The news got to the Lions through dribs and drabs.
The first piece of information passed along to team president Rod Wood came Tuesday, with the NFL letting Detroit know it wouldn’t be in an international game. On Wednesday morning, Wood was told that one Lions game would be announced Thursday morning, ahead of the full schedule release. And then came the schedule in full, later in the day Wednesday, with that top line being of most interest.
The one catch was the security around it. Wood needed two or three passwords to get to it, and when he did, the file itself was locked up like Fort Knox—he couldn’t print it, nor could he forward it to anyone else. Which only added to the moment he was about to have, in calling third-year coach Dan Campbell and GM Brad Holmes to his office.
I really can’t print this for you, Wood said. But I can read it to you.
Then, he said matter-of-factly, Our first game is a Thursday against the Chiefs.
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Campbell and Holmes couldn’t hold their emotion in, nor did they try to.
“Rod, he doesn’t do a great job of holding his emotions back,” Campbell said from the Lions facility Friday morning. “He’s pretty reserved, but you can tell with him when something’s coming. His left eyebrow goes up. So he’s trying to stay straight faced. He started on it, and you could just tell. He just went right down the lineup and gave it to us one by one. I didn’t want him to show it to us, anyway, so he just read it first.”
The coach then paused and added, “It was great. It was good, man. It’s exciting.”
It’s fair to say that, for the three guys sitting in that room in suburban Detroit, the moment meant a little more than putting a scheduling magnet on a calendar. It was, in so many ways, another marker of how far the franchise has come in two years’ time. It’s the record, sure, and how the Lions got to 9–8 last year—with eight wins in their final 10 games. But it’s also in how they’re perceived now.
This, in essence, was the NFL’s saying it wanted to use one of its biggest stages to introduce a fun, tough, lively Lions team to a nationwide audience, in putting that Lions team opposite its two-time champion. And how mind-blowing was that? Well, the man who’ll call that game, NBC’s Mike Tirico summed it up in a text to Wood after the game was announced: A year ago, this would’ve been unfathomable.
“I agree with that,” Wood said Saturday. “That we would’ve been shown on the premiere, the first game of the season, against the defending Super Bowl champs, if you’d have told me a year ago, I’d have said, That’s impossible.”
So now, the Lions get to go from trying to prove everyone wrong, to working to prove people right. Which is yet another symbol of how far they’ve come.
We’re almost at full-on OTAs, which means football practice is about to begin, and the rest can’t be too far off. And to get you ready for that, on the site today, you’ll find …
• More reason to believe Micah Parsons is going to make the NFL his.
• A couple of things to watch for on the Commanders sale in the coming weeks.
• Why the Browns are rolling the dice with the Za’Darius Smith trade and a bunch of schedule leftovers in the Takeaways.
… And a whole lot more. But we’re starting with the Lions, and what Thursday’s news says about where they are as a franchise.
Campbell would certainly understand if you pinpointed the October-November turn as the pivot point for what he and Holmes have built in Detroit—they went into Halloween at 1–6, and came out of the first Sunday thereafter with the home win over the Packers that would spark the Lions’ furious finish.
He just disagrees with the notion that the whole operation went from zero to 60 just like that.
“Everybody thinks that when you go through a stretch where you’re 1–6, you lose five in a row, it’s, You’re awful,” he says. “The reality was, we always knew, I always knew, we were one play away in all those games we lost. Yeah, you lose five in a row but, literally, it was right at the very end of the line. Dallas, that game got out of hand by the fourth quarter so take that one out, but these other ones, we were right there. You understand how close you are.
“If you listen to all the outside noise you’re miles away, and nothing’s going right; you can’t do this. And that was never the reality. Reality was, Guys, we’re one turnover away. We’re one play away, we’re one third-down conversion away, we’re one third-down stop away. Those guys understood that, and they just kept putting the work in.”
So as Campbell saw it, the Lions started taking care of the ball on offense, and taking it away on defense. They played better on third down. “And guess what?” he says. “We won a game.” They beat the Packers. Then they came back from 14 points down in the fourth quarter in Chicago, which gave Detroit an actual winning streak, their first since October 2020.
The ball was rolling.
“We had to rally late and win that game,” Campbell says. “Once we did that, I knew if we could stop the bleeding, we were probably going to be O.K., and we did that. To be able to stack two in a row, that’s when I was like, All right, we’re gonna be just fine. Then we go out to New York, we’ve won three in a row. Then you start a run.”
Just as important was who the Lions were doing it with.
Second-year receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown, a fourth-round pick in Holmes’s first draft class, had 106 catches. Rookie edge rusher Aidan Hutchinson, the No. 2 pick in the GM’s second draft, had 9.5 sacks. The team’s other 2022 first-rounder, Jameson Williams, flashed late, coming off an ACL torn in his final college game. The team’s ’21 first-rounder, Penei Sewell, was helping anchor an offensive line that was becoming a legitimate team strength.
Then, there’s the quarterback who was seen as a salary dump in the Matthew Stafford trade (to be fair, he sort of was on the Rams’ end, since Los Angeles had to shed his number to acquire Stafford), and who threw for 4,438 yards and 29 touchdowns against just seven picks in his second season as Detroit’s starter. Indeed, Jared Goff has shown, again, why even if he’s not a superstar, there was good reason he was the No. 1 pick in the 2016 draft and good reason why the Lions didn’t feel the need to force anything at the position in the draft.
“When you have a quarterback you can win with, why would you do anything else? We have a quarterback we can win with,” Campbell says. “He can win in this league. He’s our guy. And thank God we’ve got him. There’s a number of teams that are out there right now that don’t know if they have a starting quarterback. We do, so we’re fortunate. He’s a hard worker. For a guy that’s got skins on the wall and played as much football as he’s played, a veteran guy, he’s been out here all offseason.”
So has most of the group, which speaks to the other piece of where the Lions are—which is a big part of how they learned to win at that supposed pivot point last year, and started to make the plays needed to flip close losses into clutch wins.
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Campbell played 11 years in the league, and his refrain is one that’s common among those who did—the best teams he was part of really were run by the players.
So what exactly does that mean? It means when things are going right, the players are leading the charge. And when things are going wrong, they’re correcting problems. It’s what Campbell, from the time he got to Detroit 28 months ago, has been chasing and what he believes he’s starting to get in the halls of his building, which he sees as perhaps the best sign—maybe even more so than last year’s late-season rally—that real progress is being made.
“I always wanted a team that you felt could self-regulate,” he says. “The standards were set, and [the players] were the barometer. They were the regulators. They were the ones who said, Listen, this is how we go about our business. The coaches, we’re out of the world of, Hey, this is how we do things. This is what we do. We’re into all little football things, the detail, the fundamentals, the technique, the scheme. All the other stuff, the standards of the way that we go about our business, how we show up, when we show up, the way that we practice and the way that we are in the weight room with conditioning, the players handle that.
“If somebody is below the standard, if somebody’s below the line, well, the herd gets them back in line. That’s what I feel like is a little different now. Here we are going into Year 3, and I can feel the team beginning to take over, that our captains, our core, this team, are beginning to set the standards. That’s what I wanted all along. That, to me, is culture.”
Campbell, increasingly excited talking about it, then adds, “That’s when you begin to win, when your team takes it over. They’re the ones who say, No, no, no, that’s not good enough. The coach ain’t saying a word. The players are. … That’s what I see.”
And the offseason the Lions just had doesn’t hurt.
Both of Campbell’s well-regarded coordinators, Ben Johnson on offense and Aaron Glenn on defense, interviewed for multiple head coaching jobs in January, and Johnson appeared to be on the verge of landing one. Either could’ve been gone. Instead, both those guys and special teams coordinator Dave Fipp are back.
As for the roster, Campbell didn’t miss a beat when I asked where the biggest difference this year vs. last year should be. “That’s easy,” he says. “The back end. Our secondary.”
Campbell then cited Tracy Walker III coming back off injury, ball-magnet Kerby Joseph going into Year 2, and additions like Cameron Sutton, Emmanuel Moseley, C.J. Gardner-Johnson and second-round pick Brian Branch as reasons for feeling that way. “If you look at where we were in ’21 versus now,” Campbell continues, “that’s a huge transition.”
The Lions also got a potential game-breaker to complement Williams, after Williams’s gambling suspension is over (running back Jahmyr Gibbs), a prospective nerve-center middle linebacker for the defense (Jack Campbell), and what they hope is a viable replacement for T.J. Hockenson at tight end (Sam LaPorta) ahead of Branch in the draft.
And if they can fit all those pieces into what they’ve already built, with the staff coming back nearly intact? Look out.
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As for that draft class, and the criticism that the Lions took a running back and an off-ball linebacker too high, Wood jokes, “No one will think about that if we go in and beat Kansas City, and those two guys contribute to the game.”
And while the team president said it in a lighthearted way, his statement also underscores the power of the stage and the opportunity the league is giving the Lions in Week 1.
“And I do think everyone,” Wood continues, “from me on down, embraces the fact that we’re the team that everyone is paying attention to. We’re not hiding from it.”
Campbell isn’t, for sure.
He told me he planned to look up the actual number, but he knew offhand Friday that the Lions don’t have many guys who’ve played at Arrowhead, period. Campbell, on the other hand, has played and coached there countless times, and can remember going to Kansas City as a Giant to play against the Chiefs in New York’s first game after Sept. 11.
He also knows what he and the Lions are up against in the current iteration of the team and, suffice it to say, he won’t need much help getting his guys prepared for that one.
“If you go to coach [Andy] Reid’s track record, he’s won every year he’s been in this league,” Campbell says. “He is one of the best coaches who’ve ever coached his game. They’ve got the weapons, man, they got the right structure there. They’re an uber-competitive team. They got a hell of a staff. It just doesn’t get any better than this honestly, to face them Week 1. And to do it at Arrowhead, I’m excited for our players. …
“It’s a special place to play. It really is. The aura, they’re not going to be able to hear themselves think. To me, that’s the place you want to go play.”
Truth is, when they get there, they’ll have the chance to do a lot more than just play.
And in the aftermath of last week’s announcement, you can trust that’s lost on no one in Detroit.
