As a tactician, Dan Campbell is best known and best loved for leading with his face. No hill too high, no risk too great, no goofy idea gone untried—that's in considerable part how he made the Detroit Lions one of the best and indisputably the most charming team in the NFL.
Sunday's signature Big Goofy Idea, though, was a bold one even for Campbell. He somehow managed to convince Philadelphia Eagles fans to boo their team off the field at halftime and then could only watch as the Eagles won them all back by the end of the game. The Eagles did this simply by changing their identity from offensive clown show to defensive monolith, and Campbell's Lions let it happen by refusing to change anything at all. Philadelphia's 16-9 victory was a largely turgid evening's entertainment, save the way they shed their skin and emerged as a different team, one that won by means of exceedingly stout defenders and whatever offense they could scrape up. And while it is unlikely to ever convince the fan base to stop hating its own coach, Suckin' Nick Sirianni, it is finally something other than winning every game by a field goal. That's something.
Jalen Hurts, the Super Bowl-winning quarterback who is also the foremost object of the city's (considerable) sports fan angst, was largely ineffectual; he finished 14-of-28 for 135 yards, and rushed 10 times for 31 more. The tush push was not the automatic get-out-of-jail-free card it typically is. A.J. Brown finally got a bunch of targets after weeks of performing his passive-aggressive dissatisfaction with the play-calling, and still cast no particular shadow upon the game. The longest play of their evening went to little-known and unremembered Jahan Dotson, a 34-yard pass augmented by an unnecessary roughness call. That big gain ultimately set up a punt.
And yet Philadelphia's was the better offense, because Detroit produced none at all. Their best play was an electrifying 40-yard touchdown to Jameson Williams that was made more remarkable for the way he ran to the goal post and treated it the way a child treats his parent who has just returned from a long trip overseas. Williams ran at it and wrapped his legs around it long enough to get an excessive groping penalty; it was as if he knew that he and his teammates wouldn't see it again for a while. The resulting penalty drove their conversion attempt out of range on a windy night.
The rest of the offensive output amounted to watching Jared Goff being driven to distraction by endless waves of Philadelphia pass rushers in his personal space. Goff entered the game connecting on a league-leading 74 percent of his throws, but missed an astonishing 23 of 37 on Sunday night, and was just 7-for-25 in the second half; he was sacked twice, hit seven other times, and visibly uncomfortable throughout. The running game was meh-tastic despite some lightning from Jahmyr Gibbs, and go-to receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown caught only two of his 12 targeted throws. Campbell's signature move, going for it on fourth down, was a repeated failure: The team turned the ball over on downs five times, including a fake punt attempt in which linebacker Grant Stuard gained neither of the two required yards. The last time the Lions were this inert in do-or-die situations, they got shut out in New England three years ago. That was before anyone expected any different from them.
In all, while the Eagles defended like champions do, or at least how they should, the Lions cast doubt upon their own sparkly charms. They are now a full game behind the deeply ordinary Bears in the NFC North, and a half-game behind the Bizarro Packers, and while their struggles are not generating the same level of concern as the Chiefs, who were beaten by Wil Lutz and several other Denver Broncos earlier in the day and dropped to a grim 5-5, the Lions no longer feel like America's best hope for a fun Super Bowl. At this point, the top contenders there are the amusingly impertinent Patriots, the who-have-they-played Colts, the Eagles, and the sneaky-good Rams, who barely held off the sneaky-almost-as-good Seahawks despite intercepting Sam Darnold four times. All of those teams are good, but none of them really stand out as much better than the others. The most noticeable performance of the entire day was Shedeur Sanders finally getting some run in Cleveland after an apparent head injury to starter Dillon Gabriel, and going 4-for-16 for 47 yards and two first downs in a full half.
None of that seems particularly amaze-worthy—certainly not to the level of, say, the Grey Cup, which was won by Saskatchewan and its 39-year-old quarterback Trevor Harris. Harris has played for 11 teams, including five of the nine in Canada; he hasn't screwed up a fourth down in 13 years, although part of that may be because they don't have fourth down in the CFL. Trust us, it was a much better game.
The Lions are hardly done, but this was one of their least inspiring performances in the Campbell Era, because none of his stuff worked, for the first time in years, and because with all due respect to his distinctive manner and jarringly small dog, Campbell built his reputation on his stuff working a lot. But maybe his magic on Sunday night was just misdirected more than it was actively misfiring, because Campbell succeeded in doing something nobody thought possible. He may have recast Nick Sirianni as that rarest of coaching characters—venomously booed, even by his own players, but rarely beaten.
