The news got to the Lions through dribs and drabs.
The first piece of information passed along to team president Rod Wood came Tuesday, with the NFL letting Detroit know it wouldn’t be in an international game. On Wednesday morning, Wood was told that one Lions game would be announced Thursday morning, ahead of the full schedule release. And then came the schedule in full, later in the day Wednesday, with that top line being of most interest.
The one catch was the security around it. Wood needed two or three passwords to get to it, and when he did, the file itself was locked up like Fort Knox—he couldn’t print it, nor could he forward it to anyone else. Which only added to the moment he was about to have, in calling third-year coach Dan Campbell and GM Brad Holmes to his office.
, Wood said.
Then, he said matter-of-factly, .
Campbell and Holmes couldn’t hold their emotion in, nor did they try to.
“Rod, he doesn’t do a great job of holding his emotions back,” Campbell said from the Lions facility Friday morning. “He’s pretty reserved, but you can tell with him when something’s coming. His left eyebrow goes up. So he’s trying to stay straight faced. He started on it, and you could just tell. He just went right down the lineup and gave it to us one by one. I didn’t want him to show it to us, anyway, so he just read it first.”
The coach then paused and added, “It was great. It was good, man. It’s exciting.”
It’s fair to say that, for the three guys sitting in that room in suburban Detroit, the moment meant a little more than putting a scheduling magnet on a calendar. It was, in so many ways, another marker of how far the franchise has come in two years’ time. It’s the record, sure, and how the Lions got to 9–8 last year—with eight wins in their final 10 games. But it’s also in how they’re perceived now.
This, in essence, was the NFL’s saying it wanted to use one of its biggest stages to introduce a fun, tough, lively Lions team to a nationwide audience, in putting that Lions team opposite its two-time champion. And how mind-blowing was that? Well, the man who’ll call that game, NBC’s Mike Tirico summed it up in a text to Wood after the game was announced: .
“I agree with that,” Wood said Saturday. “That we would’ve been shown on the premiere, the first game of the season, against the defending Super Bowl champs, if you’d have told mea year ago, I’d have said, .”
So now, the Lions get to go from trying to prove everyone wrong, to working to prove people right. Which is yet another symbol of how far they’ve come.
