Dan Campbell’s Plan After Losing Top Two Assistants Is to Be Like Metallica

The Detroit Lions will be one of the most fascinating teams to watch in the early weeks of the 2025 NFL season.

Coming off of a 15–2 regular season campaign in 2024, expectations are undoubtedly high for the Lions heading into this year, but the they also said goodbye to two key architects of last year’s run in assistant coaches Aaron Glenn and Ben Johnson, who both left the team to take their own head coaching gigs elsewhere in the league.

Campbell was asked about the loss of his coordinators by NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero, and he stretched a metaphor a bit to mention the band Metallica, who had to figure out a way to move forward after the loss of bassist Cliff Burton, who died in an accident just as the band was making it big.

Pelissero noted that on the first record Metallica made after Burton’s death, the bass was mixed pretty low, allowing the rest of the band to carry things a bit more clearly. Would Campbell take a similar step this year, taking more control of the Lions for himself while his new coordinators step into their new roles? Not exactly, but he does like the Metallica metaphor.

“First of all, Metallica did a hell of a job with what they did,” Campbell said. “They had to replace, it’s not easy. But they did that, and that’s why they’re still who they are. They continue to evolve every year, every decade, just getting better and better and putting out hits.

“That’s what I plan on doing, and that’s what I did when I hired and promoted Kelvin Sheppard and John Morton. I’m very familiar with both of them. Of course I’m going to have my spin on it. It will start with me, and my influence on it, but I want these guys to coach and do what they believe in. We’re going to be just fine.”

The exchange begins at about the four-minute mark in the video below.

Nice work by Pelissero to use some clever framing to get a good answer out of Campbell, and nice job by Campbell of leaning into the question. In addition to carrying a Metallica mindset onto the field, it feels as though Campbell could crush “Seek and Destroy” on karaoke night.