'Detroit's here to stay:' Lions built for a Super Bowl run next season, but no guarantees

LAS VEGAS — The game itself is foggy, but Charles Davis remembers the commercial it spawned well.

Not long after Joe Montana led the San Francisco 49ers to a blowout win over Dan Marino and the Miami Dolphins in Super Bowl 19, the two star quarterbacks debuted a famous Diet Pepsi commercial that Davis remembers watching during his sophomore season at Tennessee.

In the commercial, Marino spots Montana in the bowels of a stadium and congratulates him on a game well played. Montana thanks Marino and offers to buy him a drink as the two quarterbacks part ways.

“And at the end of the thing, the dialogue went, Montana’s walking away and Marino goes, ‘Hey Joe,’ and he turns around, ‘Next year, I’m buying,’” Davis recalled this week at Super Bowl 58. “There was no next year.”

Marino had one of the greatest careers in NFL history. He retired as the league’s all-time leading passer and was a first-ballot Hall of Famer. He threw for 5,084 yards and won NFL MVP in that almost-storybook season of 1984. He had just one losing season in his 17-year career.

But as good as he was, the Dolphins never sniffed a Super Bowl again, losing in the only two other AFC titles games Marino ever played.

Thirty-nine years later, Davis was reminded of Marino and the Dolphins’ near-championship run when he saw what Dan Campbell told his team after the Detroit Lions’ 34-31 NFC championship game loss to the San Francisco 49ers two weeks ago, that there was no guarantee anyone in that room would be that close to a Super Bowl again.

“I use that all the time,” said Davis, an analyst with CBS who will be part of the network’s Super Bowl coverage on Sunday. “Use it on my kids, use it with other people I work with, all that. Use it for myself. There’s no guarantee.”

The Lions will enter the 2024 season as one of the favorites to win what should be an improved NFC.

The San Francisco 49ers have most of their important pieces from this year’s Super Bowl run under contract for next season. The Philadelphia Eagles, 10-1 before collapsing late in the regular season, made coordinator changes they hope will energize both sides of the ball. The Dallas Cowboys have won 12 games each of the past three seasons. And the Green Bay Packers, Minnesota Vikings and Chicago Bears all could be formidable foes in the NFC North.

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The Lions proved in the first half of the 49ers game they could play with anyone in the league, when they built what seemed like an insurmountable 17-point lead only to squander it in the second half.

General manager Brad Holmes promised Monday the Lions are “only going to get better” under his watch, but even if that happens, that’s no guarantee they’ll reach the Super Bowl for the first time in franchise history.

“It’s a whole process of building a team back and putting together another great year and getting through the division,” SiriusXM analyst and former NFL quarterback Rich Gannon said. “It’s hard, man. Here’s what people don’t understand: People don’t understand how hard it is to make a first down in our game, let alone win a game, let alone win a bunch of games, let alone win a division, let alone start winning (playoff games).

“It’s hard, man. And I think when you go in with that workmanlike attitude and I think Dan gets it, I think these players are going to buy in.”

Gannon said he believes “Detroit’s here to stay,” but he knows from personal experience that might not be the case.

Like Marino, Gannon had a career year, won NFL MVP and led his team, the Oakland Raiders, to the Super Bowl in the same season, then got hurt the following year as his team sputtered to a 4-12 record.

“We got to the Super Bowl in 2002 and the following year we come back and have a losing record,” he said. “You look at the Philadelphia Eagles, they go 10-1 and all of a sudden they crash and burn. It’s so hard. I just think that, that following year the expectations were so high. We had some issues internally that we didn’t deal with very well. I got injured. We had some stuff. We had some guys that didn’t quite buy in. It doesn’t take much to kind of get it off.”

The Lions are in a different spot roster-wise than the Raiders were two decades ago.

They’re younger. They have more stability at important spots like coach, general manager and offensive play caller. They seem built to last.

But they’ll face a new set of challenges this offseason when the roster goes through an inevitable churn and the organization begins choosing who to pay and who to let walk. Quarterback Jared Goff and receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown are among those who could be in line for mega offseason deals, while veterans Tracy Walker and Jonah Jackson may have played their last games in Detroit.

“We lost in the NFC championship in 2012 in a similar fashion, in a tough way where we had a chance in that football game but fell a little bit short to the Niners,” former Atlanta Falcons quarterback Matt Ryan said. “You think you’re going to be right back there, you think all these pieces are coming back and then boom, injuries happen, different things go on and we struggled the next season.

“So there is no guarantee that you’re back there, but when I watch them from an outside perspective, they’re not far off and they’ve proven that they can play with anybody in this league. The culture that Dan Campbell has built I think is one that’s going to allow for sustainability and I think that’s big.”

Campbell, Holmes and Goff are the names most analysts mention to explain why they believe the Lions have long-term staying power.

Campbell has given the Lions a formidable identity on and off the field in his three seasons as head coach. Holmes has stocked the roster with good, young talent that Campbell and his staff have coached up. And Goff has converted most of the doubters who wondered what he’d amount to after the Lions acquired him in a trade from the Los Angeles Rams three years ago.

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Goff finished second in the NFL in passing this season, threw 30 touchdowns with 12 interceptions and had the highest completion percentage of his career.

“I think you go back to the first year (when the Lions went 3-13-1), I thought to myself like, ‘I don’t know how it’s going to work out for Goff and Dan Campbell,’” Gannon said. “And obviously I think that second year, I think particularly with that win, going 9-8 the second year and winning at Lambeau (Field in Week 18), I think you can start to see that, ‘You know what, we got a chance with this guy and if we can put more pieces around him …’ And I think last year was just kind of a coming out party for the Lions.”

The two teams in this year’s Super Bowl, the Chiefs and 49ers are examples of teams that have found that elusive sustained success.

The 49ers, with the most well-rounded roster in the NFL, are playing in their second Super Bowl in five seasons and have reached two other conference championship games. The Chiefs, with the best quarterback of this generation, have made six straight AFC championship games and are looking for their third Super Bowl title since 2019.

Chiefs special teams coordinator Dave Taub, a longtime assistant who’s in his third decade of coaching in the NFL, said the good teams he’s been around have featured strong head coaches who create a culture that permeates the team; good quarterbacks, even if there’s only one Patrick Mahomes; and experienced leaders who can hold things together in times of need.

Taub, who spent nine seasons in the NFC North with the Chicago Bears, said “it’s amazing” what the Lions accomplished this year.

“I mean, they came out and they beat our ass that first game,” he said. “It was impressive 'cause we’re a hard team to beat when you have that much time to prepare. It’s really impressive what they did on the road, to come in there and get that win. I think it really helped propel them. There’s no question that it helped them throughout the season because, ‘Hey, we kicked their ass on the road.’ They could always look at that as something.”

While the Lions’ Week 1 win over the Chiefs, at Arrowhead Stadium on banner-raising night, served as the fuel that started this year’s run, the Lions came apart in the end in part because of their youth. They missed blocks, lost fumbles and dropped interceptions in their second half collapse at San Francisco, mistakes they hope to be better for next season.

To that end, Campbell implored his players in their final team meeting of the season last week to watch the Super Bowl.

Hard as it may be to stomach, players said he wanted them to feel one last tinge of pain from the chance they let slip away so when they return in 2024 he won’t have to strike a match to get the fire inside them to burn.

“You got to feel all those feelings,” Lions fullback Jason Cabinda said. “You can’t hide from them. I think it’s good to internalize that. Not for too long, but internalize it for long enough for it to give you the motivation that you need to kind of go round for the next go-round, 'cause at the end of the day, that’s the NFL. Year after year, it’s always going to keep coming. The next season’s going to come and it ain’t going to wait for nobody, so you got to stay prepared in the offseason and do what you got to do to make sure you come in ready to give it your best shot.”

Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit Lions built for Super Bowl run next season, but no guarantees