Dan Campbell is the "type of person that replays every bad decision, every bad move in my head over and over, on purpose, just to let it burn and eat away at you," he said.
"Because that’s the stuff that makes you not want to feel that anymore, is to go back for more," Campbell said a couple days after the Lions' season came to an unexpected end in a 45-31 loss to the Commanders.
The game flipped on a fumble by Jared Goff late in the first quarter, with the Lions leading 7-3 and facing 3rd and 1 from Washington's 15-yard line. As Campbell acknowledged, "We have the chance to go up 14-3 potentially and we fumble that ball, they go all the way down (and score), it just begins to change the narrative of where you’re going."
"Then they get some long drives -- that one in the third quarter, eight-and-a-half minutes, 15 plays -- and all of a sudden you look up and you’re down two scores," he said.
But Campbell does not regret the 3rd-and-1 play-call. Even though they had been running the ball with ease, Ben Johnson and the Lions went with an empty backfield and dialed up a pass to Amon-Ra St. Brown, who had a mismatch in the slot on linebacker Bobby Wagner. If they were stopped on third down, they knew that "we’d run it on fourth," Campbell said.
"We liked the matchup with Saint on Wagner and it’s a play we’ve run, man, I don’t know, 50 times this year. And it just didn’t work out," Campbell said. "It was the perfect storm: a little bit of a slip (by St. Brown), Goff has to choke the ball, then he moves up, we get beat in protection -- on a three-step, not a seven-step, so it happened fast -- and then disaster.
"I don’t worry about it, I’m not second-guessing that. If we were going to do it all over again, I’d do the same thing. I know that’s a hard pill to swallow, but it just didn’t work out for us.”
The fumble was one of three costly first-half turnovers by Goff, and one of five turnovers by the Lions in the game. Not all of the turnovers were strictly Goff's fault, said Campbell, like the end-zone interception at the end of the first half on a pass to Jameson Williams where Goff was pressured off the right edge, had to step up in the pocket and couldn't "let it rip."
"It’s a combination of a lot of things, and we were just a little bit off," Campbell said. "Normally we can overcome (that), and we just weren’t quite there. Now listen, man, the guys played hard. It wasn’t the attitude, it wasn’t the effort. It was just the little things. I mean, shoot, man, five turnovers. If we only turn it over three, we may have a chance.
"And I don’t want to take anything away from Washington, man. They earned that win. But man, we shot ourselves in the foot. We haven’t done it, and we did it that game, we just did.”