Getty Detroit Lions general manager Brad Holmes.
It’s been 30 years since the Detroit Lions won a division title. Only one other NFL team has gone longer without finishing first in their division.
But that isn’t deterring Lions general manager Brad Holmes’ faith in his team winning the NFC North this season.
When asked during a press conference on September 1 about his confidence in the Lions capturing their first NFC North championship, Holmes initially had a very simple response.
“Very high,” said Holmes.
He continued on to describe how he anticipates the franchise’s efforts to the build the roster paying off this season.
“I do think we’ve, let’s call it take our medicine in the past couple years. Me and Dan [Campbell] talk about it all the time,” Holmes told the media. “We’ve coached the Senior Bowl, we’ve had to do ‘Hard Knocks,’ we’ve done all that, we’ve gone through a lot of darkness to get to this point.
“But that’s where the grit comes in place in terms of just not really wavering and put your head down or get discouraged. We just kind of just put the focus on building the best roster that we can.”
The Lions have never won the NFC North. The last time Detroit won a division title, it was the NFC Central in 1993.
Only the Cleveland Browns have a longer active drought (in terms of years). The Browns captured their last division crown in 1989, but both droughts have lasted the same amount of seasons. The Browns did not exist from 1996 to 1998.
Brad Holmes Addresses High Expectations for Lions
Holmes projected a similar outlook for the Lions’ chances of winning the NFC North this season as a large portion of the media has done for most of the summer. The hype around the team has to be one of the highest ever in the NFL for a team that has gone so long without a division title.
Holmes obviously did very little to squash those expectations in his September 1 press conference. Instead, he seemed to embrace them and made it clear to his team that meeting those lofty goals is something the franchise is expecting this fall.
“We’re not scared of the expectations,” Holmes told the media. “The expectations are earned through, I think, what we’ve built and what we’ve done up to this point, in terms of how we finished the end of the season and through our player acquisition process. But now, we’ve got to just prove them right.”
NFL.com released a playoff predictions article on August 31 with 34 analysts contributing to the story. Of those 34 analysts, 20 of them predicted the Lions to win the NFC North.
Pro Football Focus’ Sam Monson and 33rd Team’s Ryan Reynolds also projected Detroit to win the NFC North this season.
Lions QB Jared Goff Says Lions ‘Have a High Standard’
In his press conference on September 1, quarterback Jared Goff faced some of the same expectation questions that Holmes received from the media.
Falling in line with his general manager, Goff didn’t shy away from acknowledging the higher expectations around the Lions this season. But he said the team isn’t thinking about that on a daily basis.
He also added that high expectations is what a team wants.
“I think about to 2021 and expectations were not high,” Goff told the media. “You hope they go higher and now, we are here and they are higher. Internally, we are very focused every day on getting better.
And as high as the expectations are in the media for the Lions, Goff argued the team has higher expectations.
“Obviously, people expect a lot from us, but we expect a lot from ourselves too. We have a high standard, and we’re going to uphold that.”