A few days removed from a crushing loss on Thanksgiving, outside the playoffs looking in, Dan Campbell acknowledged the Lions' reality: "Time is running out."
At 7-5, the Lions are third in the NFC North and two games behind the first-place Bears and, more troublingly, 1.5 games behind the 49ers for the final wild card spot in the NFC. (And the 49ers comfortably hold the tiebreaker over Detroit with an 8-4 conference record compared to 4-4 for the Lions.)
Next Thursday's game is huge for Detroit, with the 6-5-1 Cowboys nipping at their heels in the conference. The 7-6 Panthers, after beating the first-place Rams on Sunday, are charging into the picture, too. The Cowboys have won three straight, the last two against the teams in the Super Bowl last season, and tout the top offense in the NFL.
"They’re playing good football, they’re very much in that division race over there and playoff race," Campbell said Sunday. "We’re an NFC opponent and I know this, they want to beat us. But we want to win, too. And we need to win. That’s where this game is at."
The Lions really can't afford to lose. At 7-6, they'd be two games out of the playoffs with four games to go and three teams to pass. Whereas at 8-5, they'd be a game back of the 49ers, with the Packers and Bears playing next weekend to bring some clarity to the division race. As Campbell put it, "Our margin for error is very small right now."
"I go back to this: we just lost one," he said. "We gotta find a way to win this next one in front of us. I mean, time’s running out."
The Lions haven't suffered back to back losses under Campbell in three years, a stretch that comprises 55 games. That's one thing that should give them confidence against the Cowboys. At the same time, they haven't notched back to back wins in almost two months, their 3-4 slide their worst run of football since early in the 2022 season.
“Look," Aidan Hutchinson said Sunday, "we have five games left in the regular season and we’re at a point where there’s some adversity, for sure. We call ourselves a gritty team. It’s all over this building, it’s what people say about us. But I think it’s easy to be gritty when you’re winning games and it’s all sunshine and rainbows. But in these moments, when you’re coming off a bad loss, to a divisional opponent, on Thanksgiving -- obviously none of us want that result -- how can we come together and still make this season worthy of being remembered?"
They can start by getting after the quarterback, for one. The pass rush has been a problem of late, with the Lions totaling two sacks in the last three games. They didn't sack Jordan Love on Thanksgiving when he threw four touchdowns, and they didn't sack Jameis Winston until the final play of the game in overtime the week prior when he threw three touchdowns.
"We just gotta finish the plays that come to us," said Hutchinson. "That’s ultimately the biggest thing. I feel like last game, things just weren't quite aligning. The rush needs to be right, everything needs to be right for that sack to happen, especially with mobile quarterbacks. So, definitely, the D-line, we need to affect the game on Thursday if we want to win."
If the Lions can win four of their final five to finish 11-6, they'll be in strong shape to at least grab a wild card. In the five full seasons since the playoffs expanded to include 14 teams, no team with at least 11 wins has been left out. But a 3-2 finish would leave Detroit needing help, potentially a lot of it.
"The biggest thing is taking it week by week, and that’s how we attack it," Hutchinson said. "Obviously Dallas, we’re putting 100 percent focus into this game. That’s the mindset."
The mood around the Lions at the moment is grim, at least on the outside. Campbell knows how this looks and sounds, and how quickly it can change. He harkened back to his playing days and said, "I’ve been in these before where we got counted out."
In 2002, the Giants fell to 6-6 on the first day of December with their second loss in a row "and we were almost mathematically eliminated from the playoffs," Campbell recalled. "That was all the writing."
"And then we won out and got in," he said. "So you just find a way to win the one in front of you and don’t caught up in the rest of the stuff. That’s the bottom line. We’re in this business to win, we’re trying to win -- we've got to win."