Dan Campbell’s fourth-down reputation is still alive and well, even if the Lions have dialed it back a touch.
Over the last five seasons, Detroit has gone for it on fourth down more than any team in the NFL, with 186 attempts. Campbell has eased off that trigger a bit over the last two years, but the Lions still finished with the 10th-most fourth-down tries in the league last season at 31.
That willingness is part of who Campbell is. He’s not the kind of coach who’s going to abandon his instincts just to look safer, and he’d rather stick with his players and his own style than win by pretending to be somebody else.
The criticism, of course, comes with the territory. Whenever a fourth-down call fails, the people waiting to complain are never far behind, even when analytics often support the decision.
A recent episode of "Inside Football" brought another shot at Campbell’s approach. The show, created by former ESPN host Trey Wingo, featured Wingo, Pro Football Hall of Famer Cris Carter, former NFL coach Marvin Lewis and former Arizona Cardinals general manager Steve Keim previewing the NFC North for the 2026 season.
When the conversation turned to the Lions, Wingo asked for the front-office view on how Detroit could get back on track this season. Keim then stepped into the role of Brad Holmes and said what he would tell Campbell.
"If I'm Brad Holmes, one of the first things I'm going to say is 'Danny, I'm like, I love you. But right now your balls are bigger than your brains.
Like, we don't have to play like that.' You know what I'm saying?
Let's play within the system. Let's do the right things.
And more than anything, I think the one thing that's going to be a telltale sign for the Detroit Lions this year is, quite frankly, I think that they've got to feel embarrassed the way they finished the season last year. So, what are you made of?
Are we really that team that was ascending or are we now all of a sudden just the old Detroit Lions again?"
Keim’s own track record makes that a strange place to lecture from. His two head coaching hires, aside from Bruce Arians, were Steve Wilks and Kliff Kingsbury. After Arians left, the Cardinals went 31-50-1 over Keim’s final five seasons in charge.
The irony gets sharper when you look back at 2022. That Cardinals team had 41 fourth-down attempts, more than the Lions’ 37 that year, and only converted 18 of them.
If Keim wanted Kingsbury to rein in the aggression, that doesn’t show up anywhere in the numbers. Arizona finished 4-13 and moved on from both the general manager and the head coach after the season.
What’s clear is that Holmes is not going to talk to Campbell the way Keim described. There may be regular conversations about Campbell’s fourth-down choices and how to refine them, but not in the form of cheap shots or insults from the front office.
And if Keim really would speak to a head coach that way, it’s not hard to see why he’s out of work now and, by the look of it, not coming back.
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