At this point in the NFL preseason, it’s not common for head coaches to want to give up control of their team as they fight to get ready for the upcoming season. But that’s exactly what Detriot Lions head coach Dan Campbell did on Monday.
The Lions held an hour-long practice on Monday without any coaches present besides Campbell, who just watched from the sidelines. The players ran all the drills and did all their work themselves in a purely player-run practice, according to MLive.
“Well, he told us this morning that the players were gonna go out there and run their own practice,” Lions left tackle Taylor Decker said, according to MLive. “’Here’s the team scenarios that we want to get done and you guys are gonna go out there and run the show.’ I think it’s awesome to do. Because honestly, on a game day, we’re out there, we gotta communicate, we have to be accountable to one another.
Decker said it’s not something the team has done before and Campbell didn’t give them a lot of direction beforehand, but he thinks the player-run practice went well.
“He just told us, he was like ‘this is what the practice — these are the periods we want to practice and the coaches won’t be out there.’ That’s pretty much it,” Decker said. “Just left it at that. So, OK. Like I said, we come out here and we work every day. It doesn’t matter if the coaches are out here or not. We know what to do and how to do it. Obviously we need coaches. But we shouldn’t need them out here to be able to get good work in. Because we’re professionals. I don’t need a cheerleader to get me to go. Pretty cool. I’ve never seen anything like it, so it was fun to get out here. Frank was mic’d up again for ‘Hard Knocks,’ so he was trying to try rally the troops. It was fun.”
