On the day his team was officially eliminated from the NFL playoffs, Dan Campbell still showed some fight long after the fight was over.
The Detroit Lions had been mauled, 38-10, by the Denver Broncos — as well as COVID and the flu and injuries. Yet here was their coach, standing at a lectern Sunday night for a few minutes after the game refusing to give in to every excuse that was laid out before him.
“We come out of halftime,” Campbell said, “and we’ve got momentum and we just ran it two plays in a row and we did really good — and we fumble the ball. I’m like, ‘We may take that all the way down and score a touchdown, then what happens?’
“So it’s hard for me to say, ‘Well, everything was stacked against us.’ I’m like, man, that’s — I just, I can’t think that way. So look, it wasn’t ideal and we made too many mistakes for however we want to look at it. But it just wasn’t good enough.”
That’s no one’s fault in the first year of a rebuild. But what we saw in the Mile High City on Sunday against a mediocre Broncos team showed us the Lions are a mile away from being relevant, let alone good.
That means as ugly as you might think this game looked, it’s about to get uglier — a lot uglier — for the final four games. The high-flying Arizona Cardinals visit Ford Field next week, and those tickets should be printed with parental warnings for what Kyler Murray will do to the Lions — in probably just three quarters.
I fully understand the sentiment behind Campbell’s WE WERE THIS CLOSE to almost maybe making it a game explanation. But the fact he’s lamenting the tragedy of a fumble by Godwin Igwebuike, a safety-turned-running back pressed into emergency duty, tells you something about the desperate state of this team.
There’s no way out of it. The Lions simply must play out the string and show what they can do, for each other, for their coaches, for their future prospective teams. It’s a credit to the coaches and the players that the effort has far exceeded the team’s talent and has kept most losses within a respectable margin.
Players quit all the time toward the end of bad seasons. That extra effort that might have been there in September is suddenly nowhere to be found. Tired legs and sore bodies have a way of undermining the competitive will.
In fact, quarterback Jared Goff summed it up well when he was asked what the team can learn about itself in this final stretch.
“Yeah, I think you can learn a lot about guys,” he said. “You learn a lot about who you want in your corner and who you want in your foxhole.
“Like I said, I don’t think we’ll find anyone in this locker room that isn’t that way. But I’ve been on teams before where you find out a lot about guys in certain situations of adversity. In situations where it’s easier to not play, it’s easier to miss a game and it’s easier to say you don’t want to play in a game because you got something going on. So you find out a lot about guys.”
Goff is 100% correct. The Lions will find out a lot about guys down the stretch, not just as it pertains to their willingness to put their careers on the line in a lost season for the sake of locker-room morale. The Lions, and specifically the coaches, need to use these final games to make hard decisions about which players should return next year.
Denver Broncos running back Javonte Williams (33) dives in for a touchdown against Detroit Lions cornerback Amani Oruwariye (24) during the second half of an NFL football game, Sunday, Dec. 12, 2021, in Denver.
If Campbell and general manager Brad Holmes are serious about pushing this rebuild forward as quickly as possible, they need to face some uncomfortable truths about their roster. This can’t be a team constructed only of good soldiers who know how to sacrifice. It has to be about better talent.
Campbell and his staff showed this season that they can wring production out of limited talent. But next year, that talent has to be better. That’s on Holmes. And next year, that talent has to produce better results. That’s on Campbell.
Next year, no one will be as willing to offer Campbell excuses like the ones he was offered Sunday. There must be progress. It bodes well for Campbell that he didn’t use the former to excuse the latter in Denver. But time is running out this season for the Lions to find out who they are and who they want to be.
