Ass-Kicking Origins: Why the Detroit Lions are built for 2024 football

Fancy doesn't fly this season. You've got to win mano a mano. Lions players all know exactly when they fell in love with the sport's cruelty. Now, they're bringing Dan Campbell's words to life.

Sep 20, 2024

ALLEN PARK, Mich. — On Jan. 21, 2021, the day he was introduced as head coach, Dan Campbell put his philosophy in plain (cannibalistic) English. What will his Detroit Lions resemble? Simple. “Knock us down,” Campbell famously opined, “we’re going to get up, and on the way up we’re going to bite the kneecap off.” Knock the Lions down again and, you guessed it, they’ll gnaw into that other kneecap. A third time, yep: “We’re going to take another hunk out of you.”

Most everyone ‘round the country laughed.

One year later, into the ’22 season, “Hard Knocks” cameras recorded Campbell speaking to the entire team. He pointed to the word on a back wall — GRIT — and explained what that meant here: “We’ll play you on grass. We’ll play you on turf. We’ll go to a fucking landfill. It doesn’t matter if you have one ass cheek and three toes. I will beat your ass.” He said they’d grab opponents in the shallow end of the water and drag them to the “deep, dark abyss” to drown ‘em. “That’s who we have to be. That’s our domain. We’ll tread water as long as it fucking takes to bury you.”

Everyone started to pay closer attention.

And when the Lions came within a breath of reaching their first Super Bowl appearance ever, in ’23, the nation finally set its mockery aside and admitted football is different in Detroit.

All along, the joke was on everyone else. Campbell was never lost in a Stone Age. Au contraire. By molding his team in a virtual octagon — by conjuring R-rated imagery — the former NFL tight end was actually ahead of his time.

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Players will forever reflect their head coach. From August to January, a collection of 53 sweaty, bloody, bruised grown men spend more time at the facility than their own homes. You’re bonding with another dude in the cold tub more than your wife. In ways both big and small, every head coach sets the parameters for such a strange world. Every day. As most owners fought over branches from the McVay and Shanahan coaching trees, the Lions appeared to hire a creature straight from the WWE. The league’s swing toward the X ‘n O intellectual is understandable, of course. It’s a quarterback’s world. Coaches who supply quarterbacks every possible answer are also giving those quarterbacks confidence. And QB confidence wins. That was the theme of our first episode of “How the NFL Works.”

But such an NFL-wide obsession with scheme created an opportunity for a coach (Campbell) and a team (the Lions) to zag the other direction, to build a monster that’s predominantly concerned with bludgeoning the opposition. It’s not like this coach is drawing up plays on the walls of a cave with a rock in one hand and the winter’s meat in the other. His offensive coordinator, Ben Johnson, is a brilliant play designer and playcaller in his own right. But first and foremost, this team is a visceral extension of Campbell.

Outright “tricking” the opposition is getting harder than ever. Teams are full of staffers parsing through every snap played. Trends get snuffed out — fast. As the Lions stepped up to the line of scrimmage through overtime of their Week 1 win over Sean McVay’s Los Angeles Rams, there were no rabbits hidden in sleeves. There was also no doubt in anyone’s mind. Eleven players knew they’d exert their physical dominance.

Left guard Graham Glasgow, all of 6 feet 6 inches, 315 pounds, makes the distinction. The world Campbell created is different.

“When you are around people that are strategic coaches,” Glasgow says, “they might have that passion in how they prepare, they might have that passion in how they go about installing the plays, but I feel like when gameday rolls around, Dan has an intensity to himself. And that trickles down to the team.”

Cerebral head coaches can piece together a masterful gameplan. Stealth wrinkles work. A motion, a tweak, an innovation nobody sees coming in a big moment. You better have a smart playcaller providing solutions.

However, this remains a combat sport.

For 17 grueling games.

Violence, Glasgow believes, is taking precedence over book smarts once again.

“We’re past that era of football where you can out-brain people,” says Glasgow, a nine-year vet. “When I think about out-braining people, I feel like the 2018 Rams. On defense, they were still really physical. But they were always scheming things up. You can scheme up things, but I feel like you can’t scheme up every team for the entire year. I’m not even taking a shot at them.
“I feel like you need to have an aspect of physicality to both sides of the ball nowadays to win games.”

That’s why Mel Kiper Jr.’s suggestion that the NFL should ban two-high safeties was steamy-hot garbage. Such a configuration should be a death wish. A defense wants to bracket two safeties deep to prevent big plays? Wonderful. That allows you to run the ball through their face over and over and over and over again as a wise man once said. No defensive schematic is breaking football. If anything, it’s bringing the sport back to its roots.

For all of the asinine rule changes endangering this sport, Campbell believed in the essence of football.

Still, it’s one thing for a hair-gelled coach in a nice suit to promise pain at that opening press conference. It’s one thing to identify the DNA required to turn perennial losers into winners. Along with GM Brad Holmes, the coach needed to find the players who’d personify his rhetoric. He’s done exactly that.

They’re smart. Wonderlic scores are through the roof on the offensive line.

They’re tough. The roster’s full of individuals who’d prefer to tear your heart out.

Locker to locker, one by one, Lions players can pinpoint the moment they acquired the taste for kneecaps.

Start with the player this regime selected with their first draft pick: Penei Sewell. The pride of Malaeimi in American Samoa sat down with Go Long back when the Lions first poured the concrete on this foundation. He flashes a huge smile thinking back to the game of “Sharks and Minnows” as a young football player, the moment he realized he could whup another person’s ass in this sport. The first day of practice, coaches picked two players as “sharks” who stood in the middle of the field. All other players were “minnows” who needed to sprint from one side of the field to the other. Sharks could devour any minnow they desired. Sewell zeroed in on the biggest kid on the team, the kid his Dad kept raving about.

Sewell was sneaky. He shuffled over toward him ever… so… furtively so the kid would think he was choosing someone else.

And the second he got within range? Sewell booked it.

“Doosh! Nobody knew who I was. Boom! Smacked him. And everyone went ‘Oh my God!’ My coaches went, ‘OK, OK, OK.’ You can’t do that. I was like, ‘What do you mean? He’s got pads on! He’s got a helmet on!’ And he goes, ‘I know, I know. But you can’t do that.’”

His victim suffered a concussion, a sprained ankle and Sewell’s pretty sure his ankle broke, too.

Sewell never saw him again, either. The kid changed high schools.

Sewell was also banned from all future games of “Sharks and Minnows.”

The more you hear from the 6-foot-5, 335-pounder, the more you realize why both the GM and head coach celebrated like maniacs when the Oregon tackle fell into their arms at No. 7 overall in that 2021 draft.

“I’d die on the field for my teammates,” Sewell told us back in 2021. “I’d honestly do that. I honestly say that. Because they mean so much to me.”

Since our first conversation, Sewell has become arguably the best offensive lineman in the league. Campbell has cited him as the team’s best player. He earned a four-year, $112 million contract in the offseason.

And it was a very busy offseason.

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Not only did the Lions lock up their own — Sewell, quarterback Jared Goff, wide receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown — they aggressively addressed a defense that was scavenging the waiver wire for contributors by playoff time. Specifically, Campbell and Holmes added even more malevolence to a group trying to get over the championship hump.

First, with two vets: Defensive tackle D.J. Reader in free agency (two years, $27.25 million) and cornerback Carlton Davis via trade.

Reader is the man who brings “serial-killer vibes” to the weight room, a 335-pounder who knows that if he breaks? Everybody breaks. He didn’t grow up playing the oboe in Greensboro, N.C., no, his memories are more reprehensible. As a kid, he witnessed dog fights. It was terrible. It also taught him lessons. The sarsen stone of a nose tackle relived it all as a Bengal. (“It teaches you about what the world is. It’s going to eat you up.”)

Davis can relate. In Miami Gardens, his youth games were interrupted with bullets. Locals betting on their games — kids games — would start shooting at each other. He’d sprint to shelter. Even worse, this world desensitized many of those boys on the field. As teens, they’d start toting guns in their backpacks. “People who are in jail now — who killed people — I grew up with them,” Davis explained a year ago. It all hardened him. He bows to nobody.

The corner says the Lions have actually been trying to acquire him the last two offseasons. Campbell had a front-row seat to his running feud with Saints wide receiver Michael Thomas. Back then, Campbell was New Orleans’ assistant head coach and (current Lions DC) Aaron Glenn was the team’s defensive backs coach.

“It was a no-brainer for them to bring me in with the culture and everything they built here,” Davis says. “I fit right in. And I like to play this style of football where it's hardnosed football, work hard and during the game you’re getting after it. That’s the culture of this team. I fit right in.

“I’m still getting in guys’ faces. It doesn’t change.”

He points to playing safety at Miami Norland in high school. A certified headhunter then, he’d eye his prey like Sewell in “Sharks and Minnows” and hurl his body into ball-carriers. The collisions drew immediate flags. Whenever he did line up vs. a receiver in 1 on 1 coverage, Davis seemed more interested in turning the encounter into cafeteria-room fisticuffs.

“I was a hitter,” Davis says. “And I hit this running back so hard that I knocked him sideways and that's when I knew, I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m going to fuck people up.’”

Reader, too, knew this was a match made in heaven.

There’s a very good chance he’s not sitting on this locker-room stool in Allen Park, Mich., as a nine-year vet with north of $67 million (and counting) in career earnings without one specific Oklahoma Drill his junior year of high school. There was always a mean streak inside of him. As a pitcher in baseball, Reader hated when kids hit home runs off him. So much so that he’d take a mental note of the kid’s number, eagerly await the next time that kid stepped up to home plate and… promptly throw a fastball directly at the kid’s body.

He’d aim for the rib cage. He’d settle for the backside.

“I was going to beam him with a fastball as hard as I can,” Reader says. “No fault of that person.”

Growing up, he’d get into school fights all the time. A short fuse that made football a natural fit.

But it wasn’t until this classic hitting drill in 11th grade that everything clicked.

Laying down, awaiting the coach’s signal, Reader knew he was two seconds away from bashing into his best friend. He went back with Charlie Jones, way back to playing in the sandbox as tykes. Jones had the ball in his hands. Reader was the defender. To this day, the intoxicating rush of adrenaline flooding through his body is palpable. (“I’m like, ‘I’m going to hit the shit out of him when I get up.’”) The two popped to their feet — 320-pound Reader vs. 285-pound Jones — and Reader went HAM. Reader struck his best friend with so much force that Jones’ helmet dislodged from his head.

Reader dumped Jones to the grass.

The entire team cheered.

He stared down at his best friend, and laughed.

“That’s when I knew, man, if I would do that to him,” Reader says, “I can do it to anybody. I don’t care.’ That’s the moment. I don’t care who gets out here. They’re getting hit. It’s not going to be on me.”

Signing with the Lions was a no-brainer for both parties. Reader, 30, is here to win a Super Bowl and Reader also knows one of the worst assumptions we can make about NFL players is that everyone possesses this seek-and-destroy mindset. He’s had plenty of teammates who were merely talented at football. When he looks around the Lions locker room, Reader sees players who are thinking just like him, play to play.

Players who are “on one mission,” taking their cue from Campbell.

“That sign you see around here everywhere — grit — is truly how he tries to run his program,” Reader says. “No matter what’s thrown at you, you’re going to stare that shit in the face and get it done. You demand greatness. He knows when to push his players, but he’s also human. He’s not asking you for the impossible. He’s just asking you for what he believes you should be able to do. And you can genuinely tell that. There’s a fine line of people just riding you over and over and over and over and over again and actually motivating you to want to do better. And you can tell they believe and you want to do better. He walks that line very well.”

This is the stark difference between Campbell and the coach he replaced.

Bill Belichick couldn’t have been more wrong in suggesting the Lions are enjoying the “fruits of the labor” from Matt Patricia. Players shared their war stories with us a year ago. The culture was a disaster.

Here’s the thing. It is possible to build a team full of ass-kickers without becoming a knockoff version of Bud Kilmer. Authenticity is No. 1. Unlike Patricia — chummy in the building, prick on the practice field — Campbell is consistent. Everyone says the same thing: He never wavers. Botch an assignment and you’re liable to getting benched. Accountability still runs high. But unlike Patricia, he’s consumed 24/7/365 with bringing the absolutely best out of players. That quest brings him to tears. He values loyalty. Players notice that Campbell’s not bringing in a horde of players each week to try out. They’re not on eggshells. Practice-squad guys stick around.

All while the Lions stay on the hunt for players who’ll hear what Campbell says and run through the nearest wall. Those who view football as a punch-in, punch-out occupation need not apply.

Four draft classes have led to this point of legitimate Super Bowl contention.

The team’s latest first-rounder certainly fits the mold: Alabama cornerback Terrion Arnold. It’s been a rocky start. Two games in, Arnold has four penalties and he was also beat by Chris Godwin on a 41-yard touchdown in Detroit’s 20-16 loss to Tampa Bay.

All of which is expected. He’s no docile cover man playing it safe.

Detroit traded up to the 24th overall pick to take Arnold because he’s fearless.

The moment Arnold fell in love with football? He wastes no time. One core memory sends the corner thumbing through his iPhone. Scrolling back, back, back, back, Arnold finally finds clips from his high school football days at John Paul II Catholic High School in Tallahassee, Fla. Like Reader, his breakthrough came in 11th grade. “Just knowing,” he says, giddy, “I could go out there and physically run through somebody and not get in trouble for it.”

He remembers the hitting drill like it was yesterday. The baking-hot practice. The time of day. The yelps in the background. This kid — “Mike” was his name — couldn’t stop talking shit. Mike bragged that he could run through Arnold, repeatedly, so Arnold kindly instructed him to “say it with your chest.” Arnold was nationally recognized at the time, so he had someone filming the practice for a documentary.

This clip never made the final cut, but he’s grateful the footage is forever saved in his phone.

He shares it with Go Long. The collision broke Mike’s shoulder.

“He never played football ever after that,” Arnold says. “He quit the team right then and there.”

As his adversary exited the field, Arnold yelled at him: “That’s what you get for talking crazy!”

The same story played out in a game. Arnold claims an opponent also could not stop trash-talking, so he put this poor soul in his place as well.

“We were losing this game. I was really, really mad. So, I just slammed him on his head.”

He shares that clip, too:

The Lions’ bid for a Super Bowl ended with a football bouncing off the noggin of a cornerback who shouldn’t have been on the field the first place. It’s hard to pin the NFC Championship on Kindle Vildor, on a player who bounced from Chicago to Tennessee to Philadelphia to Detroit in a 3 ½-month span. In Arnold and Davis, the Lions aim to bring a pair of fighters back to that playoff test. Both want the ball thrown their direction with the season on the line.

Cornerbacks need such a hard edge, Arnold says. Otherwise, “they don’t last long.”

Of course, the Lions (1-1) have a very long way to go and other teams are constructed in similar fashion. The Buccaneers made a statement inside their own building. And within the NFC North, Green Bay and Minnesota pose very different challenges. As Campbell told his entire team in that epic 2022 meeting, an NFL season is much like a poignant Metallic lyric in the song, “No Leaf Clover.” That’s no light at the end of the tunnel. That’s a freight train.

The NFL season is long and unforgiving and everyone in this room understands that reality.

Glasgow tries to think up a moment of his own. Once he realized there isn’t much of a market for 6-foot-6 centers in basketball, he embraced football.

A late bloomer, he started rolling over friends his senior year.

Now, he’s taking out NFL defensive linemen and linebackers.

Sure, coaches devoted an endless number of hours to winning the schematic revolution all offseason. A graduate assistant somewhere might’ve even found the next “Philly Special” to unveil in the Super Bowl. These Lions love the element of surprise. Campbell has converted 9 of 11 fake punts through his time as the head man. They’ll find a way to surprise everyone when the pressure’s highest.

But smoke and mirrors cannot be the basis for any team. The Lions know better than anybody where the game’s headed.

Nobody can get too fancy in 2024. That’s exactly how this team, this coach and these players want it.