If the Vikings lose on Sunday to the Packers, the Lions can seize the No. 1 seed with a Monday night win over the 49ers. If the Vikings win on Sunday, the Week 18 game between Minnesota and Detroit becomes a winner-take-all contest for home-field advantage throughout the playoffs.
In other words, Monday night’s game between the Lions and 49ers will be irrelevant to the final standings, if the Vikings prevail on Sunday.
For some teams, that would create an interesting dilemma regarding whether to go all out or to rest starters. The Lions are not one of those teams.
“I’ll make this easy for everybody, that way all the critics can jump out and start attacking, but that way you don’t have to debate them anymore,” Lions coach Dan Campbell told reporters on Wednesday. “We’re bringing everything we got to this game and we are playing, I don’t care what it looks like and where it’s at and who’s this, who’s that. We’re going out to play and win this game, out on the West Coast. So there you go.”
And there the season goes, possibly, if the Lions get stung one or two more times by the injury bug. Without naming names for fear of being accused of establishing a jinx, we know which players the Lions need the most. If one or more goes down in a meaningless game, Campbell will have to come up with a better answer than, “We go all out no matter what.”
Sometimes, a situation requires strategy that might deviate from the default. However it might manifest itself the rest of the way in 2024 (and it might not manifest at all), stubborn adherence to the way we always do things could undo the question for a Super Bowl win.
It happened last year, when the Lions could have attempted a field goal to reclaim a three-score lead, midway through the third quarter of the NFC Championship. But they went for it because that’s the way we always do things. So when the fourth-down pass failed and the 49ers got a very real lift from it (as shown in the Netflix Receiver series), the door was opened for a San Francisco comeback victory.
With a road game in Santa Clark and a short week to get ready for a Vikings team that will need one win to be the No. 1 seed, does it make sense to have a starting lineup that is worn down and maybe banged up? Or does it make sense to give guys some late-season rest — in the hopes of nailing down a postseason bye?
Whatever Campbell decides to do, it should take more thought than none at all. It’s an important decision, with multiple potential ramifications.
Campbell deserves a ton of credit for transforming the franchise with his kneecap-biting mindset. To get to the top of the mountain, however, sometimes the best decision isn’t to say, “Shut up and keep climbing.”
