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Dan Campbell Gives Defiant Quote on Jahmyr Gibbs’ Inadvertent Playbook Leaks

Campbell stood behind his player.

Josh Wilson

Campbell and the Lions improved to 11-1 on Thanksgiving.
Campbell and the Lions improved to 11-1 on Thanksgiving. / Marc Lebryk-Imagn Images
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The Detroit Lions have already overcome adversity to get to 11–1 on the season after Thanksgiving week. To this point, most of that adversity has been involuntary, injury related: They've lost Aidan Hutchinson and Marcus Davenport, with Alex Anzalone joining the group of hobbled defenders with a broken arm earlier this month.

But recently a self-inflicted wound threatened to compromise both the playbook and winning culture head coach Dan Campbell has been working tirelessly to implement in Detroit over the last few years.

Jahmyr Gibbs posted a video of a teammate with a whiteboard in the background that featured code words presumably related to tactical strategy.

A reporter brought the clip to the attention of Campbell, who admitted he hadn't seen it and would have to look into it. The next time he spoke to the media, he had a bold take:

"I don’t really give a crap. If we’re gonna lose because of code words, then we’re not good enough anyway. I think we’ll just post the whole freaking playbook and every code word we’ve got. It doesn’t matter. It’s not gonna hurt us," Campbell said to the media, H/T Will Burchfield of 97.1 The Ticket.

He followed up by sarcastically saying he would not play Gibbs anymore because he was on social media.

This probably played out as well as the Lions could have hoped. Gibbs was reprimanded in the court of public opinion, leaving space for his coach to write the situation off as ridiculous, going so far as to say code words aren't a crucial-enough part of strategy anyway. A scenario potentially threatening internal conflict winds up helping Campbell reinforce his culture even further.

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Josh Wilson
JOSH WILSON

Josh Wilson is the news director of the Breaking and Trending News team at Sports Illustrated. Before joining SI in 2024, he worked for FanSided in a variety of roles, most recently as senior managing editor of the brand’s flagship site. He has also served as a general manager of Sportscasting, the sports arm of a start-up sports media company, where he oversaw the site’s editorial and business strategy. Wilson has a bachelor’s degree in mass communications from SUNY Cortland and a master’s in accountancy from the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois. He loves a good nonfiction book and enjoys learning and practicing Polish. Wilson lives in Chicago but was raised in upstate New York. He spent most of his life in the Northeast and briefly lived in Poland, where he ate an unhealthy amount of pastries for six months.

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