There was a video the Lions put out Sunday after winning their division for the first time in three decades that centered on a Sept. 1 team meeting. In the meeting, Detroit coach Dan Campbell explained to his players how they had a chance to leave a legacy, with a franchise that hadn’t won a playoff game in 31 years or a league title in 66 years.
“We’re gonna hit some bumps in the road,” Campbell told his players. “You were built for that s—.”
With the chance to break one of those droughts in Minnesota two days ago, Campbell’s Lions had to prove it one more time. They had gone into the last two minutes of the first half leading 17–7 and allowed touchdowns on each side of the half to fall behind 21–17 three minutes into the third quarter.
The Lions had hit a bump in the road. It was gut-check time. But no one needed to say anything.
“I wish there was some magic phrase that someone said,” quarterback Jared Goff told me from the winning locker room. “But we just operate. We respond. These guys that we’ve got on our team are pretty special. They really don’t get fazed by much. We’ve been in much harder situations than that. It wasn’t much of a thing. We just put our heads down and go back to work.”
Indeed, Goff and the Lions put together a 13-play, 75-yard drive with Amon-Ra St. Brown catching a touchdown from a yard out to give the Lions the lead for good.
For all the emotion—every bit of it justified—that Sunday brought out in Detroit, there was something so cold and workmanlike about the way the Lions actually got the win. It didn’t look or smell or feel like a one-off. Rather, it was just a really good team executing the plan its coach laid out ahead of Week 1.
And Goff was right. A lot of the players had been through much more difficult situations than this one: The 3-13-1 season to kick off the Campbell era, the 1–6 start last year and even the 38–6 drubbing they sustained in Baltimore earlier this year.
Every time, they proved the old Lions are gone. Every time, they responded.
Even better, by the looks of it, the new Lions are just getting started.
