DETROIT—This was the weekend that:
- May have gotten Mike McCarthy fired.
- May have paved the way for Bill Belichick to follow in the Dallas coaching footsteps of his old pal Bill Parcells.
Introduced first-year starters C.J. Stroud and Jordan Love to America as top 10 NFL quarterbacks (and maybe better than that) with playoff debuts that appeared to come out of a copy machine:
Stroud v Browns: 16 of 21, 274 yards, 3 TD, 0 INT, 157.2 rating.
Love v Cowboys: 16 of 21, 272 yards, 3 TD, 0 INT, 157.2 rating.
- Put a fire extinguisher to Mike McDaniel’s 2023 offensive genius, and planted doubt seeds in Tua Tagovailoa’s future.
- Made every team thinking of hiring Dallas defensive coordinator Dan Quinn as head coach say, “Let’s not be too hasty.”
- We digested Nick Saban and Bill Belichick “parting ways” in the span of a half-day with the franchises they made great.
- Set up a Saturday prime-time showdown between Jordan Love and Brock Purdy in the NFC’s Final Four.
- It never stopped snowing in Buffalo and the Steelers-Bills game got moved from Sunday to Monday.
- This Sunday night game had jaws dropping across America and, for those of us in attendance, had us wishing we traveled with earplugs.
You may know that this is my 40th season covering the NFL (I’ve banged you over the head enough with that this season). In terms of quality of game and atmosphere and electricity on site, this Sunday night game—Lions 24, Rams 23—will go down in the top five of games I’ve covered. I wasn’t alone.
“Walking out about an hour and 15 minutes before the game,” Detroit coach Dan Campbell told me outside the Lions’ locker room Sunday night, “man, it felt electric. I’m not even out on the field yet—just on my way there. What’s this? It’s over an hour before the game! But I can feel the hum, the buzz. The hair on the back of my neck stood up.”
“You imagine days like this when you’re 5 years old, thinking of what it’d be like to play in a big football game,” said Lions linebacker Alex Anzalone. “This was a big football game. It had everything.”
You know what I loved about it? Great, great performances—Puka Nacua simply could not be stopped, Jared Goff and Matthew Stafford put away the incredible internal pressure each must have felt and played A games, Detroit kid Aidan Hutchinson chipped in two sacks and four pressures in the game he was drafted to win. No turnovers, in a game that was as physical as a game within the rules can be. No chippiness. Just good, clean, effervescent football with a crowd that waited 32 years for a home playoff game and made the 2 hours and 46 minutes fly by.
It was a beautiful athletic contest, with skill and strategy, and two very good teams playing at the top of their games on the biggest day of their seasons. It was apt, 24-23, because it was so close, and a shame one team had to lose a game there was absolutely no shame in losing.
The crowd … The place went batcrap when local hero Eminem was shown on the scoreboard, “Lose Yourself” playing over the PA, and even batcrappier when Barry Sanders, in a Lions letterman jacket, was introduced on the field during a timeout. But it was the football that got the biggest reactions, all game long. Lots of stadiums have these decibel-measuring devices (who knows how accurate they are, but they’re in a few stadia), and in the fourth quarter, 4:20 to play, one-point game, Rams’ ball with a third-and-14, the decibel device got to 118.
Now, 118 decibels is this: standing on an airport runway as a 737 whizzes by you on takeoff. That’s the kind of night it was, a night those attending the first NFL playoff game in Ford Field won’t forget.
***
Three years ago this week, when playing and winning a playoff game at Ford Field seemed a thousand miles away, Dan Campbell was introduced as the coach of the moribund Detroit Lions. (When, by the way, in any of our lifetimes have we not been able to use “moribund” as an adjective for the Detroit Lions?) Campbell, wearing a dark suit, Lions blue shirt and tie, with short brown hair slicked back, looked about eight years younger than he looks now; coaching the Lions can age a man.
This is how Dan Campbell introduced himself to his fans in his opening press conference:
“This team is gonna be built on, we’re gonna kick you in the teeth. When you punch us back, we’re gonna smile at you and when you knock us down, we’re gonna get up, and on our way up, we’re gonna bite a kneecap off. We’re gonna stand up. It’s gonna take two more shots to knock us down. On the way up again, we’re gonna take your other kneecap. And we’re gonna get up, and then it’s gonna take three shots to get us down. And we’re gonna take another hunk out of you. Before long, we’re gonna be the last one standing. That’s gonna be the mentality here.”
That was Campbell’s trademark for a while. The Lions were the Detroit Kneecap Biters, and it played well locally. I wondered, with the benefit of time, whether Campbell still thought it was the right message to begin his tenure here.
“I don’t regret anything I said,” he said. “I said it because I was compelled to say it. I believed it. I believe in what we are. I know it’s a little bit off the wall and it’s a little whatever. But I believed it. This area represents something special and something different. For where this team’s been over the last 30 years and beyond, really, it was time to change. You can’t do this in Dallas. It’s been done in Dallas. Can’t do this in Pittsburgh. They’ve won, and won a lot. It’d been so long here. I just thought, We can do it here, though, and make it special, and we will do it.”
Then the Lions started 4-19-1 in their first year-and-a-half. Same ol’ Lions. Well, no. That’s not what Campbell thought. “I’ll tell you what I thought,” he said. “‘Our time’s coming.’ And ‘everybody can have their last laugh.’ I can’t tell you the number of times, sitting in that locker room, looking at those guys, they’re all taped up, they’re iced up, they’re beat up. We just lost another tough game.
“I remember saying to the guys, ‘One day we’ll be f---ing laughing at everybody else. Our time is coming. We got an opportunity here.’”
Campbell had a superb young GM, Brad Holmes, who came from the Rams and knew the value of mid-round and lower draft picks, and the Lions started hitting on them. Before any of that, though, they traded Matthew Stafford to the Rams for Jared Goff and draft picks. Goff’s confidence was battered after feeling abandoned by the Rams, and it took a while for Campbell and his coordinator beginning in 2022, Ben Johnson, to put him back together again. But by Sunday night, the reconstruction of Goff paid major dividends.
This is a game Goff should have been nervous for. The guy who took his job and won the Super Bowl he couldn’t win for the Rams, Matthew Stafford, was coming back to Detroit. Everyone here seems to like Stafford, who left here in the classiest way he could, but that didn’t matter Sunday night. When Stafford came out for pre-game warmups with his mates, this was the reaction:
“BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!”
This was the reaction a bit later for Detroit’s current QB1:
“JA-RED GOFF! JA-RED GOFF! JA-RED GOFF!”
Like: Stafford, one day, when you’re gray, we’ll honor you right here in this stadium. But not now. Not today. Today, you’re a bum, the enemy, and we’ll make your life a living hell for four quarters.
But Goff clearly was not nervous. Ben Johnson didn’t have to program some confidence throws into his gameplan early. Goff’s second throw, a 24-yard zip job to Josh Reynolds, told us everything we needed to know about this day. Reynolds ran a deep incut from the left, and when Goff released it, four Rams were buzzing around the middle of the field. On the replay, it’s easy to think, No! No! Don’t risk that! The window for Goff was the size of a hummingbird. But the line drive was perfect, and the big gain set up the Lions’ first TD. And that is precisely how Goff played all night. He threw it around, pressure-free, like this was a May minicamp practice.
Goff was 20 of 23 through three quarters, with touch passers and zingers like the Reynolds throw. Stafford played great too, and very nearly got the Rams in position to win it late with a field goal. But in the end, the Rams lost because they settled for field goals from the Detroit 6-, 9- and 11-yard lines instead of winning in the Red Zone. In any case, Detroit’s going to be a hard out in the playoffs if Goff replicates this show.
When it was over, someone caught Holmes, the GM, in the elevator going down to the locker letting out a series of primal screams: “YEAHHHHHH!!!! YEAHHHHHH!!!!!” Campbell, surprisingly, was the measured one afterward.
“What’s it feel like, right now, to know you built this—you and Brad?” I asked.
“Believe me,” Campbell said, “it feels good. But I think until this season gets over, I don’t know that I’ll entirely grasp all of what we’ve been able to do. As a coach, it’s the next one in front of you. We just won our first playoff game and now we got another one coming up back here at Ford Field. We gotta get ready for Tampa or Philly.
“But a day like this, this is what we’ve worked for. This was always the vision for what we could do here. I knew this was a sleeping giant. And we gave ‘em something today.”
Read more in Peter King’s full Football Morning in America column.