Lions head coach Dan Campbell knew before Monday night’s game against the 49ers that it made no sense for his team’s ultimate goal of winning the Super Bowl: win or lose in San Francisco, the No. 1 seed in the NFC will return to Sunday. evening against Minnesota. So why did Campbell risk injury to his most important players?
Campbell said he just thought playing to win was the right thing to do, and he felt his team came out of it unscathed.
“I just don’t think it’s fair to draft a guy that’s not ready to play. And then you can only sit six guys, so who are those six? And the other guys that aren’t ‘Is it fair to them that we don’t use everything we have?'” Campbell said. “Fingers crossed no one got hurt and we were lucky.”
Campbell admitted he wondered if he should rule out certain players until pregame, but ultimately said he had been preparing his team all week to win and that’s what he wanted give his team the chance to do so.
“I thought about it a lot,” Campbell said. “I ended up deciding that the right thing to do was to play these guys, because we owed it to the team.”
And now the Lions will focus on what matters: beating the Vikings on Sunday night.
