How the Lions Found the Right Players to Keep Believing

SI’s Albert Breer sat down with Jared Goff, Dan Campbell and Brad Holmes to talk about holding onto a winning mentality even before the results on the field followed.

More from Albert Breer: How Patrick Mahomes Is Trying to Become More Like Tom Brady | Colts Need to Pay Jonathan Taylor, or Anthony Richardson Might Struggle | How the Vikings Found Balance and Unlocked a New Kirk Cousins

To kick off the training camp tour, we did a fun half hour on camera Tuesday with Lions quarterback Jared Goff, coach Dan Campbell and GM Brad Holmes. And we’ll be posting videos of it over the next few weeks—you can already find some clips online.

I figured I would give you a little taste of it here, too. So below, edited for length, is a bit of our sitdown with the Lions’ guys.

Sports Illustrated: Jared, you guys all ended up in Detroit over about a month’s time. You were coming from a team that had been in the Super Bowl a couple years earlier. What was your initial feeling on this place and what had to be done?

Jared Goff: I knew there was work to do, but it was an opportunity, something I was excited for. I knew that there was some stuff that Brad had to do to build it back up, with Dan obviously involved there as well. But I was excited to be a part of it. I really was.

SI: Brad, you were with Jared for five years in Los Angeles, had all the institutional knowledge. Why did you think Jared was the right guy to start the build with?

Brad Holmes: When Jared came out [of college], even as an underclassman, he was very young. And not to get too deep into the whole draft process, we took him No. 1 because we just saw so much upside with him and he was continually getting better. And then he had some early success. … When we got here, I knew that he still had growth, and he was still a young quarterback, and he was still very talented. And then talking with Dan, our conversations about how he’s going to approach player development, how he’s going to run the team, I just knew that he was very talented. He had a lot of upside. He’d been through a lot. And I will say this—like I think all of us when we first got here, he had something to prove.

SI: Dan, your best exposure to him was probably in that 2018 Saints-Rams NFC title game?

Dan Campbell: We played each other three times during that span, over a three- or four-year period. And, yeah, that was a powerful exposure. And I told Brad this. We were talking about it and it was like, I think we can get Goff. I just remembered, when you’re on the other sideline—and we had at New Orleans, that was a hell of a defense now, and we had it built up übertalented, and those guys, it was aggressive, and man, you knocked the crap out of this guy—and I mean, he’s back on his feet, making throw after throw after throw. I just remember that’s what I came away with is like, This guy, you can’t break this guy. He just keeps making plays. We weren’t a slouch over there defensively, and so it just always impressed me. So the thought of being able to add him as our guy, our signal-caller, I’m like, Absolutely. Why wouldn’t we? Why wouldn’t we if we can?

The 2018 NFC championship game was a key moment when Goff showed Campbell, on the opposite sideline, who he was.  :: Kirthmon F. Dozier/USA TODAY Network

SI: So for you as a player, Jared, how long did it take to have the belief in them that they had in you—beyond just being motivated to prove people wrong after the trade?

JG: I think you kind of have to have some sort of blind belief to begin with, regardless. And that was a huge part of it: They want me. I want them. We’re going to go do this together. So that was the beginning. And then I think as that first year went on, Dan and I had a lot of conversations, Brad and I had a lot of conversations, and just getting to know them and getting to feel comfortable, and just trusting them and them trusting me, building that relationship. And it takes time, and we’re at the point now where we all kind of trust each other and have a good relationship and hopefully continue to build it.

SI: But was there a game, a practice, a sequence where it clicked for you—this is gonna work?

JG: There were some dark times in that first year. Yeah, it was tough, and speaking to Dan’s leadership, being able to stand in front of the room every week and speak to us from the heart and really keep doing it, it gets hard, man. It gets really hard. And I don’t think in the moment you realize how hard it is until you’re out of it. But I think when he would, when he would do that, it gives you a lot of respect for the guy. He’s a guy that I’ll fight for.

SI: What kept you believing in what you were doing, Dan?

DC: I know it’s easy to say it, but never, not one time, did I lose faith in what we were doing, where we were going, the vision that we had. Man, we talked about this before we even started that year. We felt good about our quarterback and we had a few pieces, but we knew it was going to be a hard road and we knew we were going to need some things to go our way in 2021. Like, things were really going to have to go our way. Otherwise, it was just going to be hard. But as long as we could just stay confident, keep building, keep developing, keep drafting and keeping our guys, we knew it was going to be a hard road, but no, I never lost faith. What makes that easy to say for me is because of working with this guy [Holmes] and having a guy like Goff running your offense. Sheila [Ford Hamp] is your owner. It’s like, I feel good, man. I feel like we’re all in this together. I really do. I don’t feel like anybody’s being isolated, like all right now, you’re out in the boat by yourself. And when you have that, that always leads to confidence.

SI: So how do you maintain that conviction in the building without getting results?

DC: I know for me it was, and I think Goff can attest to this: You lose a number of games like we did, and the guys come back in on Wednesday like nothing happened. Like, Man, you’d just assume we won. I mean, guys are back to work. They’re grinding. They’re on the tape. They’re going out to practice competing. We were doing it all the way up to the end of the year. I mean, special teams, we’re doing all these one-on-one drills out there where it’s compete drills, and guys are grinding through it and nobody’s batting an eye. Nobody’s pouting. Nobody’s moping. They just kept going and they believed that the next game was the one. The next game was the one, if we just clean up a couple of things. And towards the end of the year, we started playing better football. We started playing together. I think the fear is always, Well, what happens if guys don’t believe anymore and they don’t put in the work and they don’t really care anymore? And fortunately we built it that way to where we don’t have guys like that, either. Guys are willing to come to work. And it doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t sting. But it doesn’t affect the way your approach is and how you come to work.

SI: Yeah, I’m sure a big part of that, Brad, is making sure you have guys who’ll be able to handle those bumps that you knew were coming, you can’t just turn them into that …

BH: Yeah. And I mean, we were just talking a little bit about Jared being the right guy to come in. Well, you’re talking about the NFC championship game and one of the things that, unless you were there, I mean … how would you rate it in terms of loudness? [Goff and Campbell smile.] … So that’s a component as well, and the hits he took, and kept coming back. It’s like, I know that that dude is a physically and mentally tough guy. So he was the right guy to go through the journey that we knew we were about to go through. We knew, O.K., this is going to be a little tough. It’s gonna be a little tough. We knew that he was going to be able to take it.

So the other part, when it got dark last year, at 1–6, we looked at it, because, look, it’s reality. We’re big on accountability, self- assessment, all of that. And we looked at it and said, It’s working. And Dan kept saying, We just need to get that one win. We just need to get that one win. We’re very young on defense. Those guys just had to keep getting more reps. They kept getting there. They kept developing. We got great coaches. We got great teachers. They just kept getting better. And so all that just kind of came together, and when we got that one win, they just kept taking off. But we had the right guy [Campbell] over here all along because he’s wired the right way to go through those dark times. And what he kept saying the whole time when everybody else thought the sky was falling, me and Dan, the whole time, were like, No, it’s right. It’s right. And it’s a credit to Dan. It’s a credit to ownership, to Sheila having the patience to say, I trust these guys. I know it’s working. You just got to stick with it.

---

Anyway, there’s your appetizer. We’ll have clips coming on the site, and on social, leading up to the team’s opener, and I’m excited for all of you to check all of it out.