Allen Park — Detroit Lions coach Dan Campbell met with the media on Monday afternoon, following the team’s bye week. Here are the most interesting items out of that conversation.
Workload cap planned for Branch
Coming out of the bye, everything remains on track for safety Brian Branch to make his season debut this week after a 10-month recovery from last season’s Achilles tear.
The question then becomes, how much should we expect the defender to play against Green Bay?
“I think that’d be asking a lot to say he's gonna play 70 plays,” Campbell said “But we do feel like he can handle quite a bit here, and we're gonna push him in practice here early. That's one of the reasons why we're practicing tomorrow and not Wednesday, so we can push some of these guys a little bit, knowing they're going into a day off. I think that'll help a little bit, and then we'll have a really good idea by the time we hit the game. We already kind of have a range of what we're looking at for him.”
While it might not be a full workload, it sounds like the Lions intend to play Branch plenty on Sunday. It just might be closer to his rookie season in 2025, when he was on the field closer to three-quarters of the team’s defensive snaps vs. every play.
When defensive tackle Alim McNeill made a mid-season debut last year, he worked 44 reps, or 63.8% of the day’s potential workload. He ranged between 47-69 snaps (73.2-95.2%) the rest of the season, outside of the finale, when he suffered an in-game injury.
That suggests Branch could ramp up quickly once the team knocks off some of the initial rust.
Center rotation temporarily on the table
Center Cade Mays is also on track to return from the broken wrist bone he suffered during training camp.
But like Branch, Campbell remains hesitant to committing to full workload for the young center, especially with backup Juice Scruggs playing so well through the first month of the season.
So a rotation, at least for this week, remains a possibility.
Regardless of how things shake out on Sunday, Campbell is excited about the team’s depth up front, which he noted includes left guard Christian Mahogany performing well.
Back to Scruggs, Campbell praised general manager Brad Holmes for having the foresight to pull the lineman out of Houston as part of the return package for running back David Montgomery.
Campbell said there isn’t much Scruggs can’t do, and while the immediate plan is to keep him at center, as insurance during Mays’ re-acclimation, having Scruggs eventually compete for snaps at left guard, or plugging him into the jumbo package as an extra blocker, isn’t out of the question.
Feeling better at the bye
Campbell didn’t want to provide any insight on things he and the coaching staff identified from their self-scout during the bye, but he noted he was more encouraged about the direction of this year’s team at the break than last year’s version.
“Last year was one of those rare years where we had (our bye), really, right in the middle (of the season),” Campbell said. We went in and I don't remember what we were, but we had just won and it seemed pretty good. But there were some things that you could feel a little bit. And that, in some regards, I feel better going into this bye than even I did last year because I know we're ascending and we're young and we're growing and that's exciting.
“Sometimes you feel like you're topped off and maybe you're beginning to deteriorate because of issues — worn down, age, whatever it is,” Campbell said. ‘…I do feel like we're on the rise here a little bit. We've just got to keep getting better. We've got to keep testing ourselves.”
That might feel like hindsight commentary, but Campbell was never going to openly question the direction of his roster in real time. Regardless, the 2025 team exited the bye with a 5-2 record before trading wins and losses the next six weeks, leading into a back-breaking three-game losing streak in December that killed their postseason aspirations.
In fact, it’s been more than a year since the Lions have won back-to-back games, something Campbell quickly acknowledged as unacceptable for any good team.
“I mean, that's tough,” he said. “You don't want to do this roller coaster. It can get frustrating. And inevitably, if we really want to be the team we need to be, that we need to be, we want to be, you've got to win back-to-back games. And you’ve got to do it more than once a year. Every winning team I've been a part of, you start stacking wins and even after a loss, you'll stack a couple more. So, we've got to find that again, see if we can get these back-to-back wins. We're capable. We’ve just got to play 60 minutes of football, and we've got to play better than we did at Arizona.”
Going as planned
There are only so many ways to compare offensive linemen, but if we’re leaning on the evaluation of Pro Football Focus, All-Pro Penei Sewell has been as good as ever since moving to left tackle, the position he played in college.
Sewell is the publication’s top-ranked offensive tackle, by a wide margin, excelling as a run blocker while allowing just seven pressures (one sack) in protection.
Campbell’s been thrilled with the early results with the transition.
“It's been outstanding,” Campbell said. “…I still feel an ascending player. I feel like, in some regards, he looks even more smooth than he did at right. And I never thought he looked out of place at right or didn't look smooth. It's just, it almost feels like he's found even another little gear here, his ability to get out of his stance and anchor and punch and run off the football. It's a credit to him. He's banked a lot of reps and honestly he can go anywhere. I mean, you can put him in the left, you can put him at right. That's why we move him a little bit. Yeah, he's playing high level football right now.
shows how silly PFF is for dinging Sewell on that Chase Young sack
The division and any wildcard will be decided the last 4 games of the year.