We Forgot About Jack Campbell
The Lions first round pick last year is better than he gets credit for, but has lived in the shadow of other selections
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The Detroit Lions 2023 rookie class started last season as the most derided in the NFL and finished the year as the most praised. General manager Brad Holmes, widely panned for his choices last spring, used an end of season press conference as an opportunity to take a victory lap, rubbing the class’ successes in the face of all who doubted him. When he made a few similarly unconventional choices in the 2024 draft, no one dared question it.
The class’ success started with its most controversial pick. Detroit traded a top ten pick — courtesy of the Matthew Stafford trade with the Los Angeles Rams — to move back and select running back Jahmyr Gibbs in the first round of the NFL Draft. After years of “RBs don’t matter” taking over the league, Detroit broke the rules. In the second round, they went for two more “less valuable” positions — adding tight end Sam LaPorta and nickel Brian Branch.
Gibbs, LaPorta and Branch are all already among the best players in the league at their respective positions. All three played crucial roles in the team’s first ever NFC North title. They each featured heavily during a magical playoff run, bringing the Lions to the brink of Super Bowl LVIII.
But one name seems missing from all of these conversations about the Lions incredible 2023 class. Possibly the most surprising selection the Lions made on draft night in Kansas City.
After Gibbs, and before LaPorta and Branch, Detroit selected Jack Campbell, an inside linebacker out of Iowa at 18. A pick that came out of nowhere on draft night — major networks such as ESPN didn’t have the linebacker anywhere near their “best player available” graphics.
Then as training camp, the regular season and eventually even the postseason came and went, we didn’t hear much about Campbell. He didn’t make many highlight plays, but also wasn’t the source of too much fan ire. He didn’t have the best start to his NFL career, but he wasn’t so bad that you would declare his rookie year a failure.
Campbell is now entering year two, and is still getting little shine this offseason. Some of that is because of who he is as a person. A player whose only social media post over the past year was a joint Instagram post with his fiance announcing the pair’s engagement. Someone who is soft spoken, doesn’t shine much of a spotlight on himself, and never says anything truly interesting to the media.
In his introductory press conference after last year’s draft, he described it as having a “mutt mentality”, not being the pure bread that attracts the spotlight, but the dog that has to fight to be noticed.
“I’m gonna come with a humble approach and let my actions speak louder than words…earn respect here,” he continued.
“I’m a midwestern kid who up to this point has earned everything I’ve gotten. An old school blue collar mindset.”
But some of the reason he’s flown under the radar is because he is a pretty unremarkable football player. I love talking about how explosive Gibbs is, and his reel of putting opposing defenders on skates in the open field is already pretty long. LaPorta has a highlight catch every game. Branch introduced himself to the NFL by snagging a pick-6 off of Patrick Mahomes in prime time.
Campbell, for comparison, did not put together a string of plays to put his name on the map last season. His end of season highlight package, put together by Lions media, is less than two minutes long and is almost entirely made up of plays where the commentator calls out another player’s name as the playmaker. He doesn’t have any real explosive abilities — his field speed is a lot slower than his great testing performance would indicate. He did notch two sacks and a pass defense in his rookie year, but he never really stood out.
This isn’t to say he isn’t a good football player. He recorded a respectable 95 combined tackles playing alongside sideline-to-sideline machine Alex Anzalone. There were some growing pains, but by the end of last season the signs that he would be a good starter at the pro level became clear. He played a key role in a rushing defense that allowed the second-least yards in the NFL, which really came on last season because of the improvements made by the Lions’ rookie run stopper.
But 2024 still feels like a crucial year for the linebacker, who still has a lot of critics. Detroit expects him to be the starting MIKE one day. A guy who can wear the green dot and serve as the quarterback of the defense long term. This especially becomes important as the Lions face a cap crunch in the coming years, with major deals handed out across the roster this offseason — and more big deals to come soon. Anzalone, the team’s leader on defense right now who started 2023 with the green dot, could be a cap casualty next year, and even if he sticks around he may want a huge extension.
Campbell is perfectly placed to take advantage of a transition year in 2024, and take the ropes from his predecessor as the season goes on.
But he will have to grasp it.
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Campbell had a few low points early last season.
When he was coming out of Iowa, his film showed a player who lacked sideline-to-sideline speed and the fluidity to work his way around blocks or track running backs and tight ends in coverage out of the backfield. He silenced doubters at the NFL Combine, however, posting great scores in every drill. Maybe the film lied, and he was not only a good, but an elite athlete.
This clearly wasn’t the case. His poor recovery speed exacerbated how slow he was reading the field. Watching him next to Anzalone — who emerged as one of the NFL’s best off-ball linebackers in 2023 — made him look worse. The veteran linebacker was often tasked with doing the job of two players at the second level of the defense.
He was poor in the Lions overtime loss to the Seattle Seahawks in their week 2 home opener. Then, in Baltimore he was absolutely lost against one of the league’s most creative rushing attacks. These early struggles earned him criticism among Lions fans, especially as it became clear how good the other rookies in the class were.
While criticism from his early struggles lingered, Campbell began to genuinely improve. The memories many fans have of the team’s 2023 defense are those of their passing defense. Of Cam Sutton and Kindle Vildor getting burned by receivers deep downfield. What is often forgotten is how smothering the Lions run defense was late in the season. The key part of the late season improvement was Campbell catching up to NFL speed. Once he truly came online as a run stopper for Detroit, he and Anzalone were unstoppable.
The rookie linebacker’s lack of athleticism remained an issue all year — and will for the rest of his career — but the best way to make up for a lack of recovery speed is to put yourself in a place where you won’t need to recover.
Campbell is a high football IQ player who clearly learned the game as the season went on. The player he was in week 18 against the Minnesota Vikings, where he recorded a career high 12 combined tackles, is unrecognizable from the player we saw against the Ravens.
The linebacker plays the physical brand of football you’d expect from the Dan Campbell draftee. By the end of the season, his tackling became consistent. He would plug gaps in the run game, shed blockers, and play with ferocity you need from all seven men up front to stuff the run.
His struggles in pass defense remained throughout the season, though. Campbell is a true middle linebacker, the position he played for the Hawkeyes and is clearly most adept in. For Detroit, he primarily featured as the team’s weakside linebacker. It is a role that requires more man coverage in defensive coordinator Aaron Glenn’s scheme. Campbell’s lack of speed and agility often left him trailing behind a running back or tight end he was assigned to
While the Lions would probably love to kick him inside — Anzalone is great in pass coverage and could play Campbell’s role well — the sophomore player still might not be able to take over as a middle linebacker. He doesn’t have the raw speed to cover as much space as the role requires, and still has the occasional lapse in concentration that puts him behind the play.
This puts Campbell in an odd spot heading into his second NFL season. There are clear flaws in his game, but it is unsure whether they are things he can actually address. You can’t teach speed, as many say. While Campbell could surely step in as a decent MIKE if Anzalone were to be out of the picture, it would certainly be a downgrade.
Meanwhile, for the things he can control — effort, tackling, playing with discipline and having a good feel for the game — he is near his ceiling.
‘Year 2 has been good,” Campbell told reporters at OTAs, his first time talking to the media since the conclusion of last season. “For me it’s just the same mentality I’ve had my whole career, just try to be professional about how I do things.”
Now 23, entering his second year, and featuring for a team with Super Bowl aspirations, there is little leeway for the linebacker this season. Errors in man coverage can no longer be written off as part of the rookie learning curve.
“I still have a lot to improve on,” he continued. “But I feel like, anytime you can have reps its gonna help you. Right now I'm continuing to learn.”
“...Last year I was pushed to play different positions, and I feel like that helped me a lot. Just to understand what the front 7 is doing. But I feel like this year what the backend is doing.
“...This year, the standard is just higher.”
It feels odd to say, considering how poor Detroit has been at the position since DeAndre Levy’s career was cut short by injury, but the linebackers are the most dependable level of Detroit’s defense at the moment. Both starters in the nickel defense, Campbell and Anzalone, are actually good. There is continuity at the position too, with the Lions not adding or subtracting any key pieces from the room this offseason.
They will be playing in between a defensive line with two new projected starters in Marcus Davenport and DJ Reader, and a secondary with two new starting cornerbacks in Carlton Davis and Terrion Arnold. Heading into the most important season in franchise history, the Lions decided to keep its linebacker room in place.
So while the rest of the defense will likely spend the early weeks of the season getting used to playing with one another, the dynamic duo at the second level will be expected to pick up a lot of the slack.
But it also gives Campbell a chance to run it back. Play the same role he did last year, and continue improving at this level in a role that he grown into.
He told reporters that he has agonized over the disappointing finale to the Lions 2023 season, and like everyone else, getting over that final hump is the goal in his mind heading into 2024.
“What eats at me the most was the last play of the 49ers game,” he said. “The amount of sacrifice it takes from the whole team to get to that point… getting to that next level and the Super Bowl, and winning the Super Bowl, that’s what everyone wants to do.”
This goal has been in the linebacker’s sight from the start, however. Even from the moment he was drafted — to a team that hadn’t been to the playoffs in six years, not won a division title or playoff game in three decades — he had his eyes on the prize.
“The goal is to win a Super Bowl,” he said after being selected 18th overall “And anything short of that is unacceptable.”