On Sunday, Dan Campbell and the Detroit Lions had a golden opportunity as they led the Minnesota Vikings by 10 points going into the fourth quarter. The win would have been Campbell’s first road win with the Lions and the team’s first road win in their last 11 attempts.
Instead, the Lions somehow managed to allow the Vikings to outscore them 14-0 in the fourth quarter, including a touchdown with under a minute left to seal the deal.
Dan Campbell has message for Lions fans following embarrassing loss to Vikings
Late in the game, Dan Campbell made a decision that very well may have cost the Detroit Lions their second win of the season as he elected to go attempt a 54-yard field goal rather than punting or going for the game-winning first down.
On Monday, Campbell spoke to reporters and he had the following message for the fans.
“Yeah, listen, I get the road that everybody’s been down,” Campbell said. “Listen, I’m not sweating it. I’m not sweating it, this team’s not sweating it. We’ve got a long season. You look out throughout this League, and it happens this way every year, and I feel like what happens to you early in the season is – it really molds who you’re going to be as the season goes on and late in the season. Those ones that can endure the adversity of the season, the ups and downs and just stay in the race are the ones that have success. And that’s all we’ve got to worry about is our own – we’ve just got to – let’s clean up all the little errors.
And I told them, I said, ‘Look, failing isn’t failure unless you don’t learn from it.’ And so, that was a tough one. We were up two scores. Should have won that game, but you know what, we didn’t earn the right to win that game. Minnesota did, and we’ve got to look long and hard in the mirror to ourselves, and we’ve got to clean up these errors. And it’s not an excuse, but we are still young, and we’ve got some guys that even though they’re not old players, they haven’t played a lot of football, or they’re not young players, they haven’t played a lot of football.
So, we’ve got to learn from it, and we’ve got to move on and be better the next time it comes up, but I’m not – listen this is not time to go into panic mode. This is not the time to worry. This is time to do just what we did from Philly to Washington. Let’s just get better. Let’s just focus on the little details, so that’s what it’s about.”
Nation, do you think Dan Campbell will get his act together next time he has to make what could be a game-changing decision?
