DETROIT — Three years to the day that Dan Campbell stood behind a podium talking about how his Detroit team would be "biting kneecaps" Lions fans stood in the corner of Ford Field and responded with their own message.
“Super Bowl. Super Bowl.”
The Lions are one win from what long seemed like an impossible dream around here, just not ever to Campbell. Things like this — playoff runs and deafening cheers and 31-23 victories over Tampa Bay to send the team to face San Francisco for the NFC championship — were the expected result of the work and culture and preparation that he promised to install.
It wouldn’t be easy. Campbell knew that. He was inheriting a last-place team with a tragic history that had just traded away its best player, Matthew Stafford. Easy jobs don’t come to guys like Dan Campbell though.
At 6-foot-5, with a goatee, a gravel voice and physique that speaks to his NFL tight end past, he cuts an imposing physical presence. But size and strength sometimes tricks people into underestimating intelligence and creativity. Campbell had both. He might look like a jock, but he’s the farthest thing from dumb.
Campbell’s news conference went viral that day and plenty were laughing, either with him or at him or just wondering how it might all play out. He just shrugs at it now.
“I envisioned we would have a chance to compete with the big boys and that’s where we are at,” Campbell said.
Besides, none of what he said was really intended for the media or even the fans. He was setting the tone with the 53 that would eventually fill the locker room.
His metaphors are occasionally tortured, but his point is always crystal clear. Campbell was different. Detroit was going to be different too.
“That’s my guy,” Penei Sewell, the franchise left tackle, recalls thinking when he first met Campbell. “That’s my type of guy.”
“Dan’s the greatest leader I’ve ever been around,” quarterback Jared Goff said.
Campbell and general manager Brad Holmes didn’t just install a mindset through slogans. Every coach tries that. They lived it. They showed it. They actively built around the returning guys who already displayed it — the Frank Ragnows, the Taylor Deckers, the Sewells. Then they brought in more just like them, no matter the critics.
There was Goff, the cast-off of the Los Angeles Rams, throwing for 287 yards, two touchdowns, no picks. Before the game, he was serenaded by the fans – "Jared Goff. Jared Goff." Afterward, for a second consecutive week, he could barely think amidst the victory formation din.
“Really a cool thing for me,” Goff said.
There was Jahmyr Gibbs, the rookie running back the Lions were ripped for taking 12th overall, supposedly too high for the position, sprinting for a game-changing 31 yard fourth quarter touchdown run.
There was Sam LaPorta, another rookie who draft experts panned for being selected at 34th overall, hauling in nine critical catches. There was Amon-Ra St. Brown, a fourth-round steal, snagging eight for 77 yards and a score.
And there was that veteran offensive line, a mean, fast and ferocious group the country is just getting to know.
After the game, Ragnow, a six-year veteran, got selected to a national television interview and Goff had to instruct him to take off his helmet for it. When the big center showed up in the interview room, he spotted the promotional Gatorade bottle next to the microphone and asked if he was allowed to drink it.
“First time here,” he laughed.
Yeah, Campbell is a tough dude and his players are too. The Lions didn’t just get here by being tough though. They got here by outfoxing the league, seeing brilliance where others looked for blemishes, believing in their evaluations no matter the blowback, trusting that a new attitude can elevate those beaten down by losing.
They built a staff almost exclusively made up of former players, turning them into one of the most confident teams in the league.
They won Sunday with an inside-out game plan, using the pass to set up the run because Campbell said an early season match up against the Bucs defense felt too much “like swinging a sledge hammer against a steel door.”
“We knew we needed to loosen it up,” he said. “And we did that.”
Then the defense held strong when it was needed. That included two interceptions of Baker Mayfield; the final, game-clincher by linebacker Derrick Barnes, another fourth-round pick who executed coverage and jumping the route just as, he said, it was practiced all week.
The crowd noise nearly blew the roof off the place.
“Just electric,” Barnes smiled. “Let’s keep this train going, man.”
There is nothing not to like about this crew. Second-chance guys and criticized pick-ups and anonymous battlers.
“We wanted something the city can be proud of,” Campbell said of constructing the team. “You can look at those guys and say, ‘I can back that guy. I can back that team.’ Kind of salty. They don’t quit. They play hard.”
Yeah, they are the new kids on the playoff block who you won't see in national commercials, but they’ll arrive in San Francisco without hesitation, ready to bring their brand of smoke for whatever stands in the way.
“I think experience is a little overrated,” Sewell said. “I think it’s about preparation.”
Detroit will be prepared. Campbell’s teams are always prepared. He’s the unlikely face of an uber-aggressive, cutting-edge concept, but it’s all there. No fear of going for it on fourth. No hesitation of calling daring plays. No second guesses. All gas. All grit.
That’s what he was talking about three years ago. A new era for the Lions.
“To each his own,” Campbell said of the critics of his old viral video. “We’re going to the NFC championship game with that group of guys. They love football. They play football. That’s what they respect. They respect their teammates and not anything else.
“When you are able to care more about the person next to you more than yourself," the coach continued, "you are capable of doing some pretty special things.”
Even, perhaps, the Super Bowl.
