Dan Campbell slammed his coffee down, surprising everyone in the video call: “I WANT THIS JOB.” There were seven head-coaching openings in the winter of 2021, and only one team was brave enough to call Campbell. Only Campbell was insane enough to believe he could save the Detroit Lions.
So what if he was a bit…excited? Campbell, an NFL tight end for a decade and then an assistant coach for another, was a throwback in a league where the smart offensive whiz had grown popular. Coaches were instructed to spew clichés in front of the media before moving on. Campbell poured his heart out. Here was this football life force spewing his guts during his inaugural news conference, talking about kicking in teeth, biting off kneecaps, and rebuilding a team that hadn’t won anything in 30 years.
They teased him at first, confident that he would end up like everyone else, running out of town after a few years because nothing had changed. Nothing ever changes in Detroit. Then they criticized him during the ascent for being too honest, for being too out there, for having the audacity to believe that a magical turnaround was on the way, even as the losses piled up, the critics heaped on, and the Lions remained the same as always.
Coaches who lose 19 of their first 24 games should not say stuff like, “It doesn’t matter if you have one ass cheek and three toes, I’ll beat your ass.” But Campbell was saying this when the Lions weren’t pounding anybody’s ass. “People were pointing at him and laughing,” recalls left tackle Taylor Decker. That first season ate into him. One week, Campbell burst into tears on stage. He then shouted out his quarterback. “That’s not a professional head coach,” Hall of Famer Cris Carter declared on “Good Morning Football” the following day. “That’s an amateur head coach.”
They’re no longer confident they can trust him. Not in crucial moments. They’re concerned that a combination of hostility and ambition would ruin everything Campbell has constructed, denying the Lions a chance to do what no one expected. Some argue that the coach is a liability in the late game. A reckless renegade. “Just some meathead,” his quarterback, Jared Goff, cynically remarks. “That’s the perception, right?” For some, yes.
“Give me Dan Campbell on the field; I will take it. “Don’t put Dan Campbell on my sideline,” Tedy Bruschi, a former Patriots great and current ESPN analyst, stated in December. “Detroit Lions fans, there are no more ankles or kneecaps to bite. You are on top. Start acting like it. “Start coaching like it.” “I think he’s a bad coach,” said Detroit radio personality Rob Parker, a longstanding media figure in the area. “This is reckless…” “What he’s doing is unnecessary and endangers his team.”
But if you want Dan Campbell, you get the whole package: the swaggering Texan who wears his heart on his sleeve, GRIT on his hat, and has yet to face a fourth-down effort he couldn’t talk himself into. This is a man who, after seeing one of his artificial teeth fly out of his mouth during a team meeting, bent down, picked it up, and continued talking. Campbell found himself out of breath midway through his first interview for a league assistant coaching position; it turns out he stood up, tossed some chairs around the room, and began running routes. If nothing else, the man exudes authenticity.
It took four years, but the Lions have become a reflection of their head coach. A group of ass-kickers. Everyone notices the brawn—the hot soundbites, the rowdy locker room films. But ask Campbell’s players how he led a team with an injury report as lengthy as “War and Peace” to the NFC’s top seed, and they’ll tell you a secret: it’s also the brains. Campbell, they claim, is as bright as any intellect in the game. He doesn’t care who knows. “For a while, he was playing into it,” Goff says. “So what? People think I’m a meathead? They believe I am stupid? Good. I hope they do.
“I’ve been around a lot of really, really smart coaches in this league,” according to the quarterback. “He’s right there with them.” Is there one difference? “He’s very secure in who he is,” Goff says. “There’s a lot of coaches who aren’t.” “This is how smart he is,” Decker continues, discussing the same subject. “In our meetings the day before a game, he tells us exactly how we will win. A day later, that is usually what happens. You know how simple it is to buy into that? “He’s the best leader I’ve ever known. So forget what everyone else thinks. “I would not want to play for any other head coach.”
Every few weeks, at a team meeting, Campbell’s players begin to look around the room and shrug their shoulders at one another. Their coach is talking, and they don’t know where he’s heading. “Sometimes we’ll never actually get an answer,” offensive lineman Dan Skipper adds, laughing. Campbell was talking one morning in December about how he used to get into fights all the time as a youngster. He’d be beaten and battered, but he wouldn’t back down. He realized that if he could outlast anyone, he could beat anyone.
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