One year ago, Jack Campbell earned his first All-Pro nod. And the Lions LB did indeed earn it with consistently impactful play and outstanding run defense, coupled with some smart plays in coverage and excellent blitzing. The Lions rewarded Campbell with a market-setting new contract worth over $80 million for four years.
Through the first four games of 2026, that version of Jack Campbell has not been on display for Detroit. Not even close.
In hopes of figuring out why, I focused on Campbell in the game film of the Lions’ Week 4 loss to the Carolina Panthers, as well as select drives from the loss in Buffalo and wins over the Saints and Jets.
The Panthers plan
It’s clear from the very first Panthers’ offensive play that Carolina is set on manipulating and attacking Campbell. Lions are in a 4-3 and they rotate both TEs with pre-snap motion to have Campbell on the left side of the offense. Bryce Young fakes a toss sweep to the right, and the Panthers OL sells it well. By the time Young bootlegs back to the left, Campbell is already to the right of where the center snapped the ball. He is the left-side containment, by design of the defense, and he’s to the right of both DTs. His coverage assignment is the inside TE who has leaked out to the left. If Campbell is anywhere close to staying at home, he’s in good position in coverage by default. But he’s gone, overreacting to the fake.
It’s a testament to Campbell’s outstanding athleticism that he works himself back in position enough to make the tackle relatively quickly after the catch. Two plays later, alas, that didn’t happen.
Third-and-9, the Panthers spread the formation. The Lions are in nickel and playing Cover-3 and Campbell is on the offense’s right, patrolling the seam area near the line needed for the first down. Good pass rush up front as Derrick Moore hits Young just after he throws the ball to Tetairoa McMillan. Campbell is in good position to stop McMillan short, but he missed the tackle in space, sliding off harmlessly to the turf and ceding the first down.
Carolina’s very next offensive play is an example of where Campbell has struggled across all four Detroit games this season. There are at least 12 plays from the Bills and Jets games that look very similar, in terms of where Campbell is versus where the defense needs him to be in coverage. He’s not deep enough in his coverage drop, not anywhere close to it.
He’s far from the only guilty party on this pass, and Campbell does have the obligation to respect the play-action fake. The issue is, he freezes after the play-fake. This is an excellent job by the Carolina offense of isolating Campbell, knowing his tendencies and using them against the All-Pro LB (and defense as a whole):
The play, mercifully, is negated by a Panthers’ penalty. But if you’re keeping track, the Panthers have run four plays and have directly attacked Campbell in coverage in three of them. That’s not a coincidence, certainly not at the beginning of a game in a neutral script situation. It’s possible the next play was going at him, too, but Campbell is in perfect man coverage on the flexed TE as Alim McNeill gets home on a sack of Young, who was looking right at the Campbell area before getting sacked.
Man coverage positives
That is why it’s hard to be too hard on Campbell. There are several plays in this game, and there were more of them against New York, where Captain Jack is exactly when and where he needs to be. In the first 5 Carolina drives, I counted 15 such instances. A 2nd-and-6 on Carolina’s second drive is a great example. Campbell immediately identifies his TE in man coverage and blankets Darren Waller across the field in perfect phase, helping force a Young scramble to the right. You can’t cover any better than Campbell does there. He does it again a couple of plays later, too, picking up Waller on a deeper post that functioned as a designed underneath clearout by the Panthers offense. The Campbell hip flip on his coverage pickup is teaching-quality tape.
The problem is, Carolina ran 33 plays on those drives.
The blitzing debacle
Blitzing has been a concern. In this game, there was less of it, perhaps as some acknowledgment of Campbell’s relative ineffectiveness. The chart below from PFF shows their count of his pass rush (PRSH) attempts. That’s not exactly accurate, because it doesn’t count plays where Campbell starts as a rusher but then drops. He did this a handful of times in Carolina, primarily dropping into a Bryce Young “spy” role. Campbell winds up in no-man’s-land far too often on these types of plays; there were two prime examples of this in the Week 1 win over New Orleans. It appears this is an option for Campbell if he feels the blitz isn’t getting home, or it’s window dressing to speed up the quarterback.
It’s very hard to fault Campbell for trying to do something useful when the blitz, which he never hides well, fails. That seems more of a coordination issue than a Campbell issue. Then again, leaning on an All-Pro whom the team just invested tens of millions of dollars to make things happen seems like a prudent strategy from Defensive Coordinator Kelvin Sheppard. Whether that’s his intent or not isn’t clear, but tasking Campbell with that duty makes a lot more sense than, say, Malcolm Rodriguez or rookie Jimmy Rolder. Then again, on a later first-half drive, rookie DT Skyler Gill-Howard gets markedly better depth on a zone blitz drop than Campbell shows in the entire game.
Run defense regression
Aside from the inconsistencies in his depth of coverage, Campbell has had some struggles in run defense. In this case, it’s easy to see how much he misses having a true nose tackle in front of him. Tyleik Williams and Alim McNeill are both very good players (McNeill dominated much of this CAR game), but they are not as adept at keeping blockers from impacting Campbell at the second level as DJ Reader or Roy Lopez were a year ago.
While not an example of not having a nose in front of him, this run play from Carolina shows the tentativeness in Campbell’s run defense. Last year, he was attacking this fairly routine run downhill and making the play closer to the line, if not behind it. In Week 4, he’s not firing. Campbell is passively waiting when the play is there for the taking. A block from the TE that Campbell should easily beat to the punch instead causes him to give up extra yardage.
(Note that No. 93, Tyler Lacy, gets moved aside here and Tyleik Williams (91) gets put in the turf. It’s not all on Campbell.)
Contrast that with how aggressively and impressively Campbell’s Carolina counterpart, Devin Lloyd, blew up several runs by confidently attacking and knifing around would-be blocks. That’s what Campbell is paid to do. That’s what the Lions expect him to do. And it’s plays like these where Campbell is not playing to the lofty standard he set a year ago. This is one of many examples, unfortunately. These are plays where Campbell himself can be better, regardless of any schematic deficiencies.
The 2-4 extra yards Campbell surrenders here might not seem significant when the defense is giving up over 400 a game; that’s a fair and valid point. But when we hear Dan Campbell reiterate his “little things to clean up”, these are exactly the little things he’s talking about. They manifest upon themselves, positively or negatively, and right now it’s pretty much all negative. It’s emblematic of the way Jack Campbell isn’t playing as well as he needs to, or as well as the defense needs him to as a leader and tone-setter.
