Pedal to the Medal: Lions Franchise Speeding Toward First Super Bowl Appearance

Like the city they call home, the Lions know what it’s like to struggle—and how satisfying a self-engineered renaissance can be.

Jared Goff (standing), Penei Sewell (front seat) and Amon-Ra St. Brown (back seat) all received massive contract extensions this offseason. / Clay Patrick McBride/Sports Illustrated

In the beginning, the bishop’s altar was covered with a pile of discarded sofa cushions, shoeboxes, plastic decorative flowers, lighting fixtures and other bagged trash. Squatters were sleeping in the choir loft and the wood that comprised the white, ornate archways was stripped and chewed away, resembling the outer layer of a diseased oak tree. In the basement, an ankle-high river of brown sludge expanded with each rainfall and snowstorm that seeped into the building through the holes in the collapsed roof.

The place on Buena Vista Avenue smelled of wet clothes, dead animals and mold. Bishop Michael Martin purchased the property with the blessing of the Gospel Tabernacle deacons and trustees for $4,900 at a Detroit city auction 20 months ago, unaware that he’d eventually need to remove more than 70 dumpsters full of crumbling brick, warped boards, shorted wire, animal feces and cracked plaster.

Martin’s children now proudly walk the city’s revitalized waterfront and FaceTime him from its promenade. The narrative that Detroit has been saved, touched by the hands of billionaires who own roughly 70% of downtown office space and have renovated several city landmarks, resonates deeply. But no one was coming to rescue the church out here on the West Side. All Martin and his 200 parishioners knew was that the first time they heard a radio playing through the rot and debris, gospel music flowed through the building’s bones and it sounded like church.

Says Martin with a smile, “We’re used to operating on faith.”

The Lions are one of four current franchises to never have made the Super Bowl, but this core is speeding toward one. / Clay Patrick McBride/Sports Illustrated

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Day after day, starting with the 2017 season, Taylor Decker discovered that it was possible to come to work as the left tackle of the Detroit Lions and function at a high level … while also being wholly absorbed by feelings of anger and mistrust.

Decker slogged through each practice, tamping down his own aches and pains in the shadow of the $500,000 hill that then head coach Matt Patricia had built on the edge of a practice field at the team’s facility in Allen Park. Meant as an ode to toughness, it looked more like a poorly hidden septic system. After practice the Lions would go, up and down the slope, a jog to nowhere. Offensive lineman Halapoulivaati Vaitai sprained his foot there. Frank Ragnow, the team’s center, referred to it as a landmark in what felt like a war story.

Decker walked into work every morning carrying frustrations over things far outside his control. “I would see things like, Why is that guy doing this? It wasn’t aligning with what I thought we should do to get to our goal,” he says. “But I was overloading myself.”

Detroit drafted Decker with the 16th pick in 2016 and made the playoffs in his rookie season. The following year, after a 9–7 campaign, executives fired coach Jim Caldwell and life as a Lions fan got much worse. The franchise’s descent-into-darkness period commenced. 2017: last place in the NFC North. Same in ’18 ... and ’19 ... and Patricia, Caldwell’s replacement, didn’t even last through 2020, when the team surrendered 142 more points than it scored. Of course, Detroit fans weren’t unfamiliar with a bleak football narrative. In 2008 and ’09 the Lions won twice, combined, logging two of the worst statistical seasons in history. Fans needed time capsules to find the franchise’s last postseason victory (1991), which heading into last season was the league’s longest active drought.

Decker found himself snapping at teammates for elementary mistakes—“f---, this guy false started three days in a row!” Now he understands that many of those miscues resulted from his teammates’ anxieties, fears and unhappiness. “People made a big f---in’ joke about us, saying we were this dumpster fire,” he says.

This is what Dan Campbell marched into when he got the head coaching job prior to the 2021 season, alongside new general manager Brad Holmes. A day after he was hired, Campbell unleashed a graphic, metaphor-laden introductory press conference to a Zoom screen while standing next to a few team executives in COVID-19 masks—complete with an almost immediate apology for saying the word “sh--” and a threat to bite off opponents’ kneecaps. The subtext mattered to his players: This is how I want you to be, but until we get there, I’ll take the heat.

Campbell called two stalwarts, Ragnow and Decker, to ask why they liked their position coach, Hank Fraley, and if Campbell should retain him. (Campbell did.) This was an unorthodox but necessary gesture. He called prospective free agents who fit the profile he was looking for, mentioning moments on their tapes so obscure—maybe an out route that didn’t even produce a catch—that they thought no one had seen them.

Campbell and Holmes then set their sights on an available quarterback.

Jared Goff’s phone rang on March 18, 2021. His coach with the Rams, Sean McVay, dispensed with the usual small talk. So many things had happened in the previous four seasons. Together McVay and Goff had engineered a franchise turnaround, making a playoff run in 2017, McVay’s first season as coach and Goff’s second as QB. They made a sprint to the Super Bowl the next year. Much of the public blamed Goff for the Rams’ 13–3 loss and lackluster offensive performance against the Patriots in Super Bowl LIII. One teammate from those days, Marcus Peters, recently told Sports Illustrated that he found the volume and vitriol directed at Goff to be several levels beyond unfair.

No one was looking backward in the spring of ’21. McVay told Goff, simply, that he’d been traded from the franchise that had once jumped up to draft him first overall. Thirty seconds later, Goff’s phone rang again. It was his father, Jerry. News of the deal had already broken, and Jared’s reaction to it was not kind in one specific direction—his own.

Goff decided to give himself 10 minutes to process the events of the previous five years and to understand how his life had changed. After the grace period, he picked up the first call that buzzed in. Goff knew Holmes, the Rams’ director of college scouting between 2013 and ’20, from their time together in L.A. “We’ve been trying to call for the last 10 minutes!” Holmes all but shouted into the phone.

 And there it was, an early turning point for a franchise in dire need of a makeover. Goff heard something he hadn’t heard in a minute: excitement. The people running the Lions were excited to have him. “I hadn’t felt that way in quite some time,” Goff says. He considered the contrast to how things had ended with the Rams, and he told himself, “We have a chance to do something special here. Is it going to be easy? No. Going to happen? For sure? No.” But at least he, at least they, had a chance.

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Like the Lions, Bishop Martin and his parishioners took it upon themselves to rebuild, resulting in a church that represents much more than just a revitalized building. / Clay Patrick McBride/Sports Illustrated

The Bishop shares pictures from the early days. They’re the clearest way to prove just how far his church has come, a return from what he describes as “walking through an abandoned building on the edge of demonic.”

If Gospel Tabernacle’s restoration efforts failed, the next step was also the last one: complete demolition. But this group, led by contractor and lifelong parishioner John Martin, assistant pastor Andre Carslile and Maxine Martin, the bishop’s wife and the woman who inspired him to minister, have always found a way. They built a church down the road 35 years ago from scratch, just family and friends. They grew, moved, formed a 501(c)(3). They paid off the mortgage, and when they outgrew that space, purchased a larger land parcel nearby. They designed a school they planned to build there before realizing the process was too expensive—unless they bid on one of the distressed buildings in their downtown Detroit neighborhood. “That,” the bishop says, “was fate.”

The decline of what was once the mecca of the automobile industry and one of America’s great cities has been well-documented. Detroit’s population has dropped 25% this century, and in 2013 it became the first major U.S. metropolis to declare bankruptcy. But the city has seen the beginnings of a renaissance in recent years. And as Detroit began its grand restoration projects, government officials created an auction process for abandoned buildings. Bishop Martin believes that the building he purchased was Detroit, a monument to the arc of the city’s history—from proud to problematic to bankrupt and back again. Many people, the bishop says, “abandoned the city,” even officials, “who abandoned [it] behind the scenes.” But there has been a migration back to the city, including some of its sports teams. In 2017 the Pistons, who had called various suburban arenas home since 1978, moved into the gleaming new Little Caesars Arena downtown. They were following a path forged by the Lions, who returned downtown when they opened Ford Field in 2002. The team was miserable, season after season, but Bishop Martin swears he saw more residents following the same relocation pattern. “Coming back to their roots, realizing the grandeur and value of the city again,” he says. “From a pastoral standpoint, it’s the prodigal son returning home.”

Those returnees were taking a chance on Detroit becoming Detroit again. Lions fans needed an extra layer of belief, the ability to imagine a successful team in a city that last won an NFL championship in 1957, a decade before the Super Bowl era began. The bishop says everyone in the city walks in that faith, hunting for “good bones”—brick, stone, concrete, a high draft pick, a marketable star … anything that can be built upon.

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From left: Decker, St. Brown, Anzalone, Goff, Aidan Hutchinson and Sewell have all played a role in this turnaround. / Clay Patrick McBride/Sports Illustrated

Kalif Raymond, a Lions wideout and one of the first free agents signed by the Campbell regime, is a poor sleeper. The upside: Sometimes he doesn’t even try and stays at the facility, giving him an elite hall monitor’s view into everyone’s comings and goings.

Raymond challenged himself during the 2021 season to beat Goff into the building each morning or outlast him at night. Just once. The difficult part: figuring out if Goff himself ever left. “Like, bro, if I get here at 4 a.m., you’re not supposed to be here,” Raymond says. “If I’m still here at 8 p.m. you should be gone.”

Campbell once promised Eamonn Reynolds, the team’s director of football communications, that one day, when the Lions made it big, no one would want to interview the coach anymore and this moment of facility arrival time espionage would double as evidence of the plan taking hold. The players wanted to work. Through this directed suffering, stars would grow. Goff and the other cornerstone pieces on the team began to take hold of the ethos Campbell had so vividly laid out in his opening press conference.

The Lions drafted people like Penei Sewell, whose only listed professional aspiration, outside of football, was to become a farmhand, fetching tools for the old heads planting crops. And Amon-Ra St. Brown, the 112th pick of the 2021 draft who still remembers every receiver selected before him. Those who say they love to toil—and actually mean it.

“It’s like, going to the Chiefs? Would I really do anything? Am I really helping out [there]?” says linebacker Alex Anzalone, another one of Campbell’s early free agent signings, smiling. 

“Any team I’ve ever been a part of that had success—I mean, real success—leadership really came from the players,” Campbell says. In those places, coaches created a set of standards that would never be lowered, then pushed veterans and prominent younger voices to maintain and build upon what had been shaped. Those teams lived at the intersection of unimpeachable expectations and a concept now spreading across sports and flourishing especially in Detroit: player empowerment.

The Lions played with sore bodies and modest injuries through all the losing at the start of Campbell’s tenure. They believed what seemed impossible, that all the steps they were taking as an organization and as individual players would, eventually, net the results that all desired.

Late during the 2022 season, his second with the team, Campbell saw it. “That this is happening now,” he says. “We’re not winning [a ton] of games, but it’s happening. And pretty soon, these puppies will become real dawgs.”

For Goff, tangible improvement was most obvious in Week 10 that year. The Lions traveled to Chicago to face the Bears. They weren’t, at that point, playing all that poorly, despite what their 2–6 record suggested. But they weren’t finishing games. They had beaten the Packers the week before behind a dominant defensive performance; the offense still hadn’t realized its potential.

Goff picks it up from there. The Bears lead early and again midway through the fourth quarter. Down 30–24, another close loss appears to be rounding into view, another game the Lions couldn’t finish. But they get the ball with 9:11 left and the drive lasts nearly the rest of the quarter, culminating in a touchdown plunge from running back Jamaal Williams. Lions lead, 31–30, with 2:21 remaining. The Bears mount a drive, getting as far as the Detroit 8. Quarterback Justin Fields drops back, on fourth down, and is sacked. Lions run the clock out. “From that point on, I don’t know what our record is, but … pretty good,” Goff says.

He’s right. Starting with the Packers win, the Lions have played 30 games, including the postseason. They’ve gone 22–8: 8–2 over the rest of ’22 to finish 9–8 (their first winning season since 2017), then 12–5 in 2023 followed by two wins in three playoff games.

As his team gained traction, Campbell’s performative efforts behind the scenes no longer seemed overly aggressive or silly. They had a purpose and evidence-based results. On the field, that meant the execution of his famous chaos drill, which he called for randomly, giving his players an immediate, emergency situation without warning. They can’t substitute, call timeout, stop the clock, use headsets or look to coaches. They must solve whatever riddle they’re presented with, in real time, even if backups are on the field. They’ve done this every training camp. In 2022, Campbell started using this method during the season.

Away from the field, Campbell’s goofiness became a bonding agent. Maybe it was the time he lost a tooth during a meeting, allowed it to fall like a piece of chewing gum and kept talking. Maybe it was the time he showed up inexplicably caked in chalk. Maybe it was one of the many 10-plus-minute stories he would begin and never finish, ending a long pointless ramble with “anyway,” then move on.

“Everyone is like, All right, where is this going?” Ragnow says. “Everyone leaves dumbfounded. Laughing.” On the league’s most important day of game prep, Wednesday, the Lions always found themselves asking: What? “But it lightens the mood,” Ragnow says. “Like, All right, let’s do this.”

Mutual respect developed between Campbell and the players, as well as a bit of mysticism. They wondered, for example, how their coach could maintain a hulking physique and yet was never spied inside the gym at team HQ. “That’s what scares me,” Ragnow says. “Like, when is he getting it in?”

By the 2023 draft, Brian Branch, a defensive back taken in the second round, could tell that the Lions were selling not the culture they wanted to create but had already created. This didn’t just look like professional football, he says, pawing at a plate of pasta and sauce at Eminem’s downtown Detroit restaurant, Mom’s Spaghetti. It looked like where he’d just come from. A place where the ball coach reigned but the standard set itself and the players ran the show. A place like Alabama.

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The Bishop says he raised nearly $600,000 from the people who packed his pews. Like the local football team, the parish recruited like-minded, fear-facing volunteers, folks who wouldn’t be embarrassed or scared off by the history or the work ahead.

They had to redo the roof. So they redid the roof. Had to redo the floors, ridding them of the sludge and smell. Three layers: tile, carpet and a version of linoleum, with tar paper underneath. They needed to completely overhaul the electrical system. The HVAC system didn’t run, so they took out the ancient boiler and put in modern parts. They closed the holes that animals scampered through. They worked, regrouped when their equipment was stolen, then worked some more.

They rescued what they could of the beautiful timber glass windows. Added a baptismal pool and marble and gold in the bathrooms. They turned the horror movie-adjacent basement into a food pantry with 10 offices, so church officers could have a place to counsel members and distribute food, and kids could have a spot to linger that isn’t a city street. By June they were nearly done with transforming the old chapel into a temporary-usage apartment for emergencies or families in desperate need.

“The churches didn’t give up,” says Martin. “The churches didn’t quit. And the church has to go through vicissitudes, like everyone else. No jobs. No money. You had to make a decision, to do this for the betterment of people. Those people need you.”

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Campbell took the heat off his players from his opening press conference. / Junfu Han/USA TODAY NETWORK

The end of The Season That Changed Everything is still painful. Campbell will never forget the date of the NFC championship game— Jan. 28, 2024—let alone the ending. That afternoon unfolded like a five-act play: i) ideal start; ii) 24–7 halftime lead over the 49ers; iii) Super Bowl prayers raised to the football gods; iv) historic collapse cemented with a 34–31 San Francisco triumph; and v) season of great promise ends, poof.

Campbell says that what’s burned in his memory is “them trying to get us off the field, so they can roll out everything—NFC champions, you know—and they’re just in a mad scramble. Here comes the ribbon. You guys go get … Those are the things I don’t forget. Just one of those small motivators. Personally, I don’t need [many of those and] neither does our team.”

In June, Goff is asked if the battered-but-still-standing quarterback and insane-but-still-brilliant coach shared a moment in the immediate aftermath of that postseason loss. Goff might as well have been told that Eminem doesn’t rank among history’s best rap artists. His face said what his mouth made far more diplomatic. Face said: Worst question in world history. Mouth said: No, because we didn’t win.

Goff is pressed for a deeper explanation. Why stew instead of celebrate? Couldn’t most teams only dream of that kind of season? Well, not exactly.

Here they were, the best story in pro football, forgettable losers turned lovable winners, the narrative as good as a team that never lost consecutive games last season. The never-quits, those fans who always rooted for the Lions, even if many of their membership retreated into the shadows, cheering out of public view, revealing their fandom only to those they could truly, absolutely, trust—they started marching back into the light. They followed the dawgs that Campbell promised, mimicking the swagger displayed by his players. (When’s the last time someone typed that sentence?) They were Detroiters. Which made them Lions fans.

“The best supporters I’ve ever been a part of,” says St. Brown, who in his third NFL season was second in the league in catches (119), third in yards receiving (1,515), fourth in touchdown catches (10) and was named All-Pro for the first time. “They’re some of the best in the NFL. I mean, look at our away games [last season]. There’s so many blue jerseys.”

JA-red Goff chants broke out at the NFL draft (hosted in downtown Detroit) in April, at Tigers games, at Western Michigan hockey games and bars. Raymond remembers looking over at his quarterback during one such overture following the team’s divisional round win over Tampa Bay in January. Tears formed in his eyes, as he remembered his inability to beat Goff to the facility, and he simply said, “I’m so proud of you, bro.”

While the ending was painful, the impact the Lions had in Detroit last season was undeniable and created a hunger to finish the plan. To realize Campbell’s vision.

“The Lions are the epitome of the American dream,” says Keegan- Michael Key, actor, producer, comedian and, above all, Detroit native. “Last season was amazing because you could feel this uplifting energy from people across the board who were NFL fans; they were like, ‘Oh, I’m watching the Lions; that’s a great story.’”

Mike Duggan, the city’s mayor since 2014, a Lions season-ticket holder and, above all, a Detroit native, adds: “There’s something about the Lions’ success after years of being down that has resonated deeply with Detroiters, who feel our own city’s success after years of being down.” 

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A revitalized Gospel Tabernacle Church in 2024 / Clay Patrick McBride/Sports Illustrated

For the Bishop, the main point never changed. It wasn’t about one church or one football team, and it certainly was never about whether the Lions were fueling the city’s larger resurgence. It was about a city and its communities finding pride again. Which meant developing and transforming things like buildings and organizations and sports teams into entities worthy of that pride.

He understood why people left. Why they believed the city would never rise again. He also understood that many didn’t have that choice, didn’t have any choice. “You stay,” he says. “You fight.”

Much work remains. But the foundations are fortified. Which is, maybe, the only way to change the narratives that have plagued previous iterations of Gospel Tabernacle, the city it proudly calls home and, yes, the football team that’s on the upswing.

Martin was born here. Came back here. Made change, right here. He can’t help but gasp at the 313—the city center’s area code—he sees splashed across so many T-shirts. Or the shift from shame and embarrassment to, he says, “wanting to announce [that pride] and shout it from
the rafters.”

He’s rolling now, preaching almost. “I’m a Detroiter,” the bishop says. “I’m like last season with the Lions. Can’t count me out. Challenges are what I live for.”

And so, on March 3, Martin stood for the very first time in their new church. He focused on this “miraculous turnaround,” this “recovery.” He wanted to emphasize the specifics of the church’s reconstruction. But he didn’t write out a full speech or even use notes. No, this message could start in only one place: his heart.

His words were difficult to deliver, amid all the competing and heightened emotions. More than anything he said during that first service in the no-longer-abandoned space, the bishop remembers what it felt like to stand up there. He considers a question that pushes him toward deeper meanings.

“That question you asked, about the first sermon, was overwhelming,” he says. “It’s like asking a Vietnam vet about the war.”

He remembers the morning of that first service, sneaking into the chapel, discovering himself entirely alone. He looked around, admiring the handiwork, comparing the after picture right in front of him to the before snapshot that long ago imprinted in his mind. Through a window he spied an airplane flying overhead, into Detroit, passengers sure to see what’s happening there, word nearly certain to continue spreading.

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Campbell walks over to a gray sofa inside the Lions’ facility, a compression sleeve tugged over his right leg. The man who threatened to bite kneecaps has had a second knee replacement after the first didn’t take. He is amazed by modern medicine giving him the ability to “half-walk” out of the hospital, as if he wouldn’t have simply left the surgical center with the lower portion of his leg dangling by a tendon.

“You’d break a tooth on it,” he says.

Today, the closet at the back of Campbell’s office is stuffed with a Santa sack full of fan mail. Grown men approach him on the street and tell him the most bittersweet story: their only wish, that their mothers and fathers could see this. One letter told Campbell of how the 2023 season repaired a fractured family, healed through a weekly ritual around the TV. He knows it is impossible to reply to every letter but, on this sweltering June afternoon, that is his plan.

Almost everywhere he goes, there is joy. The woman working the counter at a 7-Eleven just a short drive from the Lions’ facility, next to Sareini’s Pizzeria, brightens when shown Campbell’s picture. He’s a regular customer, coming in for tins of chewing tobacco. “Whenever he sees the kids, he comes in and pays for their Slurpees,” she says. “He does it all the time, like ‘Come on! Come on! I’ll pay for it!’” 

That hill the Lions detested? It’s now a social media prop for players’ kids to roll down during camp. Or a stand for the hordes of camera crews coming to get their piece of the rebirth, filming the best team in football high above Allen Park.

All of it suggests—no, screams—that these Lions are ready for more. More expectations. More wins. More success. They’re ready to grab the wheel from Campbell and drive this franchise straight to New Orleans in February, to the Lions’ first Super Bowl. This offseason Goff, Sewell and St. Brown all signed massive contract extensions, securing themselves as tentpoles of the franchise for years to come.

One last metaphor from the coach: Campbell holds his right arm toward the enclosed fire alarm lever just a few feet away. Break only in case of emergency. He has steadied the foundation and repaired all the walls. He has hauled away the trash and slathered on paint. It’s Jared’s team now. Penei’s. Amon-Ra’s. It belongs to Frank and Alex. It belongs to the people. To the church. To the letter writers. To the mothers and fathers who didn’t get to see it.

If they need him, they know where to find him.

In the beginning, there was so much anger. So much failure. Now, all he promised is in sight.

“It’s here,” he says, softening his voice just a bit.

“It’s here.”