The Detroit Lions have what everybody wants
Prepare yourself for all the buzz words across 32 NFL training camps this week: Identity. Culture. Accountability. It's all real, all spectacular in Detroit. The Lions will contend again.
Good morning, readers! Our 2024 NFL Season Preview series is underway, icymi:
Lions features past:
One year ago, I chatted with a newcomer to the Detroit Lions who sounded like a creature genetically modified in a Dan Campbell Lab. He was physically tough, a throwback. He was signed straight from an organization that has won the second-most games since 2000.
He played a position of severe need: cornerback.
He checked every conceivable box.
No wonder general manager Brad Holmes and Campbell wasted no time signing this player to a three-year, $33 million contract two hours into the negotiating period.
After this 2023 minicamp practice, the player sounded more like one of the head coach’s top lieutenants:
“I want to play this game until damn near I can’t even walk anymore.”
He vowed to be assertive and ensure this new secondary would never gloss over the details. Personally? He’d put up with precisely zero BS. And whenever the Lions take that midseason punch to the jaw, he’d make sure they learn.
“You’re going to fail. You’re going to lose,” the player told me then. “What you do from that is what defines you. That shows your character. That shows how much it means to you. … The offense may be turning the ball over. How we approach the field to get the ball back for our offense — that type of energy is infectious. The same if we make a mistake, the offense can pick you up and say, ‘We’ve got your back!’ It’s all about having that collective momentum in all three phases: offense, defense and special teams. It’s infectious.”
The love from the head coach was real.
“He’s behind you,” Sutton says. “He has that care factor behind all the guys. This is not, ‘Hey, if I make a mistake, I may not be here.’ It gives you a lot of peace.”
The player started every game, totaled a career-high 65 tackles with one forced fumble, one interception and six passes defensed as Detroit won the NFC North and came within a 17-point second half collapse of a Super Bowl appearance.
The player — veteran Cam Sutton — was then charged with domestic battery by strangulation in March.
When the Lions learned of the warrant out for his arrest, they released the cornerback.
No team is going to bat a thousand. Even through an extraordinary rebuild like this, mistakes are a guarantee.
The key is being decisive. Operating with principle and removing anyone or anything who deviates, who poses a threat. It’s all case by case. But there are nearly 100 players in your building up to Week 1 of an NFL season and they’re all watching how you handle that player in the headline. Weakness begets weakness. All coaches claim to operate with accountability, but much fewer back it up. It’s much easier to tip-toe around harsh realities internally, ramble incoherently at a press conference and hope enough time passes for people to forget your actions didn’t really match up everything you’re saying in front of a room. But players do not forget. Each transaction (and non-transaction) sends a message to all. Whatever Sutton supplied on the field was obviously not worth his presence on the roster. The Lions correctly viewed him as a disease that must be eradicated and admitted their free-agency mistake by sending Sutton packing for a good of a larger cause.
Sutton returned to the Pittsburgh Steelers and was suspended eight games by the NFL.
One example — of many — that continue to prove the Lions are the envy of all reconfigured teams trying to build the right culture. It never happens overnight. This took 3 1/2 years, but the Lions know exactly who they are. The same cannot be said elsewhere. As training camps open up this week, we’re already hearing the NFL’s eight new coaches pontificate about culture and identity and, honestly, it doesn’t mean much. Not yet. You can express how unburdened you are by what has been 100 times over. Until pads crunch in August and games begin in September, it’s all a word salad doused in too much dressing.
Nor are those new coaches alone. Most NFL teams will spend the next month trying to turn slogans and heartfelt speeches into reality.
Sutton is not alone. On the “Ty & Bob Pod” — our in-season NFC North-centric podcast with Bob McGinn — a common theme is tracking the ceaseless tweaking of this Lions roster. The untrustworthy are benched. Or are outright released. Detroit relentlessly reshuffles its roster to capture a mix that fits its identity. All while the players themselves praise Campbell to high heavens. They thoroughly enjoy playing for the coach because they, too, fully conceptualize this coach’s vision. There’s no ambiguity around here.
One player Campbell identified as a leader to turn this franchise around, Tracy Walker, best brought the Patricia-to-Campbell, night-to-day transition to life in our “DNA” piece last summer.
Walker ran his course. Walker was effusive in his praise on his way out.
Nobody can get too comfortable ‘round here, and players respect that.
The team’s identity was forged in mistakes and honesty. Campbell expressed instant regret for kicking a 54-yarder against Minnesota in Week 3 of the 2022 season instead of going for it on fourth down (“I freakin’ hate it”) and backed up his rhetoric that point forward. If it’s 4th and 2 and time’s waning and one play secures the win? The Lions will try to bury you. Again, the Lions won’t convert every time. They went for the kill vs. San Francisco midway through the third quarter of the NFC Championship, failed and lost in numbing fashion.
But they’ll be back in this game again.
The science is inexact. What works for Campbell doesn’t necessarily work for other teams on the rise. Green Bay’s Matt LaFleur has an element of spunk to him, but he probably won’t be instructing players to gnaw on a kneecap any time soon. Authenticity is paramount. Consistency, too. If Campbell vacillated on Sutton, he wouldn’t have been himself — and everyone would’ve noticed. That’s how the Lions handled horrible news. Next, they sent (very) loud, (very) positive messages.
Core players who lifted this franchise from purgatory were locked up.
Penei Sewell: four years, $112 million ($85M guaranteed).
Amon-Ra St. Brown: four years, $120 million ($77M guaranteed).
Jared Goff: four years, $212 million ($170M guaranteed).
A mountain of cash worth spending. These moves ensure the Lions’ window stays open, essentially the polar opposite approach that the Dallas Cowboys took. Rather than proactively re-signing Dak Prescott and reworking his 2024 money to sign one or two big names that could’ve closed their gap in the NFC, the Cowboys chose to sit on their hands and sign Ezekiel Elliott. We tried to make sense of their bizarre inaction a month ago through the eyes of those who’ve worked with Jerry and Stephen Jones. Yes, all of this is frustrating Mike McCarthy.
How could it not? On Dec. 30, 2023, his Cowboys were on equal footing with these Lions. The two teams played a 20-19 game decided by a controversial penalty. One team chose to maximize a Super Bowl window because it knows exactly what it wants. The other is rudderless. Dallas will win 10 games this season, lose in the playoffs and move onto another head coach in 2025 with Jerry Jones babbling on about “glory holes” again.
The Lions traded for a bully of a press corner in Carlton Davis, profiled here and corner Terrion Arnold, at No. 24 overall, may prove to be the best bang-for-buck pick in the first round.
In D.J. Reader and Alim McNeill, they’ve got two defensive tackles with two sharply contrasting skill-sets. Reader, the ex-Bengal, is more human boulder who will not break. McNeill opened up to us about the day he looked into the mirror, hated what he saw and completely changed his life. He’s the penetrator.
James Houston returns from a lost 2023 season. He could give the pass rush a rocket boost.
Brian Branch has star potential.
Of course, it’s not all sunshine.
Detroit will face new challenges. With respect to the AFC North, expect this NFC North to be the best division in the league.
All of those 22- and 23-year-olds who brought the Green Bay Packers within one Favreian pick of an NFC title game in Detroit will improve. Jordan Love was the best quarterback in the NFL from mid-November on. Not only did the Packers provide the NFL a new quarterback blueprint to follow, this unit’s proof that teams should simply draft wide receivers and tight ends nonstop. Brian Gutekunst sure looks like a genius given the financial boom at receiver. The Packers have hoarded talent on cost-controlled deals. Caleb Williams gives the Chicago Bears real hope. No first overall pick at the position has walked into a huddle this loaded. D.J. Moore, Keenan Allen, Rome Odunze, Cole Kmet and D’Andre Swift will test Detroit’s retooled secondary. Bringing up the rear is a team with one of the best offensive coaches (Kevin O’Connell), arguably the best non-QB in the sport (Justin Jefferson) and a defense on the rise.
But at the core of a building a winner are those roster instincts.
Detroit was no one-hit wonder in 2023.
The teams that win long-term have such a sixth sense. They know exactly when to part with one player and ink others to lucrative extensions. They’re always bringing in vets for workouts to tighten loose bolts on the fringes of the roster and they’re never afraid to make an unpopular decision. Screw up more than half of the time and there’s a good chance you’re polishing off the resume for a new team. Find your groove and hardware’s a guarantee. Before he was the creepy phys-ed teacher dating women a third of his age, Bill Belichick was the standard. Now, it’s Andy Reid.
One major difference is that those two dynasties were quarterbacked by the two greatest quarterbacks ever.
Still, Campbell and Holmes were never trying to score political points when they slapped the word “grit” on t-shirts.
They know exactly what they’re doing in making Goff a rich man. The player at the most important position in sports was always tougher than advertised. He’s still that kid out of Cali — backwards hat, feet perched up — who told me one year into his pro career that he’s “more scared of people thinking I’m a p-ssy than getting hit” and “more afraid that people will be like ‘He’s a little bitch,’ than I am of truly getting hit.”
Nobody thinks that about the quarterback today. Or this Detroit Lions team.
That loss in Santa Clara did not splinter, and it will not linger.
Like Alim McNeill, they know exactly what they’re looking at in the mirror.
I've been a Lions fan since 1989. I've long ago learned to stop trusting this franchise, because time and time again, every glimmer of hope turned out be Sally pulling the football away from Charlie Brown. This time feels different, and this article outlines many of the reasons why it feels different. I'm ready to get hurt again.
GREAT work, Tyler....! Regards, Daniel