Why Lions trust coach Dan Campbell? 'He’s the guy with the big stones'
DETROIT − At some point, this will end.
At some point, all this unlikely, undermanned winning the Detroit Lions are doing on their way to vanquishing hated rivals and clinching the playoffs in early December will end.
Not this year. Especially not after the Lions posted a much-needed convincing win Thursday with a gut-check 34-31 victory over the Green Bay Packers at Ford Field that officially pushed the 12-1 Lions into the postseason and one step closer to clinching the NFC’s No. 1 seed.
Maybe it won’t even end next year.
But at some point, the law of probability will probably take over and the Lions will probably become a little more normal, lose tight games and sweat out December like most other NFL teams.
But something that won’t change with the Lions, as long as Dan Campbell remains the coach: Their swashbuckling nature and the way they don't cede anything to any opponent.
Even when the game was on the line, on fourth-and-1 with 43 seconds left, when Campbell could have just ordered a short field goal for a lead, he went for it. And he got it, when his trusted running back and trusted quarterback delivered, effectively ending the game.
Even after Campbell’s previous fourth-down attempt failed and led to an easy Packers touchdown, he didn’t hesitate to call another fourth-down conversion attempt, with everything at stake.
Why?
Maybe Campbell’s seen too many movies or heard too many aphorisms about courage that he likes. Remember the Alamo. They died with their boots on. Yippee ki-yay, mother— ... well, you get the gist.
“I think he’s done a really good job of deciding when to go and when not to go (for it),” quarterback Jared Goff said. “Certainly, because it worked, everyone is going to say, you guys are going to say, ‘Great call.' And if it didn’t work, you guys would be crushing him.
“That’s the game he plays and that’s why he’s the guy with the big stones and we trust him.”
Yes, if Goff’s trip had blown the handoff to David Montgomery and the Packers had won, Campbell would have been roasted alive.
But Campbell is a unique entity within the realm of all coaching. I’ve covered countless coaches in numerous sports for nearly 30 years as a sportswriter and I’ve never seen a coach in any sport or at any level — least of all in the NFL —handle criticism as well as Campbell.
It isn’t that he doesn’t care about criticism.
It’s that he has a strong sense of conviction about his decisions. He’s willing to live with bad results because he feels justified in his reasoning. And when he’s been wrong, about anything, he has admitted it.
Campbell is by nature more aggressive than most NFL coaches, who are overwhelmingly conservative. But aggression-for-aggression’s-sake wasn’t the case Thursday, Campbell knew he would need to roll the dice with his offense to help his injury-riddled defense.
And that meant he was willing to go for it — and was willing to live with the consequences.
So he told his team not to ride the wave based on score or circumstance. This is who they were going to be Thursday, when they converted four of five fourth-down tries. The Packers never attempted a fourth-down conversion.
“We could be up two scores, we could be down two scores,” he said. “But just because we’re one or the other, we’ve got to play our style of game going in, what we felt like we needed to do, what I felt like we needed to do.
“So that meant the risk was there, and you fell in negative territory, you’re trying to hold them to a field goal, but I knew that was how I wanted to play that team with where we were at.”
His failed fourth-down call late in the third quarter, and the Packers’ ensuing drive, didn’t work out the way Campbell preferred. But his game management, holistically speaking, did. He knew he had to use the offense to protect the hobbled defense.
“He told us early in the week he was going to lean on the offense,” Goff said, "Kind of challenged the offense really early in the week, challenged myself, challenged the guys on offense like, ‘Hey, it’s your turn to hold your weight and carry the load and make this thing happen and make this thing go.’
“For me, that’s like the greatest feeling ever. You’re like, ‘Let’s effing go and let’s make this thing happen.’ ”
And when the offense delivered a victory that was more declarative than decisive, Campbell filed it instantly into his long-term memory bank.
“I think a lot of it is just that what we’ve had to overcome,” Campbell said. “The hand we were dealt and I just love the fact our guys don’t make excuses, they just find a way.
“Everybody on this team believed we were going to win that game, and we were going to find a way, and we just, we did it again. We did it again. Guys did it.”
They sure did.
Even though they were undermanned but not overwhelmed. Bloodied but unbowed.
Yippee ki-yay, Dan Campbell.
Contact Carlos Monarrez at cmonarrez@freepress.com and follow him on X @cmonarrez.