Allen Park — One day, in the very near future, the entire Detroit Lions organization will have reprieve from being asked about the expectations surrounding their season.
But Friday was not that day.
And in the meantime, general manager Brad Holmes said, they’re not going to run from them.
“It does feel good and like what I’ve always said, I’m just happy for the fans and for the city of Detroit because they deserve that. They deserve excitement. They deserve hope, so that’s really good,” Holmes said.
“For us, let’s call it the ‘hype train.’ … It was a little surprising to me this past offseason just because we didn’t make the playoffs. Loved how we ended the season, but I didn’t think it would be to this magnitude, but regardless…how much positive news is coming out, we’ll still keep the same mindset as that we’ll always be the hunters and we’re not succumbing to targets on our back, no.
“We’ll always be the hunting and aiming for the target, so it doesn’t really change on much.”
That is, for all intents and purposes, what every fan wants to hear from their team’s general manager. It is perhaps the biggest reason the Holmes and Dan Campbell regime have such a high approval rating despite having been to exactly zero playoff games together, and why Holmes’ claim that his confidence is “very high” the Lions will win the NFC North has been met with general excitement, rather than nervousness.
Holmes’ belief that the Lions are finally ready to meet expectations is based in the idea that they already, “let’s call it, ‘took our medicine,’ in the past couple of years,” he said.
And yet, it was assistant general manager Ray Agnew — a former 11-year NFL veteran in his own right — who may have best described what players might be feeling.
“As a player, you want expectations. You want people to think you’re going to be good. And the reason why we can be comfortable is because the guys we have on this team. These guys are still hungry,” Agnew said. “They’re still hungry to prove that they’re great in this league. They’re still hungry to prove that we belong in the conversation, so I don’t worry about that. We’ve got a hungry group of guys.
“They come to work every day. You don’t see anybody slacking, laying off like we’ve figured it out, so I have no issues with that.”
With the players that he and Holmes have acquired over the last three years, Campbell is hardly surprised with the expectations that have built.
“You have this vision of where you want to go, where you see it going and what it’s going to take to get there. You don’t always know the timeline, but you know you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you and so I think we’re both very pleased,” Campbell said.
“And I think so much of it is, I just go back to this, yes, there’s an upgrade in talent, but man, we really believe we have football players. We’ve got good football players on this team and that’s the game that we’re playing. We’re not acquiring talent, we’re acquiring football players and I feel like that’s — we’ve got the most amount of those that we’ve had in three years, which gives me a lot of hope.”
Lions quarterback Jared Goff, who’s been here from the very beginning, said you can “sense” the change in the standard.
“It’s fun being here in the city with all this excitement and with that being said, it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t win and I think we all know that, I know that,” Goff said. “I’ve been on winning teams. I’ve been on losing teams. People will continue to be excited, if we continue to win. So, that’s kind of the fix to everything and winning fixes everything, as they say. So, if we can get on that winning streak, like I talked about.
“It starts with the first one, but find our way into a hot streak and keep winning and yeah, this city will continue to be excited, but it starts with this week with Kansas City and finding a way to win the first one.”
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