‘Monday Night Football’ schedule and results: Lions hang on to beat Saints

The Saints had a scare when Brees limped off the field after taking a sack. Brees spent time on the trainers’ table getting his foot taped up, but he returned on the Saints’ next drive without missing a snap. Meanwhile, Tate scored his second touchdown of the night to put the Lions up by 18 points.

New Orleans went into the fourth quarter with the ball at Detroit’s 18-yard line after Brees hit Cooks for a couple more chunk gains. However, Detroit made a big stop on third down and Sean Payton elected to go for the field goal to make it 28-13 in favor of the Lions.

Going into Week 15, Brees had completed 67.8 percent of his passes for 3,794 yards with 25 touchdowns and 11 interceptions this season. He’s been his usual excellent self, though he is on pace for his lowest touchdown total since 2007 due to the lack of productive offensive weapons and overall struggles by the Saints.

Brees has thrown for 4,000 yards in each of his past nine seasons in the league. Going into Monday’s game, he needed 206 yards to extend his NFL record streak of consecutive 4,000-yard seasons to 10. No other quarterback in NFL history has thrown more than six in a row.

Surprisingly, there is no penalty for an NFL team calling an additional timeout, with the exception of teams calling faux timeouts to freeze a kicker. (That’s considered unsportsmanlike conduct and worth a 15-yard penalty.) The only result is that the timeout isn’t rewarded. It’s the referees’ job to understand that there are no timeouts remaining and not stop play. Whichever referee blew the play dead made a mistake.

Maybe the Lions genuinely wanted to call a timeout there, thinking they didn’t have the right coverage for the play. But this is something teams could exploit for their own good. Because the refs actually blew their whistles, the Lions got a free look at the Saints’ desired fourth-down play call.

1) It has Tyrannosaurus Rexes all over it.

2) It also has hand guns?

He was able to practice in a limited capacity on Friday and there were no reported setbacks with the injury, and most expected he would be available for Monday’s game.

Johnson is playing well this year, though not at the elite level he enjoyed prior to 2014. He finished the 2012 season with almost 2,000 receiving yards and he notched 1,492 yards in 2013. However, he played in just 13 games in 2014 and had 1,077 yards.

Detroit Lions wide receiver Calvin Johnson is officially active for the team’s Monday Night Football game against the New Orleans Saints. Johnson was listed as questionable but never expected to miss this game.

Johnson is battling a minor ankle injury but has yet to miss a game this season. The 30-year-old has been given rest in practice this week. Johnson played nearly every snap in last week’s loss to the St. Louis Rams but had a quiet game, finishing with just one catch on five targets for 16 yards. Johnson has 71 catches, 981 yards and seven touchdowns on the season.

Due to a relatively high number of bad teams in the first half of the season, it took longer than usual for this year’s playoff picture to come into focus. But with three games to go, plenty of teams are firmly on the outside looking in and won’t get to experience a postseason game this season.

There are no playoff implications in the prime time matchup, but there will be plenty on the line as far as coaching staffs and rosters are concerned. Detroit’s ownership has been talking about significant changes: they are searching for a new general manager after Martin Mayhew got the boot in November, and head coach Jim Caldwell can’t be complacent by any stretch of the imagination.

The Detroit Lions are 2-7 straight up and 0-9 against the spread in their last nine road games in the month of December. The Lions will try to cover the spread on the road in December for the first time since 2010 this Monday night when they visit the New Orleans Saints.

Detroit is a 3-point road underdog at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome according to sportsbooks monitored by OddsShark.com. New Orleans has gone just 2-9-1 ATS in its last 12 games as the betting favorite.

While neither were Super Bowl favorites, few predicted they’d be sitting in the cellar of their respective divisions and jockeying to avoid a top-five pick in the draft in the middle of December. Yet, that is exactly where the Lions and Saints find themselves heading into their Monday Night Football matchup at the Superdome.

It should be no surprise that they’ve struggled in the national spotlight, too. The Lions are 2-11 in prime time games over the last 15 seasons, the worst record of any team. Their last win at night on the road was Oct. 19, 2000, at Tampa Bay, and their last Monday Night Football road victory was Sept. 19, 1994, at Dallas.