Sit around and gather together for another story from Dan Campbell’s playing days.
These days, Detroit Lions coach Dan Campbell has been labeled as an expert motivator. His authenticity, passion, and energy is infectious, and it’s why so many Lions players have labeled him as the best coach they’ve ever had .
It turns out Campbell has been a source of motivation well before his coaching days. Legendary football coach Todd Haley recently joined the “This Is Football” podcast with ESPN’s Kevin Clark, and told a great story about Campbell from his playing days with the Dallas Cowboys .
At the time, Haley was the wide receivers coach. And while we don’t get an exact date on this story, it was either in 2004 or 2005, when Bill Parcells was head coach of the team. Here’s how Haley remembers it:
“Practice on a Wednesday was going bad. You could see coach Parcells getting heated up. He was not happy with the way anything was going. There was no energy. And I see him call Dan Campbell over to the side and say a couple of words to him, and Dan runs back into the huddle. Parcells, with his arms crossed like he always did, walked over to me, and he said, ‘Watch this, Todd.’
“A fight ensued on the next play, and Dan Campbell was in the middle of it. As coaches, you’ve got to do whatever you have to do to get things going in the right direction. And he knew that Dan was his man to get in there and stir it up—and it worked. All of a sudden, (at) practice everyone is hootin’ and hollerin’, excited, and good things happened from there.”
Todd Haley was on the Cowboys staff when Dan Campbell was a player.
One day the Cowboys were struggling. Practice was lethargic. Bill Parcells had a secret weapon: Ask Dan Campbell to get in a practice fight.
Practice wasn’t lethargic after that. pic.twitter.com/JnNtchkSmB
— Kevin Clark (@bykevinclark) June 24, 2025
If this story sounds vaguely familiar, Campbell offered his perspective on a very similar situation. Back at the start of Campbell’s first training camp as head coach of the Lions, he told his own story from his time in Dallas that essentially matches this one.
“When I went to Dallas with Bill, you know what that was? That was—you’re two weeks into practice and you’d been through eight padded days, two-a-days, and guys are a little sloppy and he’d be like, ‘I want you to go up there and I want you to push (defensive end) Greg Ellis after the play. Just push him right in the back.’ I’m like, ‘Bill, you know it’s going to piss him off?’ ‘Yeah, I know.’ So then you do it, and then it’s an all-out fight, but guys got energy and juice because now all of a sudden you get a fight—and then he yells at me for starting a fight. I’m like, ‘Bill, you told me to push the guy in the back.’ It was classic Bill.”
Of course, none of this is surprising for anyone who has spent any time around Campbell. He has always been the perfect person to go to in order to add intensity to any situation.