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After a field goal with 2:53 left to play in Sunday’s game, the Lions trailed the Texans 20-13 with all three timeouts in their pocket to use in an attempt to tie the score.

An onside kick isn’t the first thing you’d expect to see in such a situation, but that’s what Lions coach Jim Caldwell called. The Texans recovered the kick and ran out the clock behind 25 yards from running back Lamar Miller on four plays before the two minute warning.

That inability to stop the run was in evidence earlier in the fourth quarter when the Texans gained 47 yards on the ground on a field goal drive and Caldwell said the Lions “hadn’t been stopping them very well in the run” when explaining the decision.

“You can take a couple different approaches to it,” Caldwell said, via the Detroit Free Press. “First of all, they weren’t going to throw the ball in that situation, so that’s why you take a shot at it and see if you can get it back. If you can’t get it, and then stop the run, no matter where you stop them in that situation, [if] we can get them stopped there early we still may have had another chance at it. But we just didn’t get it done.”

The Texans weren’t expecting the onside kick when they initially lined up, but punter Sam Martin’s kick didn’t take the right bounce for the Lions and the game ran away from them for good. The same would have happened if they’d kicked deep and done the same job stopping Miller that they did near midfield, which makes the call seem less notable than the need for better work on the defensive front.