When praising Detroit Lions, don't forget who built the team. Dan Campbell hasn't

It’s a wonder you couldn’t hear Brad Holmes guttural yell over in Windsor ... or maybe you could, and the Canadians are just too polite to say.

The Detroit Lions general manager uncoiled the most primal of screams Sunday night when he stepped into the elevator just outside the press box after the Lions held off the Rams by a point.

And, really, who could blame him?

He’d just watched the team he co-built beat the team he left and, in the process, broom Detroit’s playoff ghosts to Saskatoon. Or some other faraway place.

No wonder Dan Campbell gave him a game ball in the jubilant locker room.

“I absolutely love every single person in this room, man,” Holmes began. “We were intentional in being about grit and earning it. I love everybody in here, man. We went through darkness, and it shaped us.”

Not unlike the way darkness shaped this franchise, which finally led Sheila Hamp to Chris Spielman and to Holmes and Campbell. The team’s owner hired each separately, a bit of a break from the tradition of the general manager selects their own coach.

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Hamp and her team, though, had more than an inkling that they’d found the right pair to lead, and the right coach and GM for each other.

A gamble? Sure. But it didn’t take long for each to realize Hamp was right.

“Well, I knew it felt right the first phone call we ever had after he had been hired and then I got hired and so really before that, we had a phone call," Campbell said. "It was really right before ... that I took the job, and it was just kind of an intro. And man, I could tell ...”

Tell what, exactly?

“... tell it was — it felt like it was going to be right.’

And then they met. Yeah, it’s been a bromance ever since, and good for them. You find someone you have to work with so closely who sees the world the same way as you? Hold onto them. And remind them what they mean.

Give them a game ball, for example, and a hug, and a pat on the back and an “I love you, man,” as Campbell gave Holmes in the locker room Sunday night. Or give them a public shoutout by wearing their likeness on a sweatshirt, as Holmes did for Campbell during the draft last year.

“I told you all, this is my brother, my guy,” Holmes said at the time. “I love this sweatshirt. It’s awesome.”

Teams rarely win if the general manager and coach aren’t sharing similar views. Sure, there can be disagreements, and there probably should be some healthy discussions about different views, but most of the vision for a team and how it's built and how it plays should be aligned.

It’s aligned in Detroit. And it has been since the first day they met.

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“We’re very similar in the way that we view players, view a team, how we want to build it,” Campbell said Monday, bleary-eyed, sleep-deprived and giddy. “And I have things and I have a certain vision and Brad has helped me by the type of players we acquire and what we look for, I mean he’s given me that. He’s helped me. So, listen ... the GM and head coach have to have a healthy relationship and it starts with ownership, but then that’s the next most important by far. And if you don’t have that, you just can’t sustain success.”

Each of them believed they’d be competing in the playoffs by Year 3. Each of them believed they’d be competitive by Year 2. Each of them believed in the trenches, and building outward, not that this is revolutionary in the NFL. But go back and watch Holmes’ reaction when Penei Sewell was there at No. 7 in the 2021 draft.

He howled that day, too. Campbell didn’t yell, but he wanted Sewell for the same reasons. To have a GM and a coach that excited about an offensive tackle tells us how in line they were.

They didn’t just like his skill, his balance and quickness at his size, but his belief, his energy, his spirit. Obviously, talent is critical. But talent comes in all kinds of packages. This GM and this coach aren’t interested in talent unless it's wrapped in a certain kind of spirit.

You could hear this in Campbell’s words at the podium Sunday night:

“To be able to do something that’s greater than yourself, it takes everybody around you doing their job and doing it on a high level and you’ve got to be able to trust them. It’s special, it’s different than anything, man. And it’s why you do what we do. It’s not the money, it’s about the competition, it’s about the comradery, and to be the best of the best collectively.”

And you could hear it in Holmes words in celebratory locker room, holding a game ball, talking about going through darkness:

“It shaped us for this moment. I love y’all, man. Thank you so much. Appreciate it, especially this guy here.”

This guy here, of course, is Campbell, who stood a few feet away, who had said before he handed the game ball to Holmes that “I’m telling you man, when you’re in (expletive) lock step ... I’m telling you guys, it’s a (expletive) business, it ain’t always perfect, but we do a pretty good job, dude.”

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It’s always about the “we,” right? Because it has to be. And these two stewards of your Detroit Lions knew it had to be.

They love grit — and may love the word grit more — but they love skill, too, and speed, and elusiveness, and smarts and fundamentals. They love it all. And they believe that they see these things in players the way others may not, and they don’t worry who questions their beliefs when they draft or trade or sign players.

They’ve got each other’s backs this way. Privately and publicly, like when Campbell gave Holmes a shoutout for his courage in drafting Jahmyr Gibbs and Sam LaPorta last spring in spots he knew might engender blowback from the football cognoscenti.

Value may be a metric, but it’s subjective, too, just as building a team is art as much as it is science. It can be both. Probably should be both. It’s a matter of percentages, of how much a team builder leans into evaluating talent and gauging human beings as a matter of measurables and how much they lean into heart.

Or soul.

Or, yes, even grit.

Turns out the percentages are the same for the coach and the general manager. A division title and the first playoff win in 32 years are a testament to this.

As Campbell said Sunday night:

“Without this (expletive) guy right here ...”

And then he stopped himself and simply tossed him the game ball.

Contact Shawn Windsor: 313-222-6487 or swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him @shawnwindsor.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit Lions' Brad Holmes and his vision are becoming a reality