ALLEN PARK, Mich. -- Detroit Lions quarterback Jared Goff feels the team can hit another level.
Despite winning three of their last four games, Goff would like to see the Lions "turn our urgency up a little bit and know what time it is" as they enter the home stretch of the regular season.
All three of Detroit's three most recent victories have been decided by one score, including Sunday's 33-28 win at the New Orleans Saints that came after leading 21-0 in the opening quarter. They Lions will head to Chicago to face the Bears (1 p.m. ET, Fox) for the second time in less than a month's span on Sunday, and will have some mistakes to clean up if they want to position themselves for a top seed in the NFC playoff race.
"Know that everyone is kind of in that mode that you have to win these games, and everyone has things that they're going for. No one's out of it," Goff said. "And everyone's trying to win a game, so knowing that you have [to] turn your urgency up a little bit and stay process oriented and trust what you're doing daily in practice. But, yeah, your intensity turns up a little bit this late in the year."
Three of Detroit's final five games are against divisional opponents as they attempt to win their first division title since 1993. Second-year defensive end Aidan Hutchinson would also like to see more consistency from a defense that has allowed 30.3 points per game over the past four weeks, which ranks 30th in the NFL during that span.
"Just executing and being all on the same page. It's the inconsistency," Hutchinson said. "Sometimes it feels like we're three-and-out and just playing at such a high level and sometimes those drives are just 15-play, touchdowns that we let up, and right now it feels like it's one or the other so we've just gotta be overall more consistent."
One of the keys to victory will be stopping Bears quarterback Justin Fields' ability to dominate on the ground. His 98.0 career rushing yards per game against the Lions are the most from a quarterback against a single opponent in NFL history with a minimum of four games, according to ESPN Stats & Information.
Fields has three straight games of 100 yards rushing against Detroit, which hasn't been done by a quarterback versus a single opponent since at least 1950. Lions coach Dan Campbell has said he's placed an emphasis on stopping Fields' running game despite the defense having a hard time trying to simulate his quickness in practice.
"Listen, he's dangerous," Campbell said of Fields. "He's one of these rare, dangerous players and I'll tell you what he's done a really good job of -- from last year to this year -- is if it's a pass and he starts to move, he's still moving with eyes down the field much more than I felt like he had previously and that's extremely dangerous because even in Minnesota, he had two or three receivers wide open after he had kind of run, found a way through, broke contain and all of a sudden he gets an explosive pass off of it.
"But he is dangerous, and everything starts with him, for us defensively, and containing these guys."