Moral victories don’t come around much in the NFL. That’s just the nature of the sport.
When you’re paid to win football games and you don’t, there’s only so much solace you can take in losing.
But Dan Campbell found a little silver lining in Sunday’s heartbreaking 19-17 loss to the Baltimore Ravens, and given where the Detroit Lions are as a franchise, that sliver of hope seems appropriate for a late September morning.
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The Ravens needed a record-breaking kick from Justin Tucker and maybe a little help from the referees to beat the Lions in dramatic fashion.
The Lions dug their own grave with seven first-half penalties, including one that nullified a fumble recovery, an offense that putzed around the field part of the day and some egregious late-game play calling.
But the Lions were in a game most gave them no chance of winning, against a team with clearly superior talent, and they showed a resilience in battling back from a double-digit second-half deficit to make things exciting for the second time in three weeks.
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Winning trumps excitement every day and especially on Sundays in the NFL, but for an undermanned roster and a first-year head coach in the embryonic stages of development, it’s at least something.
“I am proud of the way that we fought because we did fight our way back into this game,” Campbell said. “And so I don’t question that. I know we’ve got the right guys here. They’re made up of the right things.”
If you’ve been a Lions fan long enough, you’ve heard that refrain and others coming from Sunday’s loss before.
Running back Jamaal Williams lamented “beating ourselves,” but said when the Lions finally stopped doing that, they proved “we can play with anybody.”
Quarterback Jared Goff called the loss “about as big of a gut punch as I’ve ever been a part of,” then promised to make the gut punches stop.
“The resiliency to push through something like this will remain,” Goff said. “That optimism, that hope, that belief in each other, because it was there. It was really there at the end, I know you guys could feel it there at the end with the fans, the crowd into it. We were into it. We felt really good about it and they made a field goal by a foot. He made a great kick. Your hat’s off to him. Lamar (Jackson) made a great play before that, but they made a field goal by a foot and we’re saying a different narrative right now if it’s not. … So all I’m saying is we will remain true, we will remain resilient and the gut punches will stop.”
The Lions have epitomized resilience and gotten nowhere before. Their last quarterback set an NFL record for most come-from-behind victories in a single season and had to force a trade to the Los Angeles Rams to maybe, finally truly prosper.
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Still, things seem weirdly different for this incarnation of the Lions, in a good way.
The Lions are young and thin and wholly overmatched in some areas, but even at 0-3 their sum appears greater than their parts.
They played an atrocious first half of football against a good San Francisco 49ers team in the opener, yet came within a whisker of forcing overtime. Last week, they traded blows with a better Green Bay Packers team for a half before falling victim to their own malfeasance. And had Tucker’s kick Sunday hit the crossbar in a slightly different spot, the Lions might have woken up Monday morning in a three-way tie for second place in the NFC North.
As things stand, the Lions have important division games on the road the next two weeks against the Chicago Bears and Minnesota Vikings. Winning one or both won’t suddenly make the Lions playoff contenders, but winning one or both — against similarly mediocre teams — seems important for the psyche of the organization and its players and fans.
The Bears are coming off a game in which they had 47 net yards of offense and could be starting a rookie quarterback for the second straight week. The Vikings are perennial choke artists whose signature defense is not up to its usual standards.
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The Lions, at 0-3, are one of five winless teams left in the NFL and off to their worst start since 2015. That is a tough reality to live in no matter what we think the future holds
At some point, winning will be the only thing that matters for this new regime. We’re not there yet, but it still is important to start replacing moral victories with real ones for everyone involved.
“It’s like I told them, I think if you really want a sharpened sword, you want something elite, you got to put it under a lot of heat and a lot of pressure, and that’s what we’re under right now,” Campbell said. “And I think we’re going to come out the other end pretty good out of this. We just can’t get discouraged and we can’t stop continuing to believe and fight. Because I see where it’s going. I can see it. I feel like things became a little more clear today and I love the grit of this fricking team, I do. Because I just mentioned again, if you’re not a gritty team you don’t hold up to this team. So, small victories and we got to move forward, find a way to beat Chicago.”
Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett.