Beating the 49ers Was Anything But Meaningless To Detroit
Credit: Junfu Han via Imagn Images
Coming into Monday night’s game against the San Francisco 49ers, the Detroit Lions had a decision to make. A Week 18 showdown with the Minnesota Vikings was looming. A mountain of injuries was getting larger. Playing a team out of the playoff picture, it felt like a perfect time for the Lions to take a deep breath, put the foot off the gas, and go after the No. 1 seed next week.
It made sense to everyone…except for Dan Campbell.
“I’ll make this easy for everybody,” Campbell told reporters last week. “We’re bringing everything that we have to this game, and we are playing, and I don’t care what it looks like and where it’s at or who’s this, who’s that. We’re going out to play and win this game out on the West Coast. So, there you go.”
Even with Campbell’s proclamation, many thought it might be coachspeak. Sure, the Lions may have wanted to win this game, but there were bigger fish to fry. But that’s not how this team operates and it led to an important milestone in a 40-34 win on Monday night.
Monday’s win over the 49ers didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. If the Lions lost, they still would have home field advantage on the line when they hosted the Vikings next week. It made the risk of an ankle or a knee bending the wrong way too much for most national analysts, and Troy Aikman and Joe Buck spent most of ESPN’s telecast wondering what Campbell was thinking playing his starters.
But there was some method to Campbell’s madness. The 49ers are out of the playoffs but they’re still a talented team. Everyone from Brock Purdy to Nick Bosa to George Kittle played at full speed during this game and may have been fueled by Campbell’s vow to win the game on Monday night.
There was also a tactical advantage to playing full speed. With the Lions down to second and third-stringers on defense, getting them starter’s reps could prove beneficial down the stretch. This is especially true considering the Lions will see many schemes similar to the “McShanahan” playbook that Kyle Shanahan utilizes with the 49ers.
Those are the on-field elements of playing like their season was on the line. But just as important was the mental element that could help the Lions make a deep run in the playoffs.
It has to be considered that Levi’s Stadium was where the 2023 season died for the Lions last January. Detroit took a 24-7 lead into halftime of the NFC Championship Game and was 30 minutes away from reaching the Super Bowl for the first time in franchise history. Glory was right there for the Lions to grab hold of… until the 49ers snatched it away.
Levi’s was where Campbell went for it twice on fourth down instead of kicking a pair of field goals. It was where a Brock Purdy pass hit Kindle Vildor right in the face mask before popping up to Brandon Aiyuk for a 51-yard reception. It’s where Jake Moody’s 33-yard field goal put San Francisco up 27-24 with 9:52 to play and Elijah Mitchell delivered the kill shot with just over three minutes to go.
Most Lions fans didn’t even want to watch this game. Imagine what it was like as a player running out of the same tunnel that they walked into after the most soul-crushing defeat of their career.
In a lot of ways, Monday’s game was a lot like a fighter tasting his blood, or digging their fingers into an old wound. The pain was still there, but it’s also part of the healing process, as Penei Sewell admitted after the game.
“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel some type of way at first, walking into this locker room and walking out into that field,” Sewell said via Colton Pouncy of The Athletic. “But I think, at the end of the day, we just gotta lock into what we need to accomplish.”
With that in mind, the Lions played their starters the entire game. Jared Goff threw for 303 yards and three touchdowns. Jahmyr Gibbs carried the running game for the second straight week with 18 carries for 117 yards and a touchdown. Jameson Williams took another step forward with five catches for 78 yards and a touchdown.
None of this healing would have happened if the Lions marched these guys out in sweatpants, even if they’d won. While the football world would have understood if Campbell had dialed things down with his starters, this is a Lions team that needs to play a full 60 minutes. And they especially needed to get their defense reps, as they surrendered 475 yards to a similar offense to the ones they’ll be facing over the next several weeks.
“This game didn’t really mean much, but this game meant everything to me,” Lions safety Kerby Joseph said. “I felt like we were so close and we came up short. So, the feeling to come back out here to San Fran and come back with the win, I know we started off slow on defense, but we were able to finish. I feel like this shows our grit and adversity.”
This game may have been meaningless to everyone outside of Detroit. But it mattered to the Lions, and you could tell by the way they played on Monday night.
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