As the Lions break for the summer, Dan Campbell wants his players to keep one thing in mind: "Just remember what we're playing for."
“Each individual, what do you want? Campbell said Thursday before the final practice of mandatory minicamp. "What do you want out of this year? What do you want it to look like when we’re sitting here in February? Where is your mind? Think about that, and let’s work backwards from there. That’ll be the message."
And what does Campbell want out of this season?
"You know what I want," he said. "I want the whole enchilada."
The Lions gorged on history last season, winning the NFC North and two playoff games for the first time ever. But they left with a rotten taste in their mouth after blowing a 24-7 halftime lead against the 49ers in the NFC title game. As Alex Anzalone said this week, "Time heals all wounds a little bit, but some losses like that you don't really ever get over."
"It's definitely something you just live with," he said.
To a man, the Lions have returned hungrier. They continue to echo what Campbell said in a quiet locker room in San Fran: It's going to take more. And "not just a little bit more," Alim McNeill said Thursday. "There's a lot more that we can do and that we can get done."
"It happened. It's over now," said McNeill, who could hardly think that night he was so dejected. "Obviously, we wanted the result to be different, but it's just nothing but motivation now. Our goal is to get back to that point and get over that hump."
The standards are rising across the team. On offense, David Montgomery and Jahmyr Gibbs were the only running back tandem in the NFL last season to rush for 900-plus yards each. They combined for 23 touchdowns and nearly five yards per carry, and "both of us together, we didn't think that was good enough," Montgomery said this week. "We want to be better this year, and we will."
As Campbell put it Thursday, it's not just a matter of, "Man, you have to push harder." The Lions have to think harder. In all three phases of the game -- and special teams will loom large this year with the reinvented kickoff -- the Lions need the smarts to not only follow the script, but the poise to rewrite it on the fly. When the 49ers adjusted in that fateful third quarter, the Lions failed to respond in the fourth.
To explain, Campbell reiterated a teaching point that Aaron Glenn made to his defense Thursday morning: If the scheme calls for a safety to help out on a tight end but the tight end isn't a vertical threat, the safety should have the feel to work back side toward a more dangerous receiver. Inside the chaos, the Lions need to think outside the box, and on their feet.
"Those are the little things where we can really grow offensively and defensively," Campbell said. "The awareness of who’s in, what’s the situation. We know what it says on paper, but we can’t do the Ron Burgundy and just continue to read off the teleprompter. We have to grow, and that’s the next step. That is the next evolution, because that’s what San Francisco did to us, quite frankly. They played at a different level.”
While the Lions haven't talked "in depth" about that particular loss, Campbell said they've embraced a simple truth: "That’s the point where we have to be at our best."
"When you’re going toe to toe with a heavyweight, everything's got to line up right, and you have to play a certain way for 60 minutes, and you can’t buckle under the pressure, which we’ve done a really good job of. We really have for a year and a half," said Campbell. "It’s just, OK man, it’s a different level against a different type of opponent. We’re going to learn from that."
Here's the good news to come out of that bad night, the silver lining of that stained second half, said Campbell: the Lions didn't emerge "gun-shy." They aren't "broken." Their confidence is firmer than ever.
"Our guys, that motivates you," said Campbell. "It makes you mad. It should make you mad. Then you have to turn that into what we talked about: What are you going to do about it? And what’s it going to look like? It’s got to be focused, it’s got to be detailed, and then you go back to work.”