessarily want a break.
“I want you to come down there and try to tell Hutch to leave the field and I want you to see how those interactions take place,” Sheppard said half-jokingly.
Hutchinson, who led the Lions with 14½ sacks and 100 pressures en route to being a finalist for NFL Defensive Player of the Year, had earned a reputation for his relentless work rate. Yet he finally came around to the idea he could use a breather every now and then so that he conserve energy needed to close out games with gusto.
“Toward the end of the season last year, we started being a little bit more deliberate about, hey, I’m going to take the first plays off of this drive,” Hutchinson said. “I did feel it in the fourth quarter; it really helps. Just taking a couple off here and there really helps the conditioning, for sure.”
Still, he knew he couldn’t stay on the sideline for too long, because the defense needed him. The team’s pash rush, after all, appeared bankrupt without Hutchinson. At times, it felt like he was the sole supplier of pressures, quarterback hits and sacks. The Lions became dependent on him, which factored into the calculus that determined how much he played.
“Hutch takes a lot of snaps, man,” general manager Brad Holmes noted in April.
But this coming season, there is hope Hutchinson will get some relief after the Lions signed free agent DJ Wonnum in March and traded up in April’s draft to select Michigan’s Derrick Moore in the second round. The initial thought when both were added to the fold was that they would each line up opposite Hutchinson, a fifth-year veteran who will turn 26 in August. While that figures to be their primary assignments, Moore and Wonnum may, at times, play in place of him.
As Holmes said, “Just to have another body that literally can spell Hutch in that rush rotation” can be beneficial.
Still, Hutchinson never seemed any worse for wear late in the season, based on his output. He averaged 5.4 pressures and 0.94 sacks over the last eight games compared to 6.3 and 0.78, respectively, across the first nine.
“I think I’m really happy with how last year went,” he said.
But when it comes to workload, could less mean more for Hutchinson?
“It is a fine line,” he said.
The Lions, though, would be wise to see where that boundary exists as they look to sustain his productivity next season and beyond.
Contact Rainer Sabin at rsabin@freepress.com. Follow him @RainerSabin on X.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Two new additions could help give Lions star Aidan Hutchinson a break
Reporting by Rainer Sabin, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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