Week 8 saw the Detroit Lions come close to beating the Miami Dolphins. A 10-point halftime lead was promising, but coach Dan Campbell’s Lions fell apart on both sides of the ball in the second half and lost, 31-27, in front of a disappointed home crowd.
The Lions are now 0-4 in one-score games in 2022. That drags down what was already a poor 2-6-1 record for Campbell in games decided by eight points or less in his debut 2021 season as Lions coach.
After the game, the frustrated head coach was asked about how he can turn around the terrible outcomes in close games. Campbell drew upon the words of his one-time NFL coach and obvious influence, Bill Parcells.
“Bill Parcells just used to say, ‘The only way to win close games is win close games.’ So, like, we’ve got to find a way to win a close game when we’re actually playing in close games, and that’s how you build confidence to do it,” Campbell said after the game. “And until then, you’ve got to do all the little things right. So I think it’s all-encompassing.”
Campbell continued,
“Hey, it’s frustrating, but I know everybody’s tired of hearing it’s close, but I do know we’re close, and you just don’t know when it’s going to turn. But if we don’t keep swinging away at it, it’ll only get worse.”
Several of Campbell’s players had similar thoughts in the locker room after the tough loss.
“It’s really hard,” quarterback Jared Goff offered. “You know typically all these games are going to be one score, right? And the teams that have the good records are on the right side of that and the teams that don’t aren’t. And we have been on the wrong side of it a handful of times now. It’s hard, but you know at some point it’s going to flip if you keep doing things the right way. And that’s the only thing we can do, keep trying to do things the right way and keep putting our best foot forward and trusting everyone around us and doing our jobs to the best of our ability.”
Left tackle Taylor Decker, who admitted the losing is “exhausting”, echoed his quarterback’s thoughts.
“I think when we get those opportunities, we have to not press to try to make a play,” Decker said. “We literally just have to do our jobs like we did in the first half, and everything takes care of itself; everything is smooth. You don’t want guys that are too amped up to try to do something extra because usually when you try to do something extra is when bad stuff happens. They just want us to go out there and do our job, and God we have so many good pieces. We have so many good guys in this locker room. We just do, we have enough. We just have to play a complete game. We have to play for 60.”
Running back Jamaal Williams scored two TDs in the first half, but he too was frustrated after the game.
“But we know what we need to do,” Williams said. “Of course, it’s irritating to hear the same question over and over and know how close we really are. We’ve just got to keep going. So, that’s why I don’t really pay attention to the words or people saying anything just because we know how really close we really are. It’s just up to us to find out, pull it out of ourselves and come out with these (wins).”
Decker’s sentiment about playing for a full 60 minutes is perhaps the most important thing anyone said after the game. As the longest-tenured Lions player on offense, his veteran wisdom is sharp. But getting that to translate across a very young roster that almost uniformly has not tasted NFL success is a difficult task.
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