LIONS COACH DAN Campbell bombed into the interview room at AT&T Stadium after his team lost to the Dallas Cowboys on what could charitably be called a technicality, uncharitably a gross refereeing blunder. The game still inside him, he gripped the lectern with both hands, as if holding it down from a storm. His presence, both physical and psychic, hit like a sneaker wave, filling every crevasse in the room. His voice, heavy with the rasp of defeat, sounded like it was being dragged across broken asphalt.
He tried his damnedest to keep from saying what he undoubtedly said before he stormed this room, and undoubtedly said the second he left it. “I don’t like to lose, OK?” he said when asked to explain his agitation. His team had run what could objectively be called the perfect play — a throwback pass from Jared Goff to tackle-eligible Taylor Decker — on a 2-point conversion with 23 seconds left and the Cowboys leading by one. The officials, apparently confusing Decker with offensive tackle Dan Skipper, ruled that Decker did not report as eligible. And now Campbell’s fingers tapped the lectern on both sides, as if they could say the words his mouth couldn’t. He blustered for a bit, said he didn’t want to talk anymore about it and busted out of the room the same way he came in. The game didn’t make sense, so neither did he.
Campbell is the kind of guy who every football player in history — at every level — has played with but not for. Because the Dan Campbell Guy, the one who plays with broken bones and blasts Metallica and is always — freakin’ always — in the weight room, is almost never the guy NFL owners choose as the face of their franchise. The Dan Campbell Guy is the position coach, or maybe the coordinator, motivating and raging behind the scenes, often holding the whole thing together from the inside out. Nobody wants to hand him the podium. He is never the safe choice, or the political choice, or the choice that allows everyone in the organization to relax.
It’s much easier to hire someone who spouts platitudes than the guy who stands in front of his team with cameras rolling and says of the opponent, “It doesn’t matter if you have one ass cheek and three toes, we will beat your ass.”
There is nothing pretentious about the man, or the way he conducts his business, just as there is nothing pretentious about the business he conducts. Coaches have a vested interest in wrapping the game in complication and intricacy, but its essence remains brute force, stripped of any pretense. And Dan Campbell is football. He understands that it’s ugly, and dangerous, and that his players long ago ran the risk/reward calculations — just as he did over an 11-year career — and ended up here. This doesn’t make him barbaric, necessarily, any more than the game itself is barbaric. It just makes him a realist.
“It’s very refreshing to play for someone who doesn’t seem to care about the corporate culture,” Skipper says. “He’s unapologetically him. You can love him or you can hate him, but he is who he is. You never need to question where you stand. You never need to tiptoe. He tells it like it is. He’s got so much passion for football, for life, for everything.”
I watched Campbell and the Lions over the course of a week, starting with the crushing loss to Dallas in Week 17, to see firsthand how Campbell has refashioned a sad-sack franchise quickly and definitively, from 3-13 in his first season in 2021 to a franchise-tying 12-win season and an NFC North championship in his third. It’s the Lions’ first division title in 30 years, and it gives Detroit — a now Lions-obsessed city once rendered despondent by at least a decade of pro sports irrelevance — its first home playoff game in just as long. And coincidental symbolism doesn’t get much more heavy-handed than it will on Sunday night: Rams vs. Lions, ex-Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford back in Detroit for the first time, ex-Rams quarterback Goff looking across the field at Sean McVay.
