Campbell on hype around Lions: Have to ‘earn it’

ALLEN PARK, Mich. — As the Detroit Lions enter the 2023 season, there have been some high expectations placed on the team that even head coach Dan Campbell couldn’t ignore.

“I think as always, the thing that’s gonna worry you is the hype train,” Campbell said Sunday, the Lions’ first day of training camp. “I mean, as with most coaches, this thing is just taking off and it’s out of control right now and that’s fine, as long as we stay focused on the job at hand and the work. I just keep going back to that. We’ve got to put the work in and earn it.”

Although the organization hasn’t reached the playoffs since 2016, the Lions are the consensus betting favorite to win the NFC North after winning eight of their final 10 games to end last season. Detroit hasn’t won the division since 1993, when it was called the NFC Central and had five teams.

They also have four prime-time games on the schedule, in addition to their annual Thanksgiving Day game.

Second-year defensive end Aidan Hutchinson says it’s nearly impossible to fully ignore the outside chatter.

“It’s kind of hard not to see it,” he said. “We’ve got the TVs on in there and it just pops up so you see it and I think it’s smart if a lot of our guys stay off of it just because it can get to your head a little bit, but I think we’re doing a good job of keeping our mentality and keeping what we’ve been doing, especially even last year, and building off of it. I think we’re doing a good job with our mentality. We keep that underdog mentality. We haven’t won anything yet, so obviously there’s a lot of expectations, but then again, we still feel like the underdogs.”

Campbell is also trying not to let his players feed into the extra attention.

“I think you just keep the message consistent, and you call it what it is, and it just goes back to the work,” Campbell said. “And when you see it not going that way or we have some guys that are deviating a little bit, or they think they’ve arrived and they haven’t, you call them out on it.

“I think as long as we do that as coaches and players as teammates, we’ll be fine.”

Lions quarterback Jared Goff credits Campbell for being the “greatest” at keeping the locker room on an even keel. Goff also gets a kick out of the buzz surrounding the Lions this season.

The 2016 No. 1 pick knows what it takes to compete on the big stage after leading the Los Angeles Rams to a Super Bowl appearance in 2018. For the Lions to reach similar heights, he knows they can’t allow outside distractions to get them off track.

“That so-called ‘hype train,’ I think it’s funny to me that like you go 9-8, you don’t make the playoffs and now you’re all of a sudden the favorite,” Goff said. “Of course, we’ve got good players, we’ve got good coaches, we’ve got a good team, but we haven’t done anything.

“We have a lot of work to do. Minnesota won 13 games last year, Green Bay’s won the division a handful of times in the last handful of years, so we’ve got some work to do to put the stamp on who we want to be and are nowhere near that yet, but are on our way.”