The funny part about this Lions run is that Dan Campbell called it. During Hard Knocks earlier this year, in front of a slew of performance-enhancing cameras and microphones, the former tight end who, these days, is looking and sounding more and more like a Hells Angels middle manager, was chiding his team for a poor practice and wondering what he could do to get them to tackle.
“What are we doing, man?” he asked his players, one eye closed to the shining sun. “And then, what, we get to Week 8 and we finally come to life because we finally got enough reps?”
Well, sort of.
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The Lions lost in Week 8, in a shootout with the Dolphins, dropping their record to 1–6. Their defensive performance was bad enough that it resulted in the firing of defensive backs coach Aubrey Pleasant. Since then, they’ve gone 5–1, with their only loss being a narrow one to the Bills on Thanksgiving. They were favored against the 10-win Vikings on Sunday and throttled them, icing the win with a tackle-eligible pass to Penei Sewell.
In the 34–23 win over the Vikings on Sunday, Dalvin Cook was held to 1.5 yards per carry. Kirk Cousins threw for 425 yards, and Justin Jefferson posted 223 receiving, but the Lions had ripped the innards out of Minnesota’s offense, reducing those to empty statistics. Many of Cousins’s throws seemed labored or challenged in the secondary. Aidan Hutchinson clubbed Cousins twice, and we finally saw what it looked like for Detroit to exist in the kind of football game this team was designed to play.
The Lions’ defense, after costing the team dearly in terms of expected points added per down in each of their first seven games, is now in the top 10 against the pass and in the top 15 overall.
To be clear, we’re not crediting the turnaround on the dismissal of one coach. We’re merely acknowledging that Campbell seems to know only the chaos; he seems to understand only the hard way and is trying to turn a nightmare scenario into his path toward redemption for himself and an entire sporting region. The fact that he saw it coming months in advance makes it all the better, almost prophetic.
The Lions, now 6–7, are the hottest team in the NFL. They have no margin for error if they want to make the playoffs. They have four games remaining, three of them on the road, two of them against division rivals, and not a single person seems to be questioning the fact that this is exactly how it was supposed to happen. This was the only way for Campbell to save the Lions.
There are sound football reasons for all of this, of course. The Lions have one of the best offensive play-callers in the NFL, in Ben Johnson; a quarterback who has been allowed to grow into his own, in Jared Goff; a punishing running game and a cohesive staff that seems content in not having an identity beyond whatever is going to get them through another week. They get to the red zone in a sustainably consistent way. When they are in the red zone, they don’t settle for field goals.
It was only a matter of time before the cosmically unfortunate hurdles that impeded them from winning football games at the start of Campbell’s run cleared away and made room for conventional-looking victories. Jameson Williams, who is being eased into this offense and caught one of his two targets for his first career touchdown Sunday, will make them more schematically diverse as the season wears on.
And, yes, they’re tackling.
But there is also a major psychological component to this. Campbell, since his arrival, has so well captured and embodied the franchise’s pains and frustrations while, miraculously, managing not to become a punch line himself. This is the typical downward spiral of the Lions coach (except the unceremoniously fired Jim Caldwell). There is a promise to fix things, a failure to live up to the promise and a failure to stay composed during the failures.
Perhaps it was due to his time as a former player during some lean seasons, but he always had a good idea of how bad it was really going to be, how hard it really is and what kind of emotional intelligence it took to keep the entire thing on course.
According to FiveThirtyEight, the Lions have a 21% chance of making the playoffs (through the early-window games Sunday). Campbell is the only coach in the league who can make that statistic feel like kismet. He said at the podium afterward that the win wasn’t perfect, though it was never going to be.
