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.
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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.”
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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.
An eventful Week 16 has drawn to a close, and we’re coming to you a day late this week, but we’ve got you covered …
• All our weekend takeaways, leading with the dominant Ravens.
• How the Jets’ vision for 2023 will carry over into ’24.
• Our normal Tuesday notes, a little later in the day.
But we’re starting with a division title 30 years in the making.
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The NFC North is in its 22nd season, and the Lions hadn’t won it until Sunday. They hadn’t won any division title since 1993. Ford Field opened in 2002, and the only postseason game it’s hosted (Super Bowl XL) didn’t involve the Lions. It’ll get one now, the first one in Michigan since January 1994. With any luck, it’ll bring the team’s first postseason win since Jan. 5, 1992, when Wayne Fontes dealt Jimmy Johnson his only playoff loss as coach of the Cowboys.
So, yes, Goff did give himself a minute at the end of Sunday’s game.
He was sitting on the visitors bench at U.S. Bank Stadium when third-year safety Ifeatu Melifonwu—who was part of the return in the Matthew Stafford trade three years ago, along with Goff—picked off Nick Mullens to seal the 30–24 win with 49 seconds left. He saw the play on the stadium video boards.
“It was a pretty emotional experience—cathartic,” Goff says. “You get there at the end and you feel like on offense, we had our chance to end it. We didn’t do the best job finishing it there. … And Iffy makes the play of the day for us.”
Goff grabbed his helmet and jogged out on the field to take a couple of kneeldowns.
After that, the first order of business for Goff was to find someone, anyone, from what Campbell calls the Lions’ “Old Guard,” players who predated the current regime and truly had the picture of what the franchise went through to get here.
“So I gave [left tackle] Taylor [Decker] a big hug on the final knee, just celebrated there and said, ‘You’re a division champ,’” Goff says. “It was pretty emotional. It was fun.”
And it certainly had to be emotional for Goff, too.
He was traded two years ago after leading the Rams to a Super Bowl, two years after signing a blockbuster extension in Los Angeles and as a part of a deal to bring Stafford to the Rams. Los Angeles moved on from him, saying he simply wasn’t good enough. And, now, here he was with the ultimate redemption story, having led the Lions out of the NFL wilderness.
But on this day, he didn’t want to talk about the past, and maybe that says the most about how Campbell and GM Brad Holmes have built the Lions into a tight-knit, tough group that doesn’t melt when the heat gets turned up.
Settling the score might’ve been nice. And who knows, maybe the Lions will face the Rams in the playoffs. But the look on Decker’s face was better.
“I’m so much more proud of my teammates and all the people that have been here,” Goff says. “That’s overwhelming the emotion of any personal vindication or personal satisfaction. Sure, I’m happy I was able to do it and happy I was able to be a part of it. To be honest with you, it’s the guys in this room, the guys in this locker room. It’s Taylor Decker being here for eight years, and Frank Ragnow being here for six.
“It’s those guys that I think about, that I’m proud to be a part of it with them and proud to be the first one in a long time to be able to do it.”
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Sunday was also about the new guys—most notably, a banner crew of rookies who have shown up all year.
Jahmyr Gibbs had the fourth-down conversion and two touchdowns. Tight end Sam LaPorta, after being such a big factor in the passing game all year, made his presence known as a blocker. Brian Branch had a pick and a strip sack in the game’s first 20 minutes. Jack Campbell was deployed all over the defense. All four, drafted in the first two rounds, played the majority of the snaps, front-line guys at their positions who were trusted and relied on all the way through.
“They don’t play like rookies,” Goff says. “They don’t act like rookies. They don’t make mistakes like rookies. They’re on their stuff. It’s a credit to those guys upstairs for getting those four. I can speak specifically to the two guys on offense; they are as good as I’ve been around. It certainly brings a new dimension to our offense.”
And it follows what Holmes has done since he got to Detroit. Penei Sewell and Alim McNeill were this way in 2021. Aidan Hutchinson and Kerby Joseph contributed right away in ’22.
All those guys also share personality traits, creating a commonality that’s obvious to someone like Goff and one that’s come to define the new Lions.
“Toughness is really what it is at the end of the day,” Goff says. “It’s toughness and it’s perseverance and it’s grit. It’s guys that don’t really care what you think of them or what they’re supposed to be. They come in here to play. They’ve done a good job of bringing in that same type of guy over and over again.”
It’s there, for sure, in how the Lions play.
As well as Goff played Sunday, Detroit’s foundation remained the run game, with the team churning out 143 yards on the ground and both Gibbs and David Montgomery hitting the 15-carry mark. Conversely, the Lions defense held the Vikings to 17 yards on 11 carries, effectively putting the game in the hands of backup quarterback Nick Mullens, who performed admirably in throwing for 411 yards but also had four interceptions.
That shows up most in the biggest moments. On two fourth-and-shorts, the Lions lined up behind Sewell and Decker and Ragnow and let them win. And to the guys there, Campbell’s trusted his players enough to make risk-taking a habit.
"It’s who we are,” Goff says. “That’s not the first fourth down we’ve gone for this year. Dan’s a creative head coach; we don’t even flinch at it anymore. If it’s fourth-and-1, we’re going for it until he pulls us off the field. It wasn’t really anything. It was a quarterback sneak and a nice little run for us. We weren’t really thinking of it.”
Because that’s how far they’ve come.
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As the clock ticked down, “Let’s go, Lions” chants could be heard throughout the stadium, continuing an invasion of Detroit fans at road games this year.
The players know the significance of what they’re doing. During that Sept. 1 meeting, Campbell went through all those dates—marking the last playoff win, the last division title and the last league championship (it was before the Super Bowl existed). So just as Goff wanted to recognize Decker coming off the field, he gave the fans their moment, too.
“Yeah, I know it means a ton to them,” he says. “It means a ton to us. I know they’ve been waiting for a division champ. Hopefully this is the first check mark of the year for us.”
And therein lies the greater message. Campbell, three months ago, didn’t stop at a division title. He went from there to winning in the playoffs and, eventually, a championship.
Whether those things will come this year remains to be seen.
But for Campbell, Holmes, Goff and the rest of the Lions, the expectation is that this is a start, not a finish. Detroit plans to be getting shots at these things for a long time to come and has a lot of reason to believe they’ll happen—a belief that comes from carrying out the plan that’s in place through a time when far fewer had any clue what the Lions’ brass was doing.
And the result is that Sundays like this one are no longer a surprise to Campbell, Goff or anyone else.
