Dan Campbell faced a tough decision heading into the Lions’ Week 17 matchup against the 49ers, a game that meant nothing from a playoff standpoint.
Rest some of your key players ahead of a massive Week 18 matchup that will determine the NFC’s No. 1 seed, or do your best against the team that ended your 2023 season one game away from the Super Bowl, even if that It means it is possible. injuries? Campbell chose the latter, and the result was a 40-34 victory that had to feel good for Campbell and his players after last year’s NFC title game loss to San Francisco.
Campbell addressed his decision after Monday night’s win:
I thought about it a lot. I thought about it before the game. I thought about it last night. I told the staff. But I ended up deciding, the right thing to do was play against these guys because we owed it to the team.
It was just one of those positions we were in. It’s hard to say who you’re going to sit on. And it’s not fair to ask guys to play who haven’t been prepared to play. …And I think the most important thing is that there were things we wanted to do better than last week and we did. We’ve cleaned up a lot of things offensively, I thought. Defensively, we talked about getting takeout. We have takeout. That will always be very useful for next week.
Look, we knew what this is. You are on the west coast. Man, it’s all good. This is what we do. You know what I mean? This is what we do. We love it very much. This is our deal right now. We’re looking forward to this, everything about this week.
Throughout Monday night’s broadcast, ESPN analyst and Hall of Fame quarterback Troy Aikman compared Campbell to his former coach, Hall of Famer Jimmy Johnson. And while Campbell definitely has some of Johnson’s traits, his actions against the 49ers mirrored what another Hall of Fame coach did in a similar place nearly 50 years earlier.
In his team’s second-to-last game of the 1976 season, then-Raiders coach John Madden faced a difficult situation on “Monday Night Football.” He could rest some of his starters against the Bengals and, in doing so, increase the odds that the Bengals would win and thus knock the Steelers (who had beaten Madden’s Raiders in both games) out of playoff contention. previous AFC title wins).
While the thought of eliminating the two-time defending Super Bowl champions must have crossed his mind, Madden didn’t let it affect his decision to go all out against the Bengals. The Raiders won, knocking the Bengals out of playoff contention and allowing the Steelers into the tournament. The decision did not haunt Madden, as his team beat Pittsburgh three weeks later for the right to go to the Super Bowl, which the Raiders also won.
We’ll see if Campbell and the Lions enjoy a similar fate this year, starting with Sunday night’s massive showdown against the Vikings.
