One of the NFL's sorriest franchises has a chance to finally play for the Super Bowl
The Detroit Lions are a team synonymous with futility, but head coach Dan Campbell has them poised for their deepest playoff run ever this year
You’ve heard the stories and seen the stats by now. Thirty-two years since the last conference championship game berth. Only one trip to the NFC title game ever. More winless seasons than Super Bowl appearances.
Any way you slice it it’s clear the Detroit Lions fanbase has been starved for success. Maybe tortured is a better way to describe it. They’ve endured decades of ineptitude on the field with nothing but an annual Thanksgiving game, and Barry Sanders or Calvin Johnson highlights to hang their hat on.
In 2021 the Lions hired Dan Campbell, a so-called player’s coach, who’s known for his ra-ra attitude and old school, aggressive mentality towards playing football. A meathead’s meathead, if you will. The decision was laughed at in analytics circles at the time of his hiring — because you can’t measure grit on a spreadsheet — but the fact of the matter is Campbell has his team on the brink of doing something no Lions team has ever done before: playing for a Super Bowl title.
“I envisioned that we would have a chance to compete with the big boys, and that’s where we’re at.” Campbell said after their divisional round win over the Buccaneers this past weekend.
Detroit was one of the worst teams in the NFL as recently as his first season in charge in 2021. The Lions went 3-13-1 before improving to a respectable 9-8 in 2022, and then a 12-5 season this year paved the way to an NFC North title and the No. 3 seed in the NFC playoffs.
The Lions have gained nearly 240 points in Elo1 since his hiring, which places them among the top five best teams in the NFL as of today after being one of the worst just three seasons ago.
The 2023 season has felt different for Detroit. The Lions won two playoff games in a season for the first time since 1957, the last year they won the NFL title, which happened to be 10 years before the first Super Bowl was played. This was also the first time they had hosted two postseason games at home; and the first time Eminem has done the Sunday Night Football intro, which can only mean something is going right for the league’s most downtrodden franchise.
One more win and history will be made.
The Lions hope this year’s NFC title game works out better than their first, though, when Washington dismantled them 41-10 on Jan. 12, 1992.
Judging by my social media followers and general attitude of the national media, so is most of the country.
Most neutral fans will undoubtedly be rooting for Detroit this weekend. Think about this: If every team had an equal shot at winning the Super Bowl at the beginning of a given season, the Lions would have been expected to win almost two titles since the 1970 AFL-NFL merger by now. That’s assuming every team has about a 1-in-32 chance (adjusted for how many teams play in each season) of winning the Lombardi Trophy.
But they’ve won zero Conference titles, let alone Super Bowls.
The last men’s professional sports championship in North America went to the MLB’s Texas Rangers, like I wrote about in November. The city of Detroit is 15th on the list of my made-up Titles over Expected (ToE) metric with a positive ToE differential of +0.69, but that’s almost exclusively thanks to the Detroit Red Wings’ dynasty of the 1990s and early 2000s. The Lions’ futility certainly hasn’t helped the city’s numbers.
But if the Lions somehow eke out a championship, one of America’s formerly proud cities would be able to boast a top-10 ranking on this list.
The best story in sports will either get even better if the Lions reach the Big Game in Las Vegas two weeks from now, or the magic will run out against the 49ers in Santa Clara Sunday. Oddsmakers don’t have much faith in the Lions; but faith is something this team’s fans have been short on for a long time.
San Francisco is still the odds-on favorite to win the Super Bowl, with the Baltimore Ravens not far behind in analyst’s minds2. At 30 percent the Lions have the lowest chance of advancing to the championship game, according to a composite average of expert prognosticators like Pinnacle, Neil Paine, PFF and other analytics models.
The most likely matchup in Super Bowl LVIII is 49ers-Ravens, as its been since the start of the playoffs.
But I’m sure Dan Campbell doesn’t care about what the spreadsheets say.
If you’re a stathead like me and want more win probability graphs and game excitement rankings check out my NFL Win Probability app, as well as my NFL analytics website for a deeper dive into league, team and player trends from this season.
Elo is a rating system devised to measure a team's strength over time, accounting for the strength of opponents, locations of games, and margin of victory. The average rating is 1500. Data collected from Neil Paine, who’s Substack you should check out.