While he didn’t boil over, Dan Campbell came to a simmer. For the first time in his tenure as Lions head coach, he betrayed some public frustration with his team’s inability to take the next step. After yet another one-score loss Sunday to the Dolphins, Campbell stressed the importance of sticking with it because “I know how close we are.” Of course, Campbell has been saying this for a while.
“Two years!” he exclaimed, as if he couldn't believe it himself. “Two years!”
So how do you —
“You keep going,” he said, knowing where the question was headed. “That’s how you do it. You keep going. You deliver another message, a different message, you change a couple of things up.”
Nothing has changed for Campbell’s — and Brad Holmes’ — Lions. Not yet. They lost six one-score games last year and they’ve already lost four this year, which equals the most in the NFL since 2021. Last season, the close games were encouraging. They were promising, even if they went the wrong way. They were the signs of a competitive team.
This season?
“It’s exhausting,” said left tackle Taylor Decker, the team’s longest-tenured player. “But there’s nothing I can do other than go back to work. There’s nothing this team can do other than go to practice Wednesday with a good attitude and try to get this thing right. It sucks, but there’s no alternative."
The Lions are 1-6 after Sunday’s 31-27 loss to the Dolphins in which they blew a 14-0 first-quarter lead and failed to score in the second half. They are 4-19-1 under Campbell and Holmes, worst in the NFL over the past two seasons. They are close and yet so far, always one play, one penalty, one poor decision away.
The Lions are a serpent that shrinks when it grows. As soon as they began patching their NFL-worst defense earlier this month, their NFL-best offense started falling apart. Their offense recovered in the first half on Sunday, just in time for their defense to collapse. The defense stemmed the bleeding in the second half, so the offense kept shooting itself in the foot.
“We just gotta stop inflicting penalties on ourselves when we get in a groove,” said running back Jamaal Williams.
The Lions were flagged on three straight snaps on their first drive of the third quarter, which naturally went nowhere. They turned three second-half drives into five first downs and 67 total yards.
“We can’t have just blow-up drives where we lose 20 yards and have to punt it,” said Decker. It’s killing us.”
So is hearing the same thing almost every Sunday.
“Just saying ‘We’re close’ irritates me,” said Williams.
“Yeah, said Penei Sewell, Detroit's stalwart right tackle, “that one bothers me. Because at some point, ‘close’ has to change. We know what the standard is, everybody knows what we’re capable of and to finish always close, and to hear it, it’s tough.”
Losing is the only thing Sewell knows in the NFL. For a while, Williams only knew winning. He spent his first four seasons on the other end of the NFC North with the Packers. He signed with the Lions to help Campbell and Holmes turn the franchise around, to be part of the team that makes history. Turns out history doesn’t budge.
Williams acknowledged that it’s been a bigger challenge than he envisioned, “but at the same time,” he said, “this is still something new to me. It’s not like I knew how to deal with it in the first place. All this is new.”
This is also new to Sewell, who enjoyed two winning seasons at Oregon before Holmes and the Lions drafted him seventh overall in last year’s draft. Sewell has been a rock for the Lions since he arrived, a mean-mugging offensive lineman who snarls on every snap. Like Williams, he's learning how to process losing without letting it sap his spirit, how to saddle up every Monday after getting thrown from the horse.
“It hurts right now, but I do a good job of just forgetting it because if you linger on something too long, it may affect you the next game. But for other guys, I can see why they would go into that shell," said Sewell. "All I can do is just lead by example. Show them, not just talk about it. 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.”
There is no lack of want in the Lions locker room. As the losses pile up, you wonder about their will. How many gut-wrenching games can they take? How many times can they fall short at the finish? How long can they believe until their belief runs dry? And, by extension, how long can Holmes believe in Campbell, the coach he didn’t hire?
“When we get those opportunities, we have to not press to try to make a play,” said Decker. “You don’t want guys that are too amped up. When you try to do something extra, that’s usually when bad stuff happens. (The coaches) just want us to do our job. God, we have so many good pieces. We have so many good guys in this locker room. We do, we have enough. We just have to play a complete game.”
Campbell and Holmes have the support of owner Sheila Ford Hamp, who made that clear after the Lions’ 1-5 start. Neither one is in danger of losing his job this season. And Campbell still believes in Aaron Glenn, whose defense was shredded yet again on Sunday. Glenn and the Lions devised a game plan to limit Tyreek Hill and Jaylen Waddle, and both receivers went over 100 yards. The Dolphins routinely made third-and-long look like second-and-short. They didn’t do anything the Lions didn’t expect, because they didn’t need to.
“They did exactly what we knew they would do, they just did it,” said Campbell. “They did it over and over and had their way.”
Campbell came to the Lions from a winning organization. He was groomed by former Saints head coach Sean Peyton and he once played for the legendary Bill Parcells. He knows what good football teams look like. He said Parcells used to say, “The only way to win close games it to win close games.” Campbell’s Lions are winless in 10 games decided by four points or less.
“It’s frustrating,” he said. “I know everybody’s tired of hearing it’s close, but I do know we’re close. You just don’t know when it’s going to turn. But if we don’t keep swinging away at it, it’ll only get worse.”
Will it ever get better?