For the first time in franchise history, the Detroit Lions have earned a playoff bye. It’s an unprecedented success for a team that just won two playoff games in the same season for the first time in over 60 years in 2023.
It’s not a new situation for head coach Dan Campbell, however. Campbell was part of a New Orleans Saints coaching staff that earned the top seed and a playoff bye back in 2018. Serving as the assistant head coach and TE coach under Sean Payton, those Saints went 13-3 and that was after resting several key starters in a regular season-ending loss (current Lions reserve Teddy Bridgewater started for Drew Brees at QB, among others).
Campbell was asked this week about what he learned from how those 2018 Saints handled a postseason bye week.
“Well, enjoy it. Just sit back for a minute and it’s really one of those things where for the players, you just want to keep the engine idling, that’s probably the best way to say it,” Campbell said retrospectively. “So, you don’t want to turn it off, but let’s just leave it in idle and really tomorrow they’re going to have off.”
Campbell continued, laying out the rest of the bye week schedule for the Lions players,
“We’re going to bring them in Thursday, we’re going to go good-on-good, practice. Most of it will be situations, end of half, end of game; we’ll come back Friday and do a full game, all out, three hours, full hitting, goal line, short yardage. Thursday, we’ll practice, it won’t be in pads but it will be end of game situations, probably an hour just to stay in flow and little things that we need, little detail work that we can get and that’s for the guys that we know can go out there and move and work. And then after that, giving them three days off and then they’ll be back in Monday and by then, hopefully we know the opponent and we’ll be ready to go.”
One of the things Campbell learned from that experience in New Orleans was not to over-prepare for an unknown opponent. The Lions coach is efforting to protect against that,
“Yeah, it’s really tough because here’s what I don’t want to do, and I’ve been a part of it as a player and a coach — you don’t know who you’re playing so then you start doing – you do leg work on another opponent and then you find out it’s not that opponent and so I would rather – I don’t want to do that to the coaches. So, my plan is to give them off three days this weekend, refresh, get your sleep, get your rest, we’re going to know hopefully by Sunday night, and then we come in and we’ll know the opponent. Then we are full force on that, full game plan, we’ll know who we face.”
Going back to those 2018 Saints…ironically, they lost to now-Lions QB Jared Goff and the Rams on a still-controversial officiating call in the NFC Championship game.