That the Detroit Lions, still only a .500 team at 7-7, have any chance at all of making the NFL playoffs is pretty dang impressive, as their coach might say. They opened with six losses in seven games. And they are still the Detroit Lions: historically the saddest of sad-sack teams.
Since their most recent playoff victory, on 5 January 1992, at home against the Dallas Cowboys, the Lions have been in eight playoff games and have lost them all. They have not even appeared in the playoffs since 7 January 2017, when they lost a wild-card game at Seattle.
Less than two years ago, they traded their rawhide-tough quarterback, Matthew Stafford, to the Los Angeles Rams … and Stafford, of course, helped the Rams win Super Bowl LVI. Meanwhile, the Lions lost their first eight games last year and finished a dismal 3-13-1. Some people wrote that they had a decent chance to finish with the first 0-17 record in NFL history.
But look again! The Lions can’t win the NFC North this year; Minnesota (11-3) has that wrapped up. After a 20-17 come-from-behind victory Sunday on the road over the crumbling New York Jets, though, the Lions stand between a 34% and 43% chance of making the playoffs, according to the numbers-crunchers. Before Sunday, their chances were only half that.
According to the New York Times and FiveThirtyEight predictors’ gizmos, Detroit, ninth in the NFC standings, stand a 96% chance of making the playoffs by winning their last three games. So the Lions would need help to leapfrog the Commanders (7-6-1) and Seahawks (7-7) to reach the tournament.
(The Seahawks beat the Lions in a wild head-to-head battle on 2 October, 48-45. It is unlikely that Washington and Detroit would end with the same record, given the Commanders’ tie, but Detroit won the head-to-head match on 18 September, 38-27.)
Even a 34% to 43% likelihood is a lot better than the 0% chance with which the defending Super Bowl champion Rams, without an injured Stafford for the rest of the season, have after Monday’s loss to the Packers. It is fantastic for the Lions, a team with five winning seasons since 2000.
Most of the credit, as it should, has gone to the over-the-top, 46-year-old, second-year head coach Dan Campbell, a native Texan who opened his tenure by promising that the Lions might get knocked down sometimes, but they’d make sure to “bite a kneecap off” as they got up.
Little biting has been needed since 30 October. The Lions believe in themselves. The Lions took a late lead against the Jets on a 51-yard touchdown pass – on fourth-and-1 – from Jared Goff (the QB who was traded for Stafford) to wide-open tight end Brock Wright, who had dropped a pass earlier in the drive.
Just as impressive, the Lions’ defense played “pretty dang good”, as Campbell said later, sacking New York quarterback Zach Wilson for a critical 8-yard-loss on the Jets’ final drive, which ended with a missed 58-yard field goal. The Jets had lost two straight and badly needed this game, too. Their playoff-chance percentages slid into the 20s.
Goff said in a postgame news conference, “You’d rather win ugly than lose pretty. There were times earlier in the year when we were winning pretty in certain situations, and then kind of letting it fall away from us towards the end, and I think that’s totally flipped to where we’re at now. We’ve won some games recently pretty handily, but we’ve also won some close games, and won some games on the road close that we had to pull out and things had to go our way at the end.
“Is it going our way, or are we making a play? I lean toward making a play, whether it was a sack on that last drive, or just things we did up front, we’re starting to learn how to win and how to win consistently in close games in tough environments. And yeah, it’s a good, mature team now.”
Goff, 28, the former California quarterback whom the Rams took with the first overall pick in the 2016 NFL draft, threw for 252 yards and a touchdown against the Jets. Nothing spectacular. Of the NFL quarterbacks who have thrown for more than 2,000 yards this year, he is still only ninth in passer rating, with 23 touchdowns and seven interceptions.
At least he is playing, which is more than the quarterback picked second in that 2016 draft, Carson Wentz, can say. Wentz, on his third NFL team, lost his starting job with the Commanders when he broke his finger in October. Wentz is healthy but has not played since.
Detroit now face Carolina, Chicago and Green Bay – three teams with losing records. This might sound far-fetched, but the Lions still have a shot to play in their first Super Bowl. (Jacksonville, Cleveland and Houston are the other no-Supe NFL teams, but the Lions have been around since 1930.)
As it stands now, the Vikings (11-3) would be the Lions’ wild-card playoff opponent if they’d squeeze in with the seventh and final NFC seed. Before making history with a 39-36 overtime victory Saturday over Indianapolis, Minnesota lost to Detroit, 34-23.
That was the game in which the Lions sealed the victory with an audacious third-down completion from Goff to 335lb offensive tackle Penei Sewell, who’d reported as an eligible receiver. Campbell would say later that he could not hear the play called because 66,374 fans at Ford Field were distracting him – and apparently the Vikings – by doing the Wave.
Campbell was asked Sunday how it felt to be 7-7 after starting 1-6. He said it was a hard question to answer, “because you know you’ll be better”.
Campbell would add: “You just don’t know how it’s going to get there or what it’s going to be. You do know, if you start playing better football, you can rattle off some wins in a row. I think that’s the best way to say it. I didn’t know what it was going to look like or how it would be, but that’s kind of the idea. You start playing some pretty good football and you rattle off two or three in a row.
“If that’s good enough to get in, great,” he said of the playoffs. “If not, it didn’t work out.”
