Thanksgiving week is 'hell week' for Dan Campbell, the Lions and the fans
Thanksgiving week is quite a week in the football world. Usually it consists of playing a grueling game on Sunday and then having to turn around and go right back to work on Monday. There's no rest and there's no time to breathe. Detroit Lions head coach Dan Campbell is feeling that this year. “This […]
Thanksgiving week is quite a week in the football world. Usually it consists of playing a grueling game on Sunday and then having to turn around and go right back to work on Monday. There's no rest and there's no time to breathe. Detroit Lions head coach Dan Campbell is feeling that this year.
“This week always reminds me – listen, it’s nowhere even close to the same, reminds me of hell week with the SEALs, when you hear them talk about that and it’s like, whatever they get, an hour or whatever and then the bell rings and you’re gone, you’re on to the next thing. So, it’s like these – just every once in a while, these power naps. You just hit it and then you’re up and then maybe – so that’s kind of where we’re at, man, just enough to refresh the brain and hit it again.”
Thanksgiving is a lot. It's not just the fast pace of the turnaround that you have to hit, there's so much more. This is a nationally televised game that damn near every family in America is going to have on their TV's on Thursday. The scrutiny is at a fever pitch on this day. All of this is enough to make anyone have a full on panic attack. I know I would.
In some ways it's not just hell week for the Lions, it's hell week for their fans too. This has traditionally been the one day of the year where everything is about the Lions. For a long time the team was so bad that the very least you could hold onto was that Thanksgiving football was a Lions thing.
The problem with that is that the Lions haven't won on Thanksgiving since 2016. Even when they're good, they still haven't been able to pull off the W. It's embarrassing because you know the world is watching and you know that the memes are going to be flying around afterwards.
This year has felt different for the most part because the 10-1 Lions have been so good and the Bears are on a five game losing streak. Surely this is the end right? This will be the time that Lions fans can enjoy their turkey for once and just know they had a good day right?
Then the injury report drops and you suddenly feel like you traveled back in time and Matt Patricia is the coach and you know the team is going to lose.
This team has been ultra resilient all year. One of the big themes about this season for the Lions has been passing tests. They passed the bounce back after a loss test, the running quarterback test, the not playing down to a bad opponent test, the weather test, the road test and the comeback from a large deficit test. Can they finally pass the Thanksgiving test? We're going to see on Thursday when hell week concludes at noon.
Thanksgiving against the Bears will provide a moment to be grateful for one veteran Lions player looking to show the world what he has
The Detroit Lions weren't the only ones to head to Indianapolis and get a win last Sunday. Veteran cornerback Emmanuel Moseley got a personal win in that game. It was his first full game that he played in since 2022. It has been a very long and hard road for Moseley in the past few […]
