Pride of Detroit
Detroit Lions coach Dan Campbell put a cap on the team’s 2026 season on Monday afternoon with a relatively brief press conference. In an 11-minute session, Campbell expressed his frustrations about what went wrong this year, talked about some vague plans for what’s next, and gave himself a very harsh grade for how he handled the year.
Here are my five biggest takeaways from Campbell’s end-of-season press conference .
Dan Campbell has been hinting at making some changes this offseason—not necessarily on the coaching staff—but it certainly doesn’t take much reading between the lines to deduce that could be on the table. During his Monday presser, Campbell said that will be the first thing he assess later this week.
“The first thing I’ve got to figure out is the staff. I need to make sure that—where do we go from here?” Campbell said. “I just need to either—I need to make sure that I feel good about where the guys are at, the positions they’re in. Or do we tweak a couple of things, move a couple of guys, do we stay pat?”
Last week, Campbell stood up for Kelvin Sheppard, noting that he feels like the first-time defensive coordinator did a “damn good job,” while also noting he hadn’t made any decisions on his—or anyone’s— future yet.
Part of the staffing decisions Campbell will have to make is whether he will continue to call plays for the offense moving forward. The Lions coach did not provide much clarity on where he’s currently leaning in that decision.
“I’m open to anything. I don’t know exactly where I’m at with that yet,” Campbell said. “I mean I guess one of the good things if I did do that, you don’t have to worry about somebody else leaving. You don’t have to worry about your play-caller leaving. So, that would be one of the perks of it. But listen, I’m going to think through all of that and I think I really want to do what I feel is best for the team.”
One of the more mysteriously intriguing parts of Campbell press conference was his desire to have the team operating more like they did a few years ago.
“I want to get back to some of the things we were doing a couple of years ago. And what I mean by that is just getting back to a little bit of what we did at the ground level, just little bit of the way we train, the way we go about things,” Campbell said. “This is going to be a good training camp for us. We’re going to go back and really sharpen the sword a little bit. And I know that’s a ways off, but I think that’s the big thing.”
When pushed about what the Lions may have gotten away from this year, Campbell opted not to get into details about what he...
