After vowing to bite kneecaps, Dan Campbell lost a tooth. Well, he lost it again. The way Jared Goff tells it, Campbell was delivering a team speech in his first training camp as head coach of the Lions when a denture fell out of his mouth.
And Campbell, true to form, didn't miss a beat.
“He must have a fake tooth and his tooth fell out and he just picked it up off the floor, put it back in and just kept talking like nothing happened," Goff said Monday on the Rich Eisen Show. "Maybe that’s why I forgot about it, because it seemed somewhat normal at the time."
Goff said he was reminded of the story last weekend at the Pro Bowl by Amon-Ra St Brown. Asked if anyone reacted in the moment, Goff said, "It may have been a serious meeting ... so I think we just kind of let it go and moved on."
The Lions did well to move on from a 1-6 start this season, winning eight of their final 10 games to finish with their first winning record in five years. Where other teams might have mailed it in, the Lions followed Campbell's lead and refused to break.
"We trust him, we believe in him," said Goff. "He’s a lot of fun to play for. Our toughness, our grit is what we rely on. But ultimately us coming together as a team has been the most important part, sticking together and trusting each other and trusting the coaches and them trusting us. It became a really good family there and something that’s continuing to grow.”
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Had the Lions squeezed into the playoffs, they certainly could have made some noise. Goff said they "proved through the second half of the season that we could play with anybody and beat anybody."
“So you never know what would’ve happened," he said. "But yeah, you sit here every year if you don’t make it and look at those teams and go, ‘Man, we could have beat them, we could have done that.’ But ultimately, you gotta get in there and do it. One more game for us would have done it, and this next year, we gotta make sure we don’t start slow like we did unfortunately this season.”
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