Can someone please explain what just happened?
I take one measly week off and the Detroit Lions forget how to play football? In Charlotte, North Carolina? A city where the height of sports entertainment is watching dudes drive in a circle for three hours?
So now the Lions’ playoff hopes are on life support; they can be eliminated Sunday if they lose to the Chicago Bears and a bunch of other stuff happens that would require me to use pie charts, a protractor, a math nerd who knows how to use that protractor, and an FBI-style evidence board so large it would require several skeins of red yarn.
I get it. Every Lions fans — and maybe every sports fan in Detroit — has playoff fever for the first time in a long time and it’s more contagious than COVID-19, RSV and “The White Lotus” combined. It’s an exciting time to be alive in Detroit in December, when everyone’s hoping for a winner, for some luck to finally befall the same old Lions.
With two games left, it isn’t likely to happen. With time running out, they simply need too much help now from the three teams ahead of them in the playoff hunt.
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JEFF SEIDEL:Why I still think the Lions will make the playoffs this season
There’s no doubt the Lions’ first playoff game in six years would be a hoot and a nice change of pace. But if it doesn’t happen, if the Lions are eliminated this week or the next — even if they end on the dire note of a three-game losing streak and finish 7-10 — let me tell you something about this team this season.
It has been a success. Because the Lions have taken steps. They have made strides. And as anyone who has raised a child can tell you, when kids take their first steps, they always stumble. No child or NFL team has ever gone from crawling to standing to walking to running with uninterrupted success.
If you weigh the entirety of this season, from the 1-6 start to the 6-1 streak that followed to the crash in Carolina to whatever comes next, the Lions have done enough already to prove they know how to pick themselves up and move forward.
When I asked Dan Campbell on Wednesday if the season could still be viewed as a success even if the team doesn’t make the playoffs, it was, of course, learning how to rally from a stumble that interested him much more than making pronouncements about a season that isn’t over.
“Yeah, I’m not even going to get into that honestly, just until this thing is done because of where we’re at,” the Lions coach said. “To me, success would be winning this game right now. To bounce back after a tough loss and get back on track, and to me, this is our recalibrate week.”
Frankly, I expected this answer because NFL coaches are about as myopic as a near-sighted mole in a black room at midnight. I will ask Campbell this question again after the season, when I’m sure he will have a much different answer.
When I posed the question to offensive lineman Taylor Decker, he inhaled deeply and gave me a much different answer.
“I would say this has definitely been a season of growth and an overall step in the right direction,” the left tackle said. “And I’ve been saying that, you know, when we were 1-5. I was like, ‘Man, we’re doing the right things. We’re just not doing enough of the right things.’ I have to still think we’re trending in the right direction.”
What Decker was speaking of was judging progress by more than the final tally on a box score or a record. I said the same thing in the first half of the season. The Lions did not look, play or feel like a 1-6 team. Just as they don’t feel right now like a team that got manhandled by a 6-9 Panthers team.
But that’s part of the learning process and the sign of progress for a rebuilding team like the Lions. They have to learn not to let problems snowball. Beating the Bears this week in their home finale would be a way to prove they’ve learned to do that.
Decker told me he hoped finding a way to overcome deficiencies and still beat the Jets two weeks ago would have served as proof the Lions could bounce back from adversity. In reality, the Jets game proved the Lions didn’t know how to handle such a big and dramatic win and carry the same preparation and execution into the next week against a lesser opponent.
Decker told me one more thing that proves this is a successful season for the Lions. He said coaches texted players Tuesday and told them ahead of time that they would practice in full pads Wednesday, which is somewhat uncommon this late in the season. Yet there was no complaining, for one very big reason: trust.
“If it’s what this staff believes is the best thing for us, then we have a lot, a lot of trust,” Decker said. “And I think especially this year, kind of seeing some of that trust and then pay dividends for us, I think that kind of snowballs. Like we trust them, and we know they’re not gonna put us out there and put us in pads and full contact just to (expletive) us.”
The result? It was telling. Players knew what the coaches believed they needed to see from the team, and the team delivered.
“Today’s practice was awesome,” Decker said. “Guys were flying around.”
The way Decker spoke felt almost cathartic. And maybe it was. He mentioned the bad taste that lingered from the Panthers loss. Campbell probably understood the players needed to get some of that angst out of their system and the physical, spirited practice probably accomplished that.
This is the kind of stuff that makes for a successful season. It’s the unseen, unquantifiable part of a team’s growth. The locker room still maintained that relaxed, confident vibe Wednesday that has been pumping through players and coaches the past two months.
So yes, it’s an exciting time to be alive in Detroit in December. Maybe the playoffs will come. Maybe they won’t. But that we’re even talking about that possibility instead of a coach’s hot seat tells us this is already a successful season, no matter what the final record is.
Contact Carlos Monarrez: cmonarrez@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @cmonarrez.