Dan Campbell Asked the Detroit Lions To Trust Him, and That Trust Paid Off

Detroit Lions head coach Dan Campbell stood in front of his team toward the end of a training camp practice just before the 2022 season. And he was heated. The Lions were fresh off of a three-win campaign, Campbell’s first with the organization. It was another unpleasant year, the kind Detroit had become all too familiar with. That, the burly coach said, had to change.

A red-in-the-face Campbell passionately pleaded with his players for the one thing he needed from each of them to turn the long-downtrodden franchise around—trust.

“All I think about is you guys,” he said in a speech captured on HBO’s Hard Knocks series. “That’s all I think about, man. That’s all I f***ing think about is you guys and how I set you up for the best f***ing possible…advantage I can give you.

“I swear to you, man, I just need you to trust me. That’s all. Please.”

The Lions have bought in. And the results speak for themselves.

Detroit scored two fourth-quarter touchdowns and secured a late game-clinching interception in a 31-23 Divisional Round win over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Sunday. Just two seasons removed from having the second-worst record in the NFL, the Lions are onto their second-ever NFC Championship Game and one win away from their first Super Bowl appearance.

It’s the type of season the raucous fans inside Ford Field over the weekend had been waiting decades for. Now, it’s finally here. The Lions aren’t losers anymore—quite the opposite—and one speech still comes to mind to explain why.

“To make a change like we have, it has to start at the top,” Lions offensive tackle Taylor Decker told reporters this week. “And you have to have a leader that goes about things the right way. Man, [Campbell’s] just a genuine person, and we trust him and we love him. There’s the clip from Hard Knocks where he said, ‘Guys, just trust me.’…That’s what we’ve done. We believe in each other, we believe in our coaches. And it’s turned into something pretty cool.”

The Lions win came three years to the day after Campbell was introduced as Detroit’s head coach. At that press conference, the former Lions tight end promised plenty of kneecap-biting and whatever else it took to make sure the Motor City’s team was the last one standing.

Fast forward through a 3-13-1 2021 season and a 1-6 start to 2022 that turned into a nine-win year, and Campbell has nearly delivered on that promise.

Detroit won 12 games in the regular season (its most since 1991), owns a division crown (its first since 1993), and now are among the NFL’s final four. Last ones standing? Not quite. A meeting with the top-seeded San Francisco 49ers in the NFC Championship Game, though, will determine if the Lions get one step closer to achieving that goal.

“I envisioned that we would have a chance to compete with the big boys,” Campbell said after Sunday’s win over the Bucs. “And that’s where we’re at.”

The road to this point, according to Lions quarterback Jared Goff, has been so much sweeter knowing the outside doubts that Detroit would ever get here. The decision to hire Campbell was far from unanimously praised. The former Dolphins interim head coach had never been a coordinator, and was widely seen as a “meathead” rather than a serious franchise-leader.

But the questions of whether Campbell was the right hire for the Lions have been answered.

And now the booming, highly caffeinated coach hopes to bring another victory to a city that has longed for a winner by taking the Lions—seeking their first NFL championship since 1957—to a place few thought the team could ever reach.

Well, few outside the locker room. Those inside? They trusted their coach.

“Dan’s the greatest leader I’ve been around and has cultivated this culture we have and our belief in each other pretty significantly,” Goff said Sunday. “You think about the dark times early on there in 2021, people calling for his head…It’s pretty good to be able to [stand] up here and be able to play in an NFC Championship.”