After the uninspiring blowout loss in Week 6 to the Cincinnati Bengals, Detroit Lions head coach Dan Campbell promised to shake things up with his team. One of the ways Campbell talked about was by changing the design and nature of practices.
Campbell went into detail on Friday on how he and the Lions coaching staff have altered how they run and sequence things during the practice sessions this week.
“That’s how everything begins is the walkthrough, then you get into the warmup and then you go,” Campbell began. “What we’ve done is we basically – we just took a little bit of the block of the meeting time off in the mornings and then we’re doing the walkthrough, went out on the turf, and it’s kind of part of your morning meetings if you will. But now, we’re out here. They don’t need to get dressed, they’re in what they’re normally in, you’re not taped, but it is a walkthrough and it’s a teaching environment.
That way, we dial everything back to where we can really just hone in on all of those things schematically, go back in, prep for practice, eat, come back out. It’s nothing revolutionary, but now when we come out to the field, we’re going. We’re going.”
Campbell said they did this starting on Wednesday, and further elaborated on how the practices have flowed since.
“We’ve done that the last two days and I’ve thought we really – I do feel like we’ve started fast and the energy was there immediately because now it’s – you’re not walking through. You’re getting warmed up and we’re going right into it.”
Other NFL teams often use this format for practice. It’s a staple flow of work for teams in the Mike Shanahan coaching tree, a divergent forest from the Bill Parcells roots where Campbell, defensive coordinator Aaron Glenn and others on the staff have experience. It will be interesting to see if Campbell appreciates the results and notices tangible improvement in areas where the team has struggled of late.
