Trailing by three with 1:44 remaining in their Week 2 loss to Seattle, the Lions took over at midfield with all three timeouts. From that point on, Dan Campbell said the Lions were in an "end-of-half" scenario, not end of game. They would force the game to overtime with a field goal as time expired, before losing the coin toss and then losing the game.
"To me, you’re down three, in the worst-case scenario you’re going in tied at halftime playing to overtime," Campbell said Tuesday on 97.1 The Ticket. "We agree with that? So we know, at worst, that’s what we need to end up with. At best, we’re going to get a touchdown. That is not end-of-game scenario, in my mind. That is end of half. That’s like, we’re the end of the second quarter, is how we’re playing that scenario."
Campbell said that because the Lions had just "come back from two scores down," they wanted to ensure that "at minimum," they brought the game into overtime: "We are going to get a field goal and we are not going to give them the chance to answer before halftime."
The drive began with a 12-yard completion to Josh Reynolds. The Lions ran their next play at 1:05, a handoff to Kalif Raymond that went for 11 yards. They let the clock run down to 32 seconds before Goff hit Jahmyr Gibbs for a short gain to the Seahawks' 23. At that point, Campbell called his first timeout with 26 seconds to go.
For the Lions, the approach changed after the next play when Goff failed to connect with Amon-Ra St. Brown over the middle for a potential first down. When they wound up facing 4th and 3 after another short pass to Gibbs on third down, Campbell let the clock wind down to 3 seconds before taking his second timeout to set up the game-tying field goal.
Asked if they thought about taking a shot to the end zone at any point in the final series, Campbell said, "No, I wanted to get a first down, call a timeout and then we had three shots to the end zone." He added that St. Brown was Goff's "first read" on the failed second-down play, "so we're good. We just didn't get it connected on."
Goff said Tuesday on 97.1 The Ticket that "it's a delicate balance" between playing to win and potentially leaving time on the clock for Seattle "and I’ve got a lot of respect for that balance that Dan played."
"Of course you want to get six there, you want to score a touchdown on any of those plays," said Goff. "But at the same time, there's an idea in the back of your head that you don’t want to kick a field goal with 45 seconds left. You do have to run those scenarios as you’re going, and it is a delicate dance there."
"We methodically drove it down, I love what Ben (Johnson) called, I thought Goff did a heck of a job," said Campbell. "We missed on a throw there, but ultimately we had plenty of time to answer. But we did what we needed to do to get into overtime."
And then, the coin fell in Seattle's favor.