Dan Campbell: 'No way to justify' game management gaffe in Lions' loss to Buccaneers

Dan Campbell stood in front of his team after the Detroit Lions ’ 20-16 loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Sunday and said the loss was on him.

The Lions squandered a chance to score points late in the first half, when Jared Goff completed a pass to Amon-Ra St. Brown at the Tampa 9-yard line with 11 seconds to play, then raced to spike the ball before the clock expired as the Lions’ field-goal unit streamed on the field.

The Lions were penalized for too many men on the field, and the penalty came with a 10-second clock runoff that ended the half.

“There’s no way to justify this,” Campbell told reporters after the game. “It’s a massive error on my part, no one else’s, and it was just between hurry-up field goal and clocking it. And it was 100% my fault. One hundred percent. And that’s why we have guys on the field who are trying to clock it, and just it’s just one of those things we work over and over, and we’ve been good, we do everything and then I mess it up.”

That mistake left the Lions down seven points at halftime and came back to bite them as they scrambled to mount a fourth-quarter comeback. After passing on a 59-yard field goal early in the fourth quarter, the Lions drove inside the Tampa 30-yard line twice in the final two minutes, but needing a touchdown to take the lead – they could have settled for a field goal had they got points at the end of the first half – they turned the ball over on downs both times.

MORE FROM BIRKETT: Detroit Lions grades vs. Tampa Bay Buccaneers: Campbell, Goff get poor marks in loss

Lions players said they appreciated Campbell’s accountability after the game.

“You come in here and he wears his heart on his sleeve and he tells us how it is and you can respect that,” defensive tackle D.J. Reader said. “Being a player in this league, I’ve been in here for a long time. I’ve heard so many speeches of, ‘Oh, we just got to get better, we just got to do this, we just got to do that.’ That (expletive) flies over your head, so eventually when you sit up there and you pour your heart out, everybody’s looking you in your eye, we understand, we get it. Also, like, we all make mistakes so it’s not like we’re beating him over the head for it, but you can tell he cares and that’s huge.”

But they insisted it was misguided.

“No. It’s not on him,” linebacker Derrick Barnes said. “We’re the players, we got to go out there and play the game. We can draw up all the Xs and Os that we want to, but at the end of the day, the players is the people that go out there and do it.”

Campbell’s game-management gaffe aside, the Lions played a sloppy game against a team they beat in the playoffs last season for the second time in as many weeks.

Jared Goff threw two interceptions – one on a missed pass interference penalty – and could have easily thrown two more. The Lions scored one touchdown on seven trips to the red zone. And defensively, they had a costly breakdown in the secondary that led to one Tampa touchdown and rookie Terrion Arnold committed two field-flipping penalties that set up two more scores.

“I mean, look, there’s plenty of things that we’ve got to clean up, absolutely,” Campbell said. “But you’ve got to take ownership, and this game’s no different than anything else. The players have got it hard enough as it is, going toe-to-toe with a good opponent. To have to overcome whatever that is, could be calls, could be coaching, could be whatever, and it’s too hard. So it’s a bottom line. But yeah, there’s things we’ve got to clean up, and they will be acknowledged, and it’s, listen, we’ve got the right guys here, we’ll clean it up. We’ll move forward.”

Baker Mayfield completed 12 of 19 passes for 185 yards for the Buccaneers (2-0). He threw a 41-yard touchdown to Chris Godwin in the second quarter, when Amik Robertson bit on a fake screen pass and Arnold and Jack Campbell let Godwin run free down the sideline. And he scored the game-winning touchdown on a designed 11-yard draw with 34 seconds left in the first half.

Goff completed 34 of 55 passes for 307 yards for the Lions, but had one costly mistake in the fourth quarter when he threw a careless pass over the middle of the field in the face of pressure that Christian Izien intercepted at the 11-yard line.

The Lions forced three-and-outs on Tampa’s final two possessions, but Goff ended the game with four straight incompletions (including one spike).

“That’s a good team,” Goff said. “I think we fought hard. I think we didn’t make enough plays. I think we had too many mistakes, and they had less mistakes than we did and then ultimately at the end of the game we kind of had a chance to win it a couple times there, but it just wasn’t enough.”

Dave Birkett is the author of the new book, " Detroit Lions : An Illustrated Timeline." Preorder it now from Reedy Press .

Contact him at dbirkett@freepress.com . Follow him on X and Instagram at @davebirkett.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Dan Campbell: 'No way to justify' game management gaffe in Lions' loss to Buccaneers