It's hard to be enthused about a two-win team in the NFL. It's a little easier when that team is building toward something better. That's how Dan Campbell feels about the Lions at the end of his first season as head coach.
"Look, I’m not happy with the wins, I know that," Campbell said Friday as the Lions prepare for the season finale against the Packers. "I would like to have more of those certainly. We all would. But as far as where we’re at now and thinking about where we started, I am encouraged. I do see a foundation that is being built, and is built, to an extent. I have to go by the way that I feel and look at the players that we have here, particularly the young foundation that we have, and I see improvement."
The Lions are a young team that's gotten younger. Injuries to veterans on both sides of the ball have forced a slew of rookies into bigger roles, for better or worse. All of them have struggled at times. And all of them have grown. Campbell said the "silver lining" to the attrition is that "we’ve banked some valuable reps" for the players the organization is counting on in the future.
"When you go back and think about some of these guys, where they were in the spring and where they were in training camp, you’re like, ‘My gosh,'" said Campbell. "That’s where you get really encouraged because you do see the steps and sometimes you lose sight of that along the way because you’re not winning and a guy makes a mistake that you wish he wouldn’t make. But when you just step back from it all and look at where you’ve come from and a number of these players, I am encouraged.”
On defense, the Lions have seven first- or second-year players who have logged at least 20 percent of the snaps: Julian Okwara, Levi Onwuzurike, Alim McNeill, Derrick Barnes, AJ Parker and Jerry Jacobs. On offense, they have six: Tommy Kraemer, Brock Wright, D'Andre Swift, Amon-Ra St. Brown, Jonah Jackson and Penei Sewell. The improvement has been tangible. And then there's everything intangible that Campbell has instilled in the team, an ethos of heart and will and pride that was missing when he arrived. The Lions played their asses off this year, for each other and for their coaches.
"Look, I think that’s what all of this has been about this first year," Campbell said. "Of course we wanted to get the wins, but the most important thing was to develop our talent, develop our players, develop our culture, knowing where we’re going."
In a recent conversation with owner Sheila Ford Hamp, Campbell said he put it like this: "We’re in the Arctic Ocean, but we’re headed to the Caribbean."
"You can see it, I can see it," he said. "It’s not always easy to see, there’s a long way to go, but we’re heading there, I do know that. That’s what this year has been about. And everything had to happen that’s happened this year, to an extent. It really has. You had to go through some of these growing pains. It’s not been easy, but anything worth having or anything worth having success at, it takes a lot of work, hard work. It’s not going to just happen. It’s also what makes it that much sweeter, that’s for sure.”
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That much was evident in the Lions' locker room after the first win of the season. Despite all the losing, the team's spirit never broke. That's not necessarily common in the NFL, where last-place teams often sleepwalk to the finish. Two weeks after beating the Vikings, the one-win Lions stunned the first-place Cardinals. Their resolve is real, and it's something they can carry into next season.
"When you talk about the foundation, I think a huge part of it is exactly what we’ve been going through: when things don’t go your way, you’ve got to go back to work and keep trying to improve. You’ve got to look at each day as a new day and learn from the old and push forward. And our guys have done that," Campbell said. "I think that’s a huge part of it, I really do. When you collectively think that way, players, coaches, organization, you get better and you become more resilient so that when you get things where you want them and you have that spirit about you, it makes you tough to beat.”
Under Matt Patricia (and Bob Quinn), the Lions were drifting through the Siberian Sea. And then they were sunk. They've re-surfaced in the Arctic, under a coach who spent five years in the Caribbean winning divison titles with the Saints. Who knows if they'll get there themselves, but at least they know where they're going.