Dan Campbell faced a difficult decision heading into the Lions’ Week 17 showdown with the 49ers, a game that meant nothing from a playoff standpoint.
Rest some of your key players ahead of a massive Week 18 showdown that will determine the NFC’s No. 1 seed, or put your best foot forward against the team that ended your 2023 season one game shy of the Super Bowl, even if that means possible injuries? Campbell chose the latter, and the result was a 40-34 victory that had to feel good for Campbell and his players following last year’s NFC title game loss to San Francisco.
Campbell addressed his decision following Monday night’s win:
I thought a lot about it. I thought about it leading up to the game. I thought about it last night. I told the staff. But I ended up settling on, the right thing to do was play these guys because we owed it to the team.
It was just one of those positions we were in. It’s just hard to say who you’re gonna sit. And it’s not fair to ask guys to play that haven’t been prepared to play. … And I think, the biggest thing is there was things that we wanted to do better than we did last week and we did. We cleaned a lot of things up offensively, I thought. Defensively, we talked about getting takeaways. We got takeaways. That will always serve you well going into next week.
Look, we knew what this is. You’re out on the West Coast. Man, it’s all good. This is what we do. You know what I mean? This is what we do. We love it hard. This is our deal right now. We’re looking forward to this, everything about this week.
Throughout Monday night’s broadcast, ESPN analyst and Hall of Fame quarterback Troy Aikman compared Campbell to his former coach, Hall of Famer Jimmy Johnson. And while Campbell definitely has some of Johnson’s traits, his actions against the 49ers mirrored what another Hall of Fame coach did in a similar spot nearly 50 years earlier.
In his team’s second-to-last game of the 1976 season, then-Raiders coach John Madden was faced with a tough predicament on “Monday Night Football.” He could rest some of his starters against the Bengals, and by doing so, would increase the odds of the Bengals winning and thus knocking the Steelers — who had beaten Madden’s Raiders in the previous two AFC title games — out of playoff contention.
While the thought of eliminating the two-time defending Super Bowl champions had to have crossed his mind, Madden didn’t let it impact his decision to go all-out against the Bengals. The Raiders won, knocking the Bengals out of playoff contention and allowing the Steelers entry into the tournament. The decision did not come back to haunt Madden, as his team vanquished Pittsburgh three weeks later for the right to go to the Super Bowl, which the Raiders also won.
We’ll see if Campbell and the Lions enjoy a similar fate this year, starting with Sunday night’s massive showdown with the Vikings.
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