The Heart of Kalif Raymond
The Detroit Lions are the best team in the NFL right now. Why? They find players built like their 5-foot-8 receiver/returner. On emails, anxiety and the power of the mind.
Good morning, readers! A quick note. The story we planned on publishing today will be pushed back a week due to that player’s injury. (We’ll aim to double up next week.)
That being said? It’s worth reprising this piece from a prior series. Kalif Raymond scored twice in Detroit’s 52-14 drubbing of Tennessee, including one 90-yard punt return.
We sat down at length ahead of the 2023 season for our DNA of the Lions story.
Brad Holmes and Dan Campbell have always known what they’re looking for in building Detroit — players like Raymond. It’s a good time to remember where he came from.
Here’s the updated piece below.
ALLEN PARK, Mich. — One after another, he snatches footballs off the JUGS machine. Kalif Raymond is positioned at the far, far, far end of the field, helmet on, hardly visible at 5 foot 8, 185 pounds.
He eventually saunters on back, heads into meetings, redirects to a body shop to get his vehicle worked on, and as the final stream of trucks and SUVS leave the parking lot around 6:15 p.m. this June day, Raymond’s still here. Still at Lions HQ. In a Carhartt shirt, visibly tired, he knows his day isn’t done yet. After this conversation, the plan is to rep out hamstring curls on the Nordic machine. If anyone’s trying to reach him today… tomorrow… a year from now… yeah. Good luck.
Raymond, labeling himself “the worst texter,” cites the 932 unread messages on his phone. He hasn’t posted anything to his Instagram in four years. His Twitter account’s all but dead, collecting dust since college.
There’s little time for doom-scrolling when you’re someone who enjoys training five to six times per day.
He cannot stop. It’s a sickness.
If Dan Campbell himself could create an ideal competitor in a lab, it’s the man he calls the team’s “Iron Man.” Raymond is not Tyreek Hill turning the Miami Dolphins into one of the NFL’s most explosive offenses, nor A.J. Brown or Justin Jefferson. Star power never powered the hype train in Detroit. But Raymond’s football DNA explains the Lions’ DNA and why these Lions are prepared to fight anyone. Football threatened to chew and spit him out from high school… to college… to the pros.
The sight of this receiver on that practice field is a window into why the Detroit Lions (6-1) are playing better than any team in the NFL right now. A showdown with the Green Bay Packers at Lambeau Field is next, the type of heavyweight bout Raymond's been building toward his entire football life.
Because, in truth, it’s never about creating anyone in a lab.
The Lions put you on the field for a reason.
Campbell knows exactly what he’s looking for.
Go Long is your completely independent home for longform in pro football.
Start down in Norcross, Ga., When peers hit puberty, Raymond stopped growing. At all of 5-2, 103 pounds — into high school — Raymond was the runt of his class. He inherited abnormally long arms, but little else physically from his 6-foot-3 father. As a result, coaches saw zero use for this new kid transferring in. The first few practices, Raymond stood on the sideline.
Eventually, he did play. Raymond was even lighting it up as a senior, allowing himself to dream of a college scholarship four games in, before… breaking his ankle. It was a grisly scene. His ankle bent at a 90-degree angle to the right. Trainers came over, clicked a bone back into place and Raymond begged them to tape it up. To let him play because he had exactly zero offers.
Of course, that was an impossibility. With his ankle in a boot, Raymond sat and sobbed. And assumed his football career was over.
It was right then he remembers looking up into the stands and seeing his best friend’s father. “You’re going to be alright!” Lawrence Nelson shouted. “Don’t worry about it!” As Greater Atlanta Christian School’s season pressed on, Nelson challenged Raymond. Told him that if he sincerely wanted to play college football, there still was a way. He sat the diminutive wide receiver down with a laptop, pulled up ESPN.com and pointed to the endless columns of DI, DI-AA, DII and DIII schools. Nelson told him that if he visited the website for each school, he’d find a staff directory that’d include email addresses for the football coaches.
There’s an offer out there, he said. It was on Kalif to find it.
So to each school, in each conference, in each division, Raymond copied and pasted an email with his film attached.
In all, Raymond estimates he sent out 800 emails and heard back from less than 10. Even some of those 10 responses were automated. The only schools mildly interested in offering him a scholarship — Lehigh and Holy Cross — were worried about that shattered ankle. No problem. Raymond rehabbed in time to run track that spring. He still could not change direction, but looked just fine in a straight line. As for his smurf stature? He got creative. On his visit to the Holy Cross campus, Raymond wore three pairs of socks, large boots, a hoodie, his letterman jacket and baggy pants in an attempt to appear much taller than he actually was.
On this eve of Signing Day, in a room full of recruits, Raymond was the last kid to get called into the head coach’s office and Tom Gilmore extended an offer.
To this day, Raymond calls Nelson’s nudge the greatest gift he’s ever received because his buddy’s father didn’t send those emails for him, no. He supplied the playbook. He said, bluntly, “It’s on you.”
If Kalif Raymond wanted anything in life, he could take it.
“It changed something in my mind when he did that,” Raymond says. “Because that point to now, it inspired me to be proactive in the things that I want and desire. … He told me, ‘It’s up to you on how you want to act when that adversity hits.’ That’s been my mentality since that moment.
“Nobody’s going to do it for you. You’ve got to want to do it yourself.”
More storms threatened to wash him away. At Holy Cross, Raymond endured three or four surgeries his senior year alone — all the result of over-training. (“I wanted it so bad. I couldn’t stop.”) The frigid winters were no fun for a Georgia kid, but he grew to love this small Jesuit school in Worcester, Mass., because Gilmore knew how to turn boys into men. Right down to his rule that if you didn’t have an internship during the summer, you needed to be on campus. Which meant getting a job to feed yourself. Looking back, Raymond knows Holy Cross’ rigorous academics also prepared him for the NFL’s film demands.
Of course, there was no way to prepare himself for another NFL reality.
Mental warfare should’ve KO’d him for good.
Raymond did enough his final collegiate season (978 receiving yards, nine touchdowns) to creep onto the Denver Broncos’ practice squad as an undrafted rookie the 2016 season. He was waived on Sept. 2, 2017, claimed by the New York Jets the next day and — after never muffing a single punt at any level — Raymond dropped one in practice ahead of the Jets’ season opener against the Buffalo Bills. The muff changed him. The muff served as a sucker punch to all of the confidence he had built up. From Georgia to Holy Cross to Denver, Raymond was forever comfortable because he knew that his team knew he could ball. On fair catches, he wouldn’t even look at the ball dropping into his hands. On returns, he didn’t even need to give those gunners a passing glance.
Everything was natural.
That comfort — abruptly — vanished.
He’d soon recognize this as a “false sense of comfortability” and Raymond says that every player who signs with a new team is liable to lose this comfort. Doesn’t matter if you’re a fringe player cycling between practice squads or a 10-year vet with multiple Pro Bowls. Because now? You’re the new guy. Coaches don’t have that built-in trust. You live in fear of mistakes compounding.
“You have that feeling of, ‘I’ve got to prove myself! Prove myself! Prove myself!’” Raymond says. “Which is partially true. But the issue is, you put so much pressure on yourself that you don’t have any patience with yourself. So any bad plays that happen, you’re trying to lean on something and that security blanket isn’t there. You want to say, ‘Oh, they know I can make this play.’ But that’s your first dropped pass with them. They haven’t seen the other thousand that you caught. So you’re thinking, ‘Maybe they don’t think I’m good’ or ‘Maybe I’m not that good.’ It becomes a mental snowball.”
Everything was vividly different. His number (84), his locker room, how the 10 players in front of him blocked. The comfort of Denver was gone.
One innocent mistake planted a droplet of stress inside Raymond’s mind and, that Sunday, Raymond muffed two punts in a 21-12 loss to the Bills. Not only was his confidence now gone. Raymond became suffocated by the reality that one more muff would for certain get him released. His anxiety was “crazy.” That Tuesday night, Raymond couldn’t sleep because he knew he’d be fielding punts at the next day’s practice. Severe night sweats kept him up most of the night. Raymond survived practice but, of course, another game loomed.
This one was in Oakland.
Fear of failure was officially overpowering the possibility of success.
“You teeter,” says Raymond, his flat hand tipping to and fro. “To the point of, ‘I’d rather not go out there than have the fear of failing again.’ It drives you to a place where it feels like your back is against the wall. Except there’s no wall. It’s a cliff.”
The punt rifled off the foot of Raiders punter Marquette King with 2 minutes left in the half. At his own 15-yard line, Raymond waved for a fair catch and the ball ricocheted off both of his hands. As the Raiders recovered, Raymond cowered into the fetal position. He was dejected. Empty. Inconsolable on the sideline moments later. Pissed at himself, Raymond tried leaning into anger. Worse? He felt all alone. He didn’t know these coaches, these players and had zero family members in the stadium.
“Not only do I know nobody here,” Raymond says, “but at this point I don’t even know myself.”
He pauses. His mind wanders back.
“It was tough. It was tough.”
Two days after this humiliating 45-20 loss, Raymond was cut loose. He loitered around on the New York Giants’ practice squad and returned 11 punts with two more fumbles in the games. There isn’t a ripe market for undrafted 5-foot-8 wide receivers out of Holy Cross who can’t hold onto the ball. His football career, for all intents and purposes, should’ve died right in the Black Hole.
Only, it did not.
How Raymond attacked that 2018 offseason is how Dan Campbell wants all of his players thinking. At the ledge of a free-fall into a new profession, Raymond realized he had zero “mental foundation” to lean on — only that anger — because he wasn’t doing any mental work on his own. Everything, always, was physical. After all, he never struggled with the literal act of catching a punt.
He thought back to advice from former Bronco teammate Bennie Fowler. The wideout who constantly preached about the science of mindfulness. Finally, Raymond got into the app, Headspace, and began meditating. Float sessions were a game-changer. This total “sensory deprivation” clears his mind. Raymond can’t see anything because the room is pitch back. He cannot hear anything because he’s on his back in water with his ears covered. And he cannot feel anything because the water’s set at the same temperature as his body.
The first time he floated, that crucial ’18 offseason, Raymond’s mind raced “like a jet engine” for first 75 minutes, before reaching a total state of peace the final 15 minutes.
“To put that in perspective,” Raymond says, “imagine how much your mind is racing throughout the day. Those 15 minutes of peace, all your worries? You’re like, ‘This isn’t as important. Maybe I should let this go.’ Let’s say you’re on the Internet and you’ve got 30 tabs open. There’s so much to look at, right? It’s like closing tabs to eventually have one or maybe two tabs where you can just focus. All those other tabs, you don’t even need. They’re from last week. It’s stuff going on in your subconscious. You’re closing tabs.”
That summer, Raymond knew he could disappear… or fight.
The choice was easy.
As far back as he could remember, he had a true passion for this sport. After dropping one pass as a youngster in park ball, knowing Dad was in the stands, he wailed so uncontrollably that he needed to be taken off the field. There’s a ton of fight laced into his DNA, too. His mother’s family emigrated from China to Vietnam in World War II and then Vietnam to the United States during the Vietnam War. Mom was 3 years old then and nearly died on the boat ride over with her uncles. Kalif hasn’t asked many questions on the subject because he knows it’d stir trauma.
From what he heard, his family couldn’t dock the boat to land because they would’ve been thrown right back on it. So they got as close as they could, and swam to shore.
No, he could not give up.
That summer, he trained six times per day. He’d start with meditation, then a morning mile… a 9 a.m. workout… a 12 to 2 workout… JUGS from 3 to 4… jiu jitsu 5 to 6 and capped it all off with another workout from 9 to 11 at night. His aim was to field so many punts at the JUGS machine that muscle memory would overpower any anxiety that returned. Thousands upon thousands of reps, he knew, would serve as “ammo in my quiver.” Even if it came with the downside of, you know, ugly welts all over his chest.
His moment of reckoning soon arrived that ensuing preseason as a member of the Giants. Another punt return.
The team that cut him loose, the Jets, booted it to the same side he fumbled vs. Oakland. As he ran over to field the punt, Raymond felt anxiety bubbling to the surface. Anxiety that could only travel so far. He had caught so many punts in training that his body essentially told his nerves, “Nah, not today,” and Raymond smoothly fielded the punt to return it 35 yards. He still feels anxiousness. Nerves are inescapable. Each time, however, Raymond blasts through the sensation. And if he does drop a pass? Fumble? There’s no need to panic with this newfound mental foundation.
He’s never alone, either. After that Raiders game, he vowed to make sure he always had a family member in the stands. Whatever those plane tickets cost.
Raymond toggled between the Giants, Titans, Giants, Titans again, becoming everything Campbell could’ve wanted upon taking over the Lions in 2021.
This was one of this regime’s first acquisitions.
He’s no inspirational mascot gathering teammates ‘round for story time. He can play. Raymond blossomed into a chains-mover for quarterback Jared Goff, catching 73.4 percent of the balls thrown his way in 2022. In 57 games as a Lion, he has caught 143 balls for 1,843 yards and seven touchdowns. As the primary punt returner, he’s averaging 12.9 per return. His electric 47-yard touchdown was the difference in a 2022 win over those Jets.
After crossing the goal line, Raymond collapsed back into that fetal position. But only briefly.
A split-second later, he turned onto his back and teammates piled on.
He never forgets the road here. When the Lions played the Jacksonville Jaguars, the visitors’ assistant special teams coach introduced himself. Luke Thompson explained that he coached at Georgetown University a decade prior. He was one of those 800 email recipients.
“If I put in everything I have,” Raymond says, “I can look at myself in the mirror if it doesn’t work out. That gives me peace.”
A man with no business playing a down of college ball is now in Year 9 of his pro career.
This is the spirit Campbell and GM Brad Holmes covet.
They obsess over finding more players who are willing to pen those 800 emails, who are taking up meditation to slay a personal demon.
Operate this way and, naturally, you’ll land stars.
Because do not tell Raymond that he’s the last player to leave the field. Maybe he was this particular day, but 99.9 percent of the time it’s the team’s No. 1 option. It’s Amon-Ra St. Brown, the hardest-working player he’s ever seen. Without fail, St. Brown ends every practice with 202 catches at the JUGS machine. Add it up and that’s 606 per week. Part of Raymond hates even vocalizing this out loud at the risk of a jinx, but he’s “outrageously confident” every time the ball’s thrown to St. Brown solely because of his work ethic. If anyone wants to know how the Lions are built, Raymond says to no look further than the team’s best receiver.
During lifts, St. Brown is the one putting up the most weight. When everyone’s finished, he’s the one sneaking in an ab workout.
“The dude is a monster off the field,” Raymond says, “before he even steps on the field.”
Nobody has an excuse to tap out when the most talented player on the entire team is living so relentlessly. OK, OK. Raymond’s comatose IG account did briefly come alive over the ‘23 offseason on a technicality. He got married in July. His wife posted photos from Renault Winery in Egg Harbor, N.J. and tagged Kalif’s handle. Yes, he’s now a married man who’ll always have a loved one in the stadium. No, those 25,800+ followers should not expect much of a social-media presence from Raymond. Nor should anyone expect a text reply.
Time’s of the essence. He doesn’t want so much blood, sweat and tears shed in vain.
At the conclusion of each day, Raymond stares into the mirror to ask, Did I do everything in my power to get better today? The answer must be an unequivocal “yes” every time. He still doesn’t know how to relax.
He’s working out nonstop.
“Because,” he adds, “I want it so bad right now.”
Hard to blame him. The Lions have a realistic chance to reach a championship for the first time since the Dwight Eisenhower presidency. After crossing the goal line on his 90-yard punt return for a TD last weekend against the Titans, he tilted his head back to scream. No doubt, a sweet feeling. Kalif Raymond was one of the first players this regime acquired and, chances are, they’ll keep him around as long as they possibly can.
They know everyone’s watching.
They’ll keep hunting for more players wired just like him.
ICYMI:
You have to love the Lions employing all their resources to win games no matter how they rank on the "star power" charts. I think because of this, the Lions are now well above the Packers and anyone else in the NFC. In years or decades past, it was practically automatic that when teams like Green Bay and Minnesota played the Lions, there were usually much better and there was little question as to who would win.
If weather and turnovers don't wreck the Lions, they win by at least 10 points.