Dan Campbell has been around this league a long time time as both a player and a coach and he knows these opportunities don’t come around often.
After watching his team’s 17-point lead slip away in Sunday night’s NFC Championship, the Lions HC was very upfront with his team. Sharing with reporters what he said to them after the game:
I told those guys, this may have been our only shot. Do I think that? No. Do I believe that? No. However, I know how hard it is to get here. I’m well aware. And it’s gonna be twice as hard to get back to this point next year than it was this year. That’s the reality. And if we don’t have the same hunger and the same work — which is a whole ‘nother thing once we get to the offseason — then we got no shot of getting back here.
Dan Campbell says it will be “twice as hard” to get back to this point next year 😬 pic.twitter.com/ZAfgyCVvwY
— Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) January 29, 2024
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Campbell added that you have to make the most out of every opportunity in the National Football League and that the Lions will no longer be sneaking up on people next season.
I don’t care how much better we get or what we add or what we draft. It’s irrelevant. It’s gonna be tough. Everybody in our division’s gonna be loaded back up. And, you know, you’re not hiding from anybody anymore. Everybody’s gonna want a piece of you. Which is fine, you know. Which is fine. … So it’s hard. You wanna make the most of every opportunity. And we had an opportunity and we couldn’t close it out.
Detroit led 24-7 at the half and ended up walking out of Levi’s Stadium with 34-31 loss. Certainly a tough one to swallow for a city and a franchise that’s never found itself in this situation before.