Dan Campbell believes the best NFL teams are led by the locker room. The coaches can make the rules. But once the players set the standards, the team tends to thrive.
"Dan Campbell just gives us the green light: It’s your team," Penei Sewell said Thursday. "It’s a player-led team, so whoever wants to step up and whoever the team gravitates to the most, we just ride with them."
At 6'6, 325 lbs, Sewell might have his own gravitational pull. He also pushes himself to no end. He's got a big smile and a nasty mean streak. He's devoted to his teammates in a way that makes them devoted to him. Fellow offensive lineman Halapoulivaati Vaitai was pondering retirement this offseason, then took a major paycut to stay in Detroit partly because he wanted to play another season with Sewell.
A mauler up front, Sewell has always had his teammates' backs. When Logan Stenberg committed consecutive false start penalties in his first NFL game at guard in last year's season-opener and heard boos from the home crowd, Sewell turned to him and said, "Fu*k that, bro." Then he reminded Stenberg that he'd make the same mistake in his debut and grinned, "You’re ready to get off the ball." Stenberg was steady the rest of the game.
Sewell, just 21 at the start of last season and a year removed from being the youngest starting left tackle in NFL history, had to find his place in Detroit's locker room. He didn't want to come on too strong, too soon. He has too much respect for the vets like Vaitai, the 29-year-old who Sewell lovingly calls Unc. But as the losses piled up early last season, it was clear that Sewell had something to say.
After the Lions fell to 1-6 with a Week 8 loss to the Dolphins in which they were shut out in the second half, Sewell said he was tired of hearing how the team was close, "because at some point, close has to change." He said he and his teammates "know what the standard is," and "all I can do is just lead by example."
"Show them, not just talk about it," Sewell said at the time. "That’s the No. 1 thing when you’re building trust in that leadership role. You gotta do stuff that no one else is doing. It may seem weird, it may seem odd, but we have to change it.”
In reality, Sewell needed to talk even more. He could feel the words stirring within him, like a pot starting to simmer, and his quarterback could sense it. Sewell said Thursday after the Lions' fifth OTA that "as the season went along, I just felt like my body was trying to say something." Cue Jared Goff.
"I didn’t know whether it was to myself, to a specific person or to the whole team," said Sewell. "So actually, one of my teammates came up to me and was like, ‘Man, you gotta talk.’ It was really Jared. So I just kind of stepped into that role and let my heart speak and just ran from there."
The push from Goff came during the Lions' Week 13 rout of the Jaguars, with Campbell standing nearby. It clearly resonated with Sewell, whose louder leadership resonated with his teammates: "We won that game, so I’m pretty sure it went pretty good," he said. His openness on and off the field brought a tightly-knit group even closer together as the Lions won eight of their final 10 games.
"I think it definitely starts in the locker room," said Sewell. "That’s where we all spend the most time with each other and kind of get away from football and actually learn about the human being across you that really you’re going to war with. I think it starts from there and then everything after that just follows through."
Of his teammates, Sewell said he learned the most about tight ends Brock Wright and Shane Zylstra. (In Detroit's Week 14 win over the Vikings, Wright and Zylstra learned that Sewell is a decent tight end himself.) A good team is built on trust, which relies on personal rapport. Nothing about this is forced for Sewell, a force of nature who said he's "just trying to be me and I want everybody else to be themselves, too."
Coaches are in charge in the NFL, but it's on the players to take charge. In Sewell, Campbell and the Lions don't just have a stalwart right tackle and one of the game's best young players. They have a leader who's found his voice. He used it on Thursday to make it known that the Lions are "coming out with a different intent, a different purpose than we were last year."
"It’s kind of unspoken," said Sewell, who will keep speaking up.
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