Even in victory, Lions head coach Dan Campbell remains focused on improving his team. Campbell found some areas where his team needs to do better than they did in Kansas City in Week 1 if they hope to keep the wins rolling.
Campbell’s Lions beat the Chiefs, 21-20, on Thursday night. It’s a great win, knocking off the reigning Super Bowl champs in their own building to kick off the new NFL season. The head coach won’t let his players or assistant coaches revel in the accomplishment without working on issues he saw during the game.
What stood out to Campbell that needs to improve?
“Probably offensively is tempo. Man, we’ve got to improve our tempo,” Campbell said on Friday. “That’s probably top of the list right now and then third-down offensively. And we weren’t great on defense either in that first half, now we turned it around there, but I think those are a couple things we’ve got to clean up that would be top of the list here.”
The Lions had some plays on both sides of the ball where the timing and coordination between the different units were not sharp. Fortunately, the Lions made more plays on offense and defense than the Chiefs did, and came away with the victory.
Campbell noted that “they are very correctable issues that we’ve got here, so that’s what fires you up. We’ve got so much room to grow and get better.”