Detroit — They weren’t ready for prime time before.
But they’d better be now.
Because when the curtain goes up on the NFL season in September, the Lions will take center stage in the spotlight. And this won’t be just a cameo appearance, either, as Dan Campbell’s team — a trendy pick to win the NFC North for the first time in 30 years and the source of so much offseason buzz across the league — is scheduled to make at least five national-television appearances in 2023, four of them in prime time.
The first of those will feature the Lions making their inaugural appearance in the league’s 20-year-old marquee kickoff event, a Thursday night opener on Sept. 7 against the defending Super Bowl champion Chiefs in Kansas City.
You asked for it, Detroit, and now you’ve got it: Here’s another chance to prove to “Everybody” that you’re to be taken seriously. That last year’s late-season surge, in which the Lions won eight of their last 10 games to make a surprising playoff push, was no fluke. And that the Week 18 win at Lambeau Field — a victory that knocked Green Bay out of the playoffs and sent four-time MVP Aaron Rodgers packing for New York — was merely a dress rehearsal for Campbell & Co.
“The Chiefs we know. They’re the champs, right? They’re the team that everybody knows,” said Mike Tirico, the lead voice on NBC’s NFL broadcasts, as he unveiled the “NFL Kickoff Game” on the “Today” show Thursday morning. “The Lions? Very different story. … You know, there’s always a hot team. People say, ‘Hey, who’s the team everybody’s talking about?’ It’s the Lions this year. So we’ll get to see them the opening night to find out if it’s real or not.”
Oh, it’s about to get real, all right.
Because that opener is just the beginning for the Lions, who were largely an afterthought in league circles a year ago. Sure, they’d been tabbed to appear on HBO’s “Hard Knocks” in the 2022 preseason. But last May’s schedule release felt like just another cold shoulder in Detroit, as the league opted not to feature the Lions in any prime-time games in its 18-week schedule. There was the traditional slot on Thanksgiving Day — annually one of the NFL’s highest-rated broadcasts — but that was it for national TV initially (the Jan. 8 finale at Green Bay was later flexed to prime time due to its playoff implications). And with no West Coast road games on the 2022 schedule, there weren’t even any late-afternoon time slots for the Lions.
While disappointing, it wasn’t all that surprising, however. The Lions lacked star power, were coming off a 3-13-1 finish in 2021 — their fourth consecutive season with double-digit losses — and hadn’t finished with a winning record since 2017. “Unattractive is not the right word,” NFL vice president of broadcast planning Mike North insisted at the time. But “irrelevant” probably would’ve sufficed.
Buzz building
Yet with interest spiking in the Lions after the “Hard Knocks” fanfare last August and their hard-charging finish last winter, that was due to change. The only question this offseason was how dramatically it would, and whether it would truly benefit the team on the field.
“Certainly the exposure is great,” team president Rod Wood told reporters at the NFL owners’ meetings in March, when asked about the prime-time love that was coming the Lions’ way. “I’d rather have as many at home as possible. I mean, the road prime-time games are a challenge for travel. But if you earn the right to play on prime time, it’s because of good things, not anything we should be worried about.”
And even though three of the Lions’ four prime-time dates this season are, in fact, on the road, I expect that’s exactly what we’ll hear from these Lions, starting with their head coach, who’ll be a guest on the NFL Network’s “Good Morning Football” show Friday ahead of the Lions’ rookie minicamp this weekend.
Campbell kicked off last season’s training camp with a passionate speech to his players about “grit” and a willingness to play anybody, anywhere. Home, road, grass, turf. “We’ll go to a (expletive) landfill,” he said. “Doesn’t matter.” And Campbell has spent this spring talking about “raising expectations” in Detroit, where he believes a young roster fortified through free agency and the draft is “positioned much better to swing with the big boys this year.”
The league and its broadcast partners are banking on it, clearly. The NFL could’ve kicked things off with a Super Bowl rematch between Kansas City and Philadelphia or had the Chiefs face one of their AFC rivals in Cincinnati or Buffalo. Instead, they picked the Lions, because as Onnie Bose, the NFL’s other VP of broadcasting, explained on “The Dan Patrick Show” Thursday, “We really like that narrative around that team. … There’s a lot of energy there, and we feel really good about starting the season with that energy against the Super Bowl champs.”
The Lions are listed as an early 7-point underdog visiting Arrowhead Stadium for the first time since 2003, back when Joey Harrington was their quarterback. Detroit hasn’t won a season opener since 2017, and Kansas City — coming off a third Super Bowl appearance and second title in four years — hasn’t lost one under head coach Andy Reid since 2014, when Patrick Mahomes was just a freshman backup quarterback at Texas Tech.
But this is a matchup of two of the league’s top five offenses last season, and it’s worth remembering the last time Jared Goff faced Mahomes and the Chiefs in 2018 — he was still with the Los Angeles Rams — they produced an all-time shootout on “Monday Night Football.” The only game in NFL history in which both teams scored 50-plus points — Rams 54, Chiefs 51 — featured 14 touchdowns, 1,001 yards and four fourth-quarter lead changes.
Stirring slate
So the intrigue is there, and win or lose, it should be when the Lions return home to Ford Field in Week 2 against Seattle, the team that snagged the final NFC wild-card spot over Detroit with the help of some controversial officiating back in January.
The Lions play three of their first five at home, but the other early road trip is another prime-time affair. Amazon Prime time, to be more precise, as the Lions return to Lambeau to face some screaming Cheeseheads in one of the NFL’s Thursday night streaming games.
They’ll also host the Packers on Thanksgiving for the first time since 2013, and in between, Detroit will play host to the Las Vegas Raiders for a Monday night tilt on Halloween eve. Assuming they’re able to pick up anywhere close to where they left off last season, that should be a rollicking night downtown (the Lions haven’t hosted a prime-time game since that disastrous debut for Matt Patricia in the 2018 opener).
All in all, the travel doesn’t look particularly daunting for the Lions, who will cross through fewer time zones (nine) than any other team in the league. The lone West Coast trip — at the SoFi Stadium against the Los Angeles Chargers on Nov. 12 — even comes immediately after a Week 9 bye. The only cold-weather game on the schedule is an early December date in Chicago. And while they’ll have short weeks to prep for both Green Bay games, they’ll get extra time to get ready for three other NFC opponents in Seattle, Carolina and New Orleans.
Still, eight of their 17 games are against teams that made the playoffs last winter, and six of those will come on the road, including another prime-time game on a Saturday night in Dallas on Dec. 30. That’s sandwiched between two divisional games against Minnesota, the reigning NFC North champion. And the last of those Vikings games, notably, is listed as time/date TBD at Ford Field.
The NFL wants to keep its prime-time options open to find the best matchups, you see, and for a welcome change, that means keeping an eye on Detroit. Everybody’s eyes, actually.
john.niyo@detroitnews.com
Twitter: @JohnNiyo