EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — They were tense. Tight, if you will. Worried too much about messing up instead of focused on playing. Dan Campbell hadn’t seen his team look like that all season. He told them at halftime.
“We were afraid to fail,” the Detroit Lions head coach said. “We were making some mistakes because (of it).”
This may sound counterintuitive for a team that was below .500 before beating the Jets, 20-17, Sunday at MetLife Stadium. This may even sound a bit silly.
As in: How can a professional athlete so suddenly be afraid to fail? After all, Sunday’s game was the Lions’ 14th of the season.
The answer is pressure. Expectation is another way to say it. Before last week, the Lions hadn’t had any — at all.
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They were a nice story in putting together a few wins and giving the big, bad Buffalo Bills a thrilling game on national television on Thanksgiving. It’s easy to forget, though, that the Lions were still just 4-7 after Josh Allen broke their hearts.
They were a curiosity. No one was talking playoffs. Not seriously.
But they are now, and in order to weather the next three weeks and make the postseason they will have to navigate the kind of pressure this franchise hasn’t had to worry about in years.
The kind of pressure the head coach spotted early Sunday afternoon in New Jersey. The kind of pressure that will only intensify if the Lions keep winning.
Being everyone’s darling and the toast of the league is fun, in theory. Fine, it’s fun in reality, too. It has its consequences, though.
One of the consequences is accepting everyone’s “cheese,” as Campbell said. Which is another way of saying kudos. He isn’t worried about the praise, though, or about it blowing up his team’s ego.
“We can play,” he said.
His team knows it can play. It isn’t craving affirmation from fans and the larger football community. In that sense, the “cheese” doesn’t matter.
What matters is the pressure that accompanies the “cheese.” Or rather, the pressure that comes when a team radically changes the direction of its season the way the Lions have.
It’s rare, and the Lions know it.
This kind of winning is new for most of the players on the team, either because they are young or have been on the Lions for a while and all they know is losing.
“For me, I’ve been around,” said Jamaal Williams, who was still irritated with the holding call that negated his touchdown run in the second half. “But for the rookies and second-year guys, yeah, this is different.”
Things began to change 10 days after that loss to Buffalo, when the Lions blitzed Jacksonville at Ford Field. It changed even more after they beat Minnesota the following week.
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That win wasn’t a fluke, the work of a plucky upstart. The Lions won because they were better in just about every way.
That win changed the expectation. And that changed the pressure. The Lions felt that pressure this past week leading up to the Jets game. Campbell saw it in his team’s play the first half.
It’s a natural reaction, to be sure. Human nature and all that. It’s also a reaction that’s easy to dismiss because the players are doing a job.
As with most kinds of change, hesitation is part of the curve, and before Sunday at MetLife Stadium, the Lions played freely. If they lost games, it was because they couldn’t cover receivers or convert the critical third or fourth down. Not because they were worried about meeting expectations.
Yeah, they lost a few because they were learning how to win early in the season. They lost at least one — maybe two — because Campbell was also learning how to win in his second season with the Lions.
But Sunday was a new challenge. The Lions were favored — on the road. Against a solid team with a great defense.
Also, a win meant getting back to .500. It also meant their playoff potential would become even more real. Again, that adds pressure.
Amon-Ra St. Brown hadn’t thought about it like that until his coach spoke at halftime Sunday.
“He said, ‘We’re playing not to lose, but what do we have to lose?’ And he’s right,” St. Brown said. “That resonated with me.”
The Lions made the plays they had to in the second half. They scored. They got a stop. They survived — yes, the Jets, but also themselves.
“This was another win but a different way to win and we had to find a different way to win,” Campbell said. “Every time that happens you just continue to grow, and you figure things out and your confidence grows.”
It’s all so new this winning. For you, certainly. For most of the players, too. Navigating that is real. The Lions had to do that Sunday.
They will probably have to do it again. Campbell said he will be ready.
“We can’t become so tense and start doing things that we weren’t doing (before),” he said. “There is a reason why we got to this point, (a reason) we got to this point and we’re beginning to win. If we start becoming so tense and uptight that we’re so afraid that we’re going to lose, you’re not going to win that way. That’s what we have to guard against. We’ll be on it.”
No doubt they will be. No doubt he will be.
It’s the key to the next three weeks.
Contact Shawn Windsor: 313-222-6487 or swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @shawnwindsor.