Dan Campbell walked to the lectern at Ford Field on Sunday afternoon, his hat askew and tilted back on his head.
The Detroit Lions coach looked like he’d just survived a cage match, and after his team needed overtime to win its season opener against the New Orleans Saints, that’s kind of how it felt.
Jahmyr Gibbs ran for 156 yards and two touchdowns on a career-high 29 carries, and the Lions’ much-maligned secondary forced an incomplete pass on the would-be game-winning 2-point conversion to escape with a 31-30 victory.
“You never know the way it's going to go [Week 1], but you know, especially a team like that, man, that's up-and-coming, they're young, they're hungry, man, this is their new hope for the season, they're going to throw it out at you,”
Campbell said. “And they did that, and so it became that kind of game, and we hung in there and made the last play. We made the last play to win it, and that's the most important thing.”
Ugly wins always trump hard-fought losses in the NFL, and no one in the Lions’ locker room will care how grisly Sunday’s performance was if it helps them get back to the playoffs in January.
Last year, the Lions went 2-5 in games decided by seven points or less and missed the postseason for the first time since 2022.
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But Sunday’s game never should have come down to the last play, not after Gibbs and the defense staked the Lions to a 21-0 lead only to have an inefficient offense and leaky secondary fritter it away.
“We didn’t play nearly our best game and we still beat a quality team,” second-year defensive tackle Tyleik Williams said. “Good little start but we got to get way better if we want to go to the places we want to go.”
Jahmyr Gibbs touches it (unofficially) 38 times
The Lions leaned heavily on Gibbs in Drew Petzing’s mostly uninspiring debut as offensive coordinator.
Gibbs had 14 carries for 67 yards in the first half and 28 touches for 151 scrimmage yards in regulation, plus four more carries nullified by penalty.
Playing the “bell cow” role in his first game since signing a contract that made him the highest paid running back in NFL history, Gibbs finished with 186 total yards and keyed three of the Lions’ four touchdown drives.
He carried seven times for 46 yards and had one catch on the Lions’ first scoring drive, scored his second 1-yard run of the game on the Lions’ first possession of the third quarter, and touched the ball six times on the Lions’ 10-play touchdown drive in overtime.
Campbell called it a “very promising” start and downplayed concerns about whether that big a workload could negatively impact Gibbs later in the year.
“You know what I like?” he said. “Winning a game, man, and we were going to win this game. And that guy's our hot hand, and ultimately, do I want to set records with how many carries? No, that's not something I want to do. But when you look at a guy and you feel like, ‘All right, man.’ He's in good shape. I mean, he had a really good camp, and he’s in phenomenal shape. He's in the best shape I've seen since he's been here. Now, that doesn't mean we're not going to monitor and we're going to keep an eye on this guy, cause we understand that too. But we did what we had to do today.”
Gibbs said he felt like “I could have took 40” carries Sunday, and the Lions might have been better offensively if he did.
After Gibbs’ touchdown with 3:39 left in the first quarter, the Lions had 56 yards of offense on their final five drives of the first half, then capitalized on short fields from a Derrick Barnes interception and Roger McCreary fumble to score their two third-quarter touchdowns.
Saints answer in second half
Tyler Shough answered with four straight scoring drives for the Saints, picking apart the Lions secondary with a no-huddle offense that Lions players said left them tired and sometimes in the wrong personnel packages.
Shough finished 35 of 56 passing for 410 yards and three touchdowns. He threw a tying 9-yard touchdown to Juwan Johnson with 1:07 left in regulation, and after the Lions went three-and-out on the ensuing possession, the Saints missed a 62-yard kick as time expired to send the game to overtime.
New Orleans also had a fumble recovery returned for a touchdown overturned on replay in the first half.
Jared Goff opened OT with a 4-yard touchdown pass to Amon-Ra St. Brown for the Lions, and after Shough answered with a 10-play, 80-yard scoring drive, Saints coach Kellen Moore decided to go for two and the win.
Lions-Saints final play
The Saints ran a pick route out of a three-receiver stack to the short side of the field. Williams forced Shough to double pump his throw with pressure up the middle, and Rock Ya-Sin had tight coverage on Bryce Lance as the pass sailed out of the back of the end zone.
TWO-POINT CONVERSION IS INCOMPLETE AND THE LIONS WIN pic.twitter.com/RRBb32Zrtm
— NFL (@NFL) September 13, 2026
“We knew they was going to go picks and rubs,” Ya-Sin said. “It was just really good communication in the back end to match the route concept that they ran and then just tried to finish through the hands late. I knew the ball would be up and I knew where he wanted to go, so just tried to finish through the hands and get off the field and win the game.”
Ya-Sin said the win and the final defensive play wasn’t redemption for him or a Lions secondary that’s considered the biggest weakness of the team. And in the quiet of locker room long after the rest of his teammates had showered and headed for home, he acknowledged there’s much more work to be done.
“We can play so much better," Ya-Sin said. “So when we play better, to our standard, we'll win a lot more convincingly.”
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Dave Birkett covers the Lions for the Detroit Free Press. Contact him at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Bluesky, X and Instagram at @davebirkett.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Lions' win vs Saints should never have come down to final play in OT
