Dan Campbell’s Belief in Lions Was on Display in Week 1 Upset Over Chiefs

Detroit’s coach has spent years telling all of us how his team would respond in a game like this. He delivered.

It matters a great deal that the Lions won their season-opener Thursday night, beating the defending Super Bowl champion Chiefs while, at the same time, logging one of the most significant regular-season victories in franchise history.

It matters a great deal that Detroit won with a defensive effort. Buoyed last year by its stellar offensive line and brilliant play-caller (OC Ben Johnson), the team parted ways with its pass-game coordinator on Halloween 2022 after giving up scores of 38 points to the Eagles, 48 points to the Seahawks and 29 points to the Patriots, which, when adjusted for Matt Patricia’s offense, was a bit like Azerbaijan trying to get a piece of the French national soccer team. Establishing the Lions’ defense as a strong point was a necessity.

Campbell stayed true to himself in a Week 1 game on a big stage.

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It matters a great deal that Andy Reid was so concerned about the Lions’ physicality, and their ability to wear down opponents over the course of the game with a grinding run game, that he opted to go for it on fourth-and-20—then fourth-and-25 after a false start—rather than simply throwing up his hands with a punt and allowing Penei Sewell & Co. to remind Reid how expensive Chris Jones is going to be this week as Detroit melted the clock to nothing.

But what mattered most was a fourth-and-2 at the Kansas City 45-yard line with 2:33 remaining. The Lions went for it, taking a swing for the maxilla against the greatest quarterback and coach in the league, on the road, while getting drowned out by the loudest crowd in professional football. And their coach, Dan Campbell, behaved on the sidelines as if the punt option wasn’t even on his controller menu. In fact, Campbell was irritated, visibly, that the Lions took so long to register the gravity of his decision and actually run the play. Here was Evel Knievel barking at the safety inspector.

It’s fair to believe that the Lions won and Campbell was also reckless (he also went for, and hit on, a fake punt deep in his own territory early in the game, a call so dangerous that überconservative studio analyst Jason Garrett may have broken out in hives). But it’s also important to recognize that, when the game came down to a moment of decision-making that stripped bare who Campbell was on the biggest night of his head coaching career, he remained in character. He was not afraid. He wanted the Lions to know as much. He wanted the world to know as much.

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Campbell spent the past two years, at first through muffled laughter, telling everyone that this is how he was going to handle the big games that he promised his teams would play in (another declaration made through muffled laughter). It matters so much less that the Lions won this game than it does the way in which their coach behaved. One single-game result over the course of a 17-game season is consequential, no doubt, but not nearly as much as it would have been had Campbell yanked his offense off the field and decided to surrender.

There are theoretical births and deaths in nearly every moment of a football season, and packaged in that one decision to try to win the game outright (a decision that, we should point out, was also easily defensible from an analytical perspective) Campbell orchestrated the erasure of years of futility, self-loathing and ineptitude. He killed the old Lions. Out came a contender.

I know what you’re going to say: The Lions didn’t even convert. Jared Goff’s pass was batted to the ground. On any other night, even with a one-legged Travis Kelce (or maybe a three-handed Kadarius Toney?), Mahomes would have walked back onto the turf and driven the Chiefs into field goal range, and we’d all be sitting here celebrating the established order of things. Kansas City here, and Detroit there, with all the other teams that simply exist as ancillary characters in the NFL universe.

The more complicated truth is that almost no bold decision went the way it was depicted in the most cinematic recesses of our brain. Paul Revere never yelled “The British are coming!” Michael Jordan didn’t have the flu for the “Flu Game” (Jordan says now it was food poisoning; Jalen Rose says it was a hangover). George Washington never even had a cherry tree.

A few months from now, when the Lions are rolling toward a playoff spot, all we’ll remember is that everyone looked at Campbell, with the early stages of his season on the line, with the latter stages of his unextended contract on the line, with the game on the line, and asked him how good he thought his team really was. We’ll remember that he didn’t hesitate to answer.