Last Thursday the Detroit Lions got one of their biggest wins of the year when they beat the Green Bay Packers at home to clinch the playoffs and move farther into position to clinch a second straight NFC North title and the first seed in the NFC.
In an alternate reality, there’s a chance that Dan Campbell and the Lions are getting fried by everyone right now because they went for it on fourth down in field goal range late in the game and maybe Jared Goff fell completely down and fumbled the ball and the Lions lost and Dan Campbell’s aggressiveness bit them.
That’s not what happened in real life though. What happened is that the Lions picked up the conversion and kicked the game-winning field goal as time expired. Maybe there are a lot of coaches out there who live with one foot in reality and the other in that alternate reality where they’ve failed. Dan Campbell apparently does not, but he still understands the risk and why most coaches maybe wouldn’t take it.
“Here’s the obvious. What happens when we don’t get that? That’s the obvious. We’re moving to the next house you know what I mean? That’s why.” Campbell said. “But it’s to each his own. And there’s plenty of philosophies that have worked in this league and you can win a lot of games doing it your way, and I just lean more this way. And it doesn’t mean we’re always going to be this way, but that was right for that game.
We’ve been doing this now for a while. Our guys understand what’s at stake and the way that we play more times than not, and it’s not all the time, but they understand, you know, they’ve been put in the fire enough to where, you know, they understand these fourth downs. And we play pretty good under pressure. We do pretty good in pressure moments. And it’s a credit to our players and our coaches so they’re ready for it. And you know, it’s just a matter of for me, making sure that I do give them the best opportunity to still have success.”
At the end of the day there are multiple big things here that people need to see. This is not going to always work. There will come a time when a big gamble will not pay out and maybe the Lions wind up losing, in part, because of it. That is something that just comes with the territory and everyone in the building has accepted that and has proceeded with that knowledge in their head and they don’t care.
The reason they don’t care is because all the noise around everything that happens is just background noise. They don’t hear the analysts on ESPN saying they did something wrong. They don’t hear the people on Twitter dogging them. They don’t even hear the fans that disagree. All they hear is their head coach saying “I believe in you and I believe you’re capable of anything.” There is nothing more powerful than that. There’s nothing louder than that.
That’s why this team can withstand failure. We’ve seen them do it already. We saw them fail on their biggest stage last year and they didn’t change a thing about themselves other than collectively coming together and increasing the level of how much they want it.
This is who the Lions are and you just have to trust in it if you’re a fan. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks.