After the most dispiriting loss of his tenure as head coach of the Lions, Dan Campbell pointed the finger directly at himself. He said players don't flail the way they did in last Sunday's 29-0 drubbing in New England "unless your head coach doesn't have them ready."
"So that's 100 percent on me," Campbell said.
When the Lions come out of their Week 6 bye, it might be time to turn up the dial at practice: more one-on-ones, more hitting, more game-like reps. In a word, more intensity.
"I need to take a good long look at how we practice," Campbell said Tuesday on the Stoney & Jansen Show.
Because of the Lions' injury-ravaged roster, Campbell said he hasn't had the team practice in pads for three weeks. NFL teams are only allotted 14 padded practices in a season.
Campbell said he's favored "longer walk-throughs" to allow the injured players to be on the field, but that's come at a cost for a young team: "We need more reps for some of these guys, particularly defensively."
"I’m not so sure we don’t need to be back in pads," Campbell said. "We haven’t been in them in a long time. I don’t know if we need to have more intensity or more volume -- I think we're getting some volume -- but I have to look at all those things. We have to get to where we’re preparing to win, not just preparing to play."
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On one thing, Campbell is clear: "We need to do more one-on-one." He thinks that will particularly help spark the Lions' pass rush, which has generated the second fewest sacks in the NFL.
"To me, that really pops off the table," Campbell said. "One-on-one route-running coverage, one-on-one rush, all of it. That’s just one little thing, but there’ll be other things that come with it."
The road doesn't get any easier for the 1-4 Lions on the other side of the bye. They visit the Cowboys, then host the Dolphins and Packers. Barring serious improvement, a 1-7 start is staring them in the face. So are a few more padded practices, for a team that needs them.
"You gotta earn your right to win every game," said Campbell. "It doesn’t matter who you're playing. You gotta approach it the same way. You’ll get your rear beat by anybody or you can beat anybody. It’s all about your approach and how you handle adversity. Look, every team is going to hit it at some point this year and we’re in ours right now. And you’d rather have it now than late in the season, so we gotta come out of this.
"We’ve got work to do, but we’ve got the right players here to do it. We gotta go to work and we gotta prepare to win."
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