After Jared Goff's fifth interception of the night, Lions offensive line coach Hank Fraley gathered his guys on the sideline and told them, "Let's keep our heads up, men. We can win this game." The Lions would score on their final three drives for their most improbable victory of the season, 26-23 over the Texans.
Dan Campbell said Tuesday on 97.1 The Ticket that "it was one of those games where, man, you just feel like the energy was favoring them for a while, but I also knew we would get out of it. It’s just a matter of when."
The Lions stumbled in Houston, but they were never really staggered. They took a punch between the eyes and hardly even blinked. They went into the locker room at halftime trailing 23-7 and "we just talked about what we can do better," Campbell said. "The coaches hit ‘em well." Offensive coordinator Ben Johnson harkened back to last year's NFC title game and told his unit, "This is San Francisco in reverse.”
"We made a couple adjustments, but also, I just wanted to see us come out and switch the intensity, particularly offensively. Let’s take it to them a little bit, and that was really the gist of it," Campbell said. "Nobody was frazzled. There’s always going to be a little frustration with those things, but that doesn’t put us in a bad way. We handle adversity pretty well here."
The Lions struggled to protect Goff in the first half, and couldn't get their usual push in the run game. The offense averaged 3.8 yards per play. Jahmyr Gibbs and David Montgomery averaged 1.8 yards per carry. Detroit cleaned up the combo blocking in the second half, sprung Gibbs on a few explosives in the fourth quarter, and churned out 7.2 yards per play. Gibbs and Montgomery averaged 4.3 yards per carry.
"I thought the way we called it in the second half was awesome," Goff said Tuesday on 97.1 The Ticket. "Getting the ball into Gibbs’ hands, letting him move, we had some good screens dialed up and we just got a little confidence back."
And when Amon-Ra St. Brown scored on a screen to cut it to 23-20 early in the fourth, "right then and there we knew," said Goff, "this is a whole new ballgame and we can go win this thing. And I think it gave our defense a little more juice, they kept playing their tails off. Their performance in the second half can’t be overstated."
That touchdown drive was sandwiched between a three-and-out and a four-and-out for the Texans, who mustered barely three yards per play in the second half. And it was sustained by a courageous catch by Jameson Williams, who went up to grab a high pass from Goff over the middle and was folded like an accordion by a pair of defensive backs. On the TV broadcast, former receiver Cris Collinsworth called it "one of the better catches we've seen all season."
Goff went a step further and said, "For him to hold onto that thing in traffic, that was one of the better catches I’ve been around."
"He’s a tough kid, man, and he’s a fun guy to play with. That catch he had on the little curl route was indicative of that. That was a huge play for us. We were still trying to get our feet underneath us at that point," said Goff.
The key play on the Lions' final drive was an 11-yard pass to St. Brown that pushed Detroit into field goal territory. The Texans were in zone on third and six, which left a linebacker responsible for St. Brown out of the slot, and the Lions called a play that allows St. Brown to choose his route based on what he sees in the defense. He and Goff saw the same thing, "he got open and I put it on him," said Goff.
"When you have a guy who can play that way and is smart, and you can give him a route that has three different ways he can go, it makes my job easier," Goff said.
Jake Bates made his job look easy. The rookie from the Houston area drilled the two biggest kicks of his life, the first from 58 yards to tie the game, the next from 52 to win it. Goff never had a doubt that Bates would deliver, given that "he makes them in practice all the time, from way further out than that, which is hard to believe," he said.
After Bates knocked home the winner, Goff embraced Campbell on the sideline and told him, "That's why our team is different, because we can handle stuff like that." The Lions became the first NFL team in more than 50 years to throw five picks, trail by 15-plus points and come back to win.
"It doesn’t matter how it goes," said Campbell. "That is the nature of this league and the opponents that you face and where you’re at. No two wins are alike. And that’s ultimately what it comes down to, is finding a way to win. That’s really your bedrock, is overcoming, and no matter what, you’re never out of it, and let’s just find a way to get it right. We do that, we have that, and that is part of us, and that’s the most important ingredient in any winning team."
The Lions have won seven in a row for the first time since 1995. If they make it eight Sunday against the Jaguars, it will mark their longest single-season streak since they started 10-0 in 1934 -- in their inaugural year as the Detroit Lions after relocating from Portsmouth, Ohio. They sit atop the NFC, with their eyes on the No. 1 seed in the playoffs.
They can be punched, like any team. They can even be pinned, for a quarter or two. But if Campbell's Lions have taught us anything, they refuse to tap out.