When Dan Campbell said after the Detroit Lions’ NFC championship game loss to the San Francisco 49ers in January that it was “going to be twice as hard to get back to this point next year,” he was speaking from experience.

Campbell was assistant head coach with the New Orleans Saints in 2018 when that team lost to the Los Angeles Rams in the NFC title game on a missed pass interference penalty.

The Saints went 13-3 the next season, but lost their playoff opener to the Minnesota Vikings in overtime and haven’t played for a conference title since.

The Saints aren’t alone. No NFC runner-up has gone on to win the Super Bowl the next season since the Green Bay Packers in 1995-96. The Packers lost to the Dallas Cowboys in the 1995 playoffs, then beat the New England Patriots —pre-Tom Brady — a year later in Super Bowl 31.

GET READY: Detroit Lions training camp FAQ: Everything you need to know for 2024

Before last year’s 49ers, no NFC team that lost in the previous year’s conference championship game had even advanced to the Super Bowl since the 49ers also did it (under then-head coach Jim Harbaugh) in 2011-12. Of the 10 NFC runners-up from 2012-2021, five failed to make the playoffs.

“I mentioned this last year and I’ll say it again: It’s going to take a lot more than it did last year to get to where we were,” Campbell said this spring. “That’s just the nature of how it goes. But we’re going to be more than capable of doing that. Things got to go your way, but it does start with you. It starts with those players, starts with the coaches. We’ve got to put the work in.”

The Lions, by all accounts, had a successful spring.

They re-signed cornerstone players Jared Goff, Amon-Ra St. Brown and Penei Sewell to long-term contracts. They overhauled their sieve of a secondary, signing Amik Robertson in free agency, trading for Carlton Davis and drafting Terrion Arnold and Ennis Rakestraw. And they retained all three of their coordinators, including offensive wizard Ben Johnson, giving them unmatched continuity.

The Lions will open training camp Wednesday as one of the favorites to represent the NFC in the Super Bowl, though they will have to navigate a more treacherous schedule to get there. The NFC North is better, with improved rosters in Green Bay and Chicago and a still-young nucleus in Minnesota, and they play a first-place schedule featuring games against fellow Super Bowl hopefuls the 49ers, Cowboys, Houston Texans and Buffalo Bills, among others.

Here are five storylines to kick off camp and that will in many ways define the season.

Great expectations

The Lions were most everyone’s pick to win the North last season, so they’re not in completely uncharted territory. But you have to go back to at least the 1990s to find a Lions team generating this much Super Bowl buzz.

That’s a good thing, without qualification. Most every other NFL team would love to be in the Lions’ shoes. But there unquestionably are pitfalls that come with being the hunted rather than the hunter.

The weight of heightened expectations can be sizable, both individually and as a team. Expectations will grow as the calendar turns, and the smallest of stumbles can take a team down the wrong path. The Lions seem built to handle whatever comes their way with Campbell as head coach, but most people thought the same about the Philadelphia Eagles last year, and they were left watching the playoffs after just one week.

Falling in line

The Lions have one of the best offensive lines in the NFL. They return four of five starters, including arguably the NFL’s best lineman in Sewell, and added Pro Bowl guard Kevin Zeitler to fill their only opening.

But three-fifths of the line — Zeitler, center Frank Ragnow and left tackle Taylor Decker — sat out spring practice because of injuries, and the line averages nearly 30 years old. It’s not a young group, and injuries to any of the starters could sink the ship.

Goff’s play is hugely dependent on the protection he gets up front, and the backbone of the Lions’ high-powered offense is the running game. Campbell won’t overtax his veterans in camp, but that doesn’t mean they’ll make it through the regular season in one piece.

Bates Motel

The Lions should have a real, bona fide kicking competition in camp for the first time in years.

Michael Badgley has made 26 of 30 field goals over parts of the past two seasons for the Lions, but his limited leg strength could be a liability in end-of-half and close-game situations. The Lions signed UFL star Jake Bates away from the Michigan Panthers in June. Bates has a hammer for a leg — he made three 60-plus-yard field goals for the Panthers — but is unproven after never kicking in college.

Bates will have to earn the Lions’ trust in camp to beat out Badgley for the job. One thing that might work in his favor: He was a kickoff specialist in college, and if he proves reliable in that area in camp, he could be a weapon under the NFL’s new kickoff rules.

Second in command

The Lions don’t have many holes on their roster, but they do have some question marks. Offensively, there’s not a lot of depth at receiver, and Jameson Williams, their No. 2 pass catcher, remains largely unproven.

Williams will play opposite Amon-Ra St. Brown and has the speed and explosive ability to challenge teams deep. He needs to be more consistent catching and tracking the ball and running routes, but coaches insist he made major strides in those areas this offseason.

At defensive end, the Lions have been searching for a complement to Aidan Hutchinson. They signed Marcus Davenport in free agency. They’ll get James Houston back from a lost season due to injury. And Mitchell Agude is coming off an eye-catching spring. If one of that trio — or anyone else — emerges as a reliable No. 2 pass rusher, the Lions defense will be better off.

Corner store

The Lions acquired enough depth in the secondary this offseason that Campbell said in June he had no idea who would start in his secondary this fall.

Davis and Arnold seem likely to open camp as the first-team cornerbacks, and Robertson could play the slot if the Lions are serious about giving Brian Branch the chance to win a starting safety job. Rakestraw probably opens as a backup slot defender. Kerby Joseph and Ifeatu Melifonwu give the Lions two more playmakers at safety. And at some point, Emmanuel Moseley may be ready to contribute in his return from a torn ACL, too.

There’s enough depth to survive the season, but the Arnold and Rakestraw face big learning curves as rookies playing one of the NFL’s most dangerous positions and Branch and Moseley sat out the spring in their rehab from injuries. Nothing’s a given in the NFL, no matter the size of the offseason investment.

Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on X and Instagram at @davebirkett.

SOUTH BEND, Ind. (WNDU) – Notre Dame’s Compton Family Ice Arena played host on Saturday night to a hockey match between the Pucks for Autism team and alumni of the Detroit Red Wings of the NHL.

This event is part Pucks for Autism charity games, in which the organization travels to various hockey arenas across the country to promote autism acceptance during the 2024-25 NHL season.

“Pucks for Autism is a 501(c)(3) charity that my husband and I started in honor of our son, Henry,” explained Eva Pheiffer. “From that, we have grown exponentially from being just a small tournament once a year. We now have our large tournament every year in June, but we also have several tournaments throughout the year, like this one where we raise money and donate to local charities or local facilities that also assist with special needs children and adults.”

Pucks for Autism welcomes players of all skill levels and abilities to join them for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to play on NHL ice.

Proceeds from Saturday night’s game will benefit Camp Milhouse, which has deep roots here in Michiana as a residential camp for people with disabilities.

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It’s no secret that law enforcement’s use of facial recognition technology disproportionately affects Black people more often than it does any demographic group…and it’s been like that for years. But one city plans on making changes to how it uses the technology, thanks to the wrongful arrest of a Black man nearly six years ago.

Last month, along with agreeing to pay Robert Williams $300,000 in a settlement agreement, the City of Detroit agreed to revise how police use facial recognition to solve criminal cases, according to the Associated Press.

The Detroit police will now go back and look at all cases between 2017 and 2023 in which facial recognition was used and will notify a prosecutor if an arrest was made without evidence independent of the technology.

Robert Williams’ wrongful arrest

Williams was arrested in 2018 after someone stole watches from a store in the Detroit area. The only evidence Detroit Police had was an image from the store’s surveillance footage. Officers then sent the image to the Michigan State Police so they could run a search using face recognition technology, and what came up was an expired driver’s license photo of Williams, according to the lawsuit.

Although Williams said he was not the man in the image, Detroit police still used his photo to create a photo lineup and show it to a man who was not a witness to the crime and only saw the store’s surveillance footage.

Despite this, an officer, who has not been identified, still applied for an arrest warrant.

In April 2021, Williams filed a civil rights lawsuit against the detective, the city and the city’s chief of police with the help of the ACLU and the University of Michigan’s Law School’s Civil Rights Litigation Initiative.

More from the ACLU:

The lawsuit alleges that the detective, through his omissions in the warrant application, misled the magistrate judge, resulting in issuance of an arrest warrant without the required probable cause. It also alleges what discovery in Mr. Williams’ case and several more recent facial-recognition false arrests in Detroit have since made obvious: That the city lacked any policy for law enforcement use of face recognition technology at the time the technology was used in this case, and that Detroit failed to train its police officers on the dangers of misusing face recognition technology in their investigations.

Past examples of facial recognition affecting Black people

Even before Williams’ wrongful arrest, facial recognition technology had already been doing Black people dirty.

In 2018, 28 members of Congress, including six members of the Congressional Black Caucus, were falsely identified as suspects charged with a crime on Amazon’s facial recognition technology.

In December 2020, a Black man in New Jersey filed a lawsuit after he was wrongly identified as a suspect who shoplifted from a hotel gift shop. He spent 10 days in jail.

In July 2021, a Black girl was banned from a Michigan skating rink after facial recognition software misidentified her for a different Black girl who got in a brawl at the business on a prior date.

In August 2023, a pregnant Black woman was falsely identified and arrested as a carjacking thief in Detroit thanks to the technology.