For those wondering how the Lions were going to deal with their outbreak of defensive injuries, Dan Campbell showed the world Thursday night.
On their first play from scrimmage, he watched three starters throw the Packers for a 7-yard loss: Jamal Adams, Kwon Alexander and Za’Darius Smith, who got credit for the sack. Adams had been in Detroit five days, Alexander six and Smith exactly a month.
Three hours later, Campbell made the gutsiest call of the season, going for it on fourth-and-1 from the Packers’ 21-yard line in a tie game with 43 seconds left. Two plays after David Montgomery converted, incredibly taking the handoff from a tripped-up Jared Goff, Jake Bates nailed a 35-yard field goal at the buzzer to give the Lions a 34-31 win over Green Bay, a guaranteed spot in the NFC playoffs and a franchise-record 11-game winning streak.
“I just felt like we needed to end it on offense,” said Campbell, who’s now an NFL-best 32-8 (.800) since Nov. 1, 2022. “And I did not want to give that ball back and I believed we could get that. I believed we could convert.”
Translation: The most aggressive coach in football knew he had to coach even more aggressively to help his banged-up defense, which also lost stalwart Alim McNeill to a concussion on that first Packers possession. Even with the additional assertiveness, Super Bowl champion Mark Schlereth said Friday morning on FS1 that those fourth-down calls were already part of the Lions’ culture and inner-being.
“I think the thing that makes Dan Campbell Dan Campbell is his authenticity,” said Schlereth on Breakfast Ball. “He talked to his team about, ‘This is the way we’re going to play this game,’ and he’s authentically true to what he says. We’re going to be the aggressors, we’re going to win it on offense, we’re going to cover our defense — that’s got a ton of injuries – with offense.
“And I’ve sat down and had this conversation with him, face to face on multiple occasions. And one of the things he says is, ‘I want to go for it so many times on fourth down that it’s not a big thing for my offense. So, I’m telling you, fourth down for me, there’s a pucker factor that goes on when I was a player because we hardly ever did it.”
The Lions do it – a lot. This season, they rank first in total fourth-down attempts (140), conversions (77), red-zone attempts (39), attempts when leading or tied (61) and fourth-down touchdowns (17). They did it five times in Thursday’s win over Green Bay (9-4), converting four.
“I knew how I wanted to play this game,” Campbell added, “the team knew it and everything in me told me, ‘Let’s finish this,’ and, so, we did.”
Goff on historic pace: Goff’s extraordinary effort to get the ball into Montgomery’s hands on that critical fourth down won’t show up in the boxscore, but his passing yards did. Goff, who was 32 of 41 for 283 yards with three touchdowns and an interception, now has 3,265 passing yards for a Lions offense that leads the NFL with 32.1 points per game. According to the 33rd Team, only Hall of Famers Peyton Manning and Y.A. Tittle have led the league’s top-scoring offense in passing yards for multiple franchises in NFL history. Goff also did it in 2017 for the Rams.
More history: The Lions (12-1) have consecutive 12-win seasons for the first time in the history of a franchise that began in 1930, when they were known as the Portsmouth Spartans. Detroit, one of just four current NFL teams without a Super Bowl berth, also has consecutive playoff berths for the first time since 1993-95.
Titanic clash on deck: The Lions get a 10-day rest before a potential Super Bowl preview against Buffalo on Dec. 15 at Ford Field. The Bills (10-2) are in Los Angeles to play the Rams on Sunday. Should Buffalo win this week, that Week 15 game in Detroit would feature a team on an eight-game winning streak against a team on an 11-game winning streak. According to Elias Sports Bureau, the last time two teams met with both on an in-season winning streak of at least eight games was Dec. 7, 1969, when Bud Grant and the Vikings beat the Rams at the L.A. Coliseum.
For more information on the Lions and Packers, visit the Detroit and Green Bay team pages at ProFootballPost.com.
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