"I hope this loss humbled this locker room," said Raiola, a team captain. "I think we maybe got ahead of ourselves too early too fast. ... I think maybe everybody thought that because of the moves in the off-season and because of the change in this locker room, it's just going to work like that. It doesn't work like that."

--Twice in the first half of last season, the Lions bounced back from a bad road loss with a home victory. They lost at Philadelphia, 56-21, then beat Chicago at home. They lost at Washington, 34-3, then beat Tampa Bay at home to kick off a three-game winning streak. They finished the first half 6-2. But they went 1-7 in the second half.

--Sunday's game could become the first regular-season game at Ford Field not to sell out since the Lions moved there in 2002. Raiola understands the fans' frustration after the Atlanta loss. "It's happened in the past, so how are people supposed to believe that it was a bad game?" Raiola said. "The only way to do that is go back out next Sunday. How can we just lip-service that it was a bad game? You can't. You've just got to prove it. We've got to deal with this. We brought this upon ourselves. We've got to deal with it."

--Left tackle Jeff Backus isn't too worried about the loss at Atlanta. "We have a good group in here, and we all realize this is a team sport and a team game and it's going to take everybody in here to win ballgames," he said. "I don't think anybody expected to be down 21 so early in the game. We were stuck with that situation. When things aren't going right, you just have to fight and battle your way out of it. We weren't able to get it done. ... I just take this one week at a time. It's a first game. We didn't play well. There's a lot of things we need to improve."

--Wide receiver Roy Williams wants the Lions to throw more often. "I love to run the ball, but there's nobody in this world that can stop our four-wide package, and it wasn't in," Williams said. "We get in two-minute late in the second (quarter) and we go down in score. That's what we're supposed to be in."

--Victor DeGrate directly contradicts Tatum Bell's alibi in the Rudi Johnson luggage sage. Bell was caught on a surveillance camera taking Johnson's luggage out of the Lions' locker room Sept. 1, as Johnson was about to take his job as a Lions running back. Bell said it was an honest mistake. He said Victor DeGrate -- a friend and former teammate who had been cut Aug. 30 - asked him to pick up his backpack and drop it off at a friend's. He said he picked up the wrong bags and didn't know what happened to their contents. But DeGrate said he never asked Bell to pick up anything. He said he didn't leave behind any backpack and does not know the woman to whom Bell took the bags. "The way I just figure, he got caught up in a jam and that was the best thing going at the time, was to say what he said," DeGrate said.

BY THE NUMBERS: 82 - Losses since Matt Millen took over as Lions president in 2001.

QUOTE TO NOTE: "We went out there and played horrible." -- LB Ernie Sims, on the Lions' season-opening 34-21 loss at Atlanta.