After the Lions won their fourth in a row last Sunday to move to 5-1, Amon-Ra St. Brown declared, "We have bigger goals ahead of us." As they should. The Lions have an eye on the division, where they've opened a commanding lead, and another on the conference, where they're tied at the top with the Eagles and 49ers. It's all about the playoffs.
You bet. Thanks to their stranglehold on the NFC North, the Lions, per one projection, have the NFL's highest probability of making the postseason at 95 percent. But just getting there was never the goal. They intend to stay there, by staying right here. The Lions don't just want their first home playoff game in 30 years. They want multiple, like they're making up for lost time.
"We have our own standards and goals that we talk about and it’s very much about winning this division, because if you do that, you’re going to get a home game and then you go from there," Dan Campbell said Tuesday on 97.1 The Ticket. "To me, it’s easy to say you want to win the Super Bowl. It’s all about seeding and it’s all about winning your division."
If the playoff started today, the Lions would be the No. 3 seed in the NFC, hosting the Seahawks. The Eagles would be No. 2, and the 49ers No. 1 with the first-round bye. The Lions would also be on a potential collision course with Matthew Stafford and the Rams in round two in what would be flat-out anarchy at Ford Field, but we digress.
The No. 1 seed isn't out of Detroit's reach. The Lions have the second easiest remaining schedule in the NFL, with just two more games against currently-above-.500 teams: the Ravens, this week in Baltimore, and the Cowboys, Week 17 in Dallas. The rest of Detroit's opponents are a combined 12 games under .500. The Eagles and 49ers, meanwhile, have two of the NFL's hardest-remaining schedules.
Home playoff games aren't gimmes, of course. Campbell saw the Saints lose three of them during his tenure as assistant head coach, before he took over in Detroit. But they sure make for an easier road to the promised land, which is where everyone wants to go.
"Once you’re in the tournament, man, I’ve seen it too many times: it’s all about matchups, it’s all about timing, it’s everything," Campbell said. "So the goal is to win this division. And honestly, four weeks going now, I’ve been breaking it into groups."
The Lions went 3-1 in the first quarter of the season, and they're 2-0 in the second. The way Campbell sees it, they have two more games -- at Baltimore, home against the Raiders on Monday Night Football -- before their Week 9 bye. Then it's time to saddle up for the race to the finish.
"Really, it’s about, ‘Hey, we got four to go to the bye, we’re 2-0 and we got two to go. And then we catch our breath and we make the final push.' That’s really the extent of it: 'Guys, we got two to go here, and we gotta win these next two,'" Campbell said.
Six games into the season, the Lions are sitting pretty. Their 2.5-game edge in the NFC North is the widest of any division leader. They still have five games to come against the Bears (1-5), Vikings (2-4) and Packers (2-3). There's a chance they clinch a division they've never won before they even play the Vikings for the first time, on Christmas Eve. At that point, the Lions would be gunning for the right to make the conference come through Detroit.
"We want to keep doing what we’re doing," said St. Brown. "We want to get to the playoffs, we want to have home-field advantage for the playoffs. There’s so many things that we want to accomplish this year, but man, this is just a start for us."