Betting on Culture: Dan Campbell's Dynasty Blueprint

On the tangible benefits of culture, the Ravens' defense as a case study, and how the Lions' new hires could set them up long term.

For around 18 weeks of the 2024 season, the Lions were the NFL’s best team, which made their early playoff exit - a second-round loss to the Washington Commanders - all the more disappointing. But perhaps just as consequential for Detroit were the two losses the team suffered a week later, when offensive coordinator Ben Johnson and defensive coordinator Aaron Glenn left to take head coaching jobs with the Jets and Bears.

It’s not uncommon for top teams to lose an assistant to the job market after a great season, but what makes their losses especially challenging for the Lions is that Glenn and Johnson share a certain quality that makes them especially difficult to replace - they were both the play-callers for their respective units.

In hopes of landing the next Sean McVay or Kyle Shanahan, seemingly every team in the league is searching for a 30-something play-calling coordinator to become their next head coach. The results of those coaches back up this play-calling-centric approach, but it also has a flip side: the playbook-sized holes that are left in these young coordinators’ previous units. Most playoff teams that lose a coordinator regress on the side of the ball he leaves behind, but those teams that lose a play-calling coordinator, on average, fall a precipitous 12.2 spots from the season before, four spots worse than the units that lose a non-play-calling coordinator.¹

Former Lions OC Ben Johnson at his introductory press conference as the new Bears head coach.

The Lions losing both their play-callers also has an ominous precedent - the last playoff team to replace both play-callers was the 2022 Eagles, when OC Shane Steichen and DC Jonathan Gannon were lured away by the Colts and Cardinals head coaching jobs. Those Eagles then fell from the third-ranked offense and sixth-ranked defense in 2022 to the 24th and 30th, respectively, in 2023, showing just how far a great team can fall when they lose their edge in the play-calling department. Fortunately for Philadelphia, the seasoned play-calling coordinators they brought in for 2024, DC Vic Fangio and OC (and new Saints HC) Kellen Moore, laid the groundwork for something of a bounce-back season.

So it might leave you scratching your head to learn that the replacements for Johnson and Glenn in Detroit - John Morton (OC) and Kelvin Sheppard (DC) - only have a single year of play-calling experience between them. You’ll start scratching harder when you learn that year was Morton’s 2017 calling the Jets offense, where he was fired after the Jets ranked 24th in points scored.

But look closer at Detroit’s coordinator hires, and you do see a throughline. While they’re lacking in tactical experience, Detroit’s new coordinators both offer a different value to Dan Campbell’s Lions: cultural continuity. When you look at units across recent NFL history that have not only gotten good - as Detroit has over the last two seasons - but maintained that dominance in the long term, hiring Morton and Sheppard has the opportunity to pay off in a much larger, more durable way than even finding another top play-caller.

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Defining a Cultural Advantage

The idea of “establishing a culture” is well-worn in football; a cliche trotted out at every NFL head coach’s introductory press conference. Good teams will talk about establishing a “winning culture,” but that, too, seems like a stretch - after all, nearly every player in the NFL is manically competitive, and they are all certainly trying very hard to win. 

But there have been a small handful of teams over the course of NFL history that have truly cultivated a different approach to the game worthy of being deemed a unique “culture.” Those cultures tend to start out with the presence of a strong player or head coach who instills a clear identity into their team or unit. Tom Brady and Bill Belichick’s “Patriot’s way,” the moniker for their culture of extreme accountability, embedded itself across the organization in the form of neurotic, precise preparation on the way to winning six Super Bowls. The Legion of Boom Seahawks, who brought a violent, old-school approach to match Pete Carrol’s exacting standards, led the league in scoring defense for four(!) straight seasons, and would have had back-to-back Super Bowls if not for running into Brady and Belichick (and not running the ball, with Marshawn Lynch, on the one-yard-line).

The difference between cultures like these and a collection of good players and coaches is how the culture-driven teams invest in their identity to prolong and deepen their excellence. That is still a little abstract, so let’s consider perhaps the most successful, longest-running culture in the league to date - the Baltimore Ravens defense.²

Since 1999, the Ravens have spent 22 of 25 years as a top-ten defense. That is as good and as consistent as any unit in the league has been in that span, and it is not all that close. What makes it all the more impressive is that this stretch has necessarily included several generations of coaches and players, meaning the team’s secret sauce was not the result of just a couple of exceptional individuals. In fact, as we look closer at how the Ravens defense has played at such a high level for such a long time, it’s largely the way the team leveraged their culture to find and develop the right personnel that has been the difference in their dominance and the more fleeting good stretches that other franchises enjoy.

That culture began to take shape ahead of the team’s inaugural season when the front office paired new defensive coordinator Marvin Lewis with rookie middle linebacker Ray Lewis (no relation). Both Lewises brought plenty of value on their own - Ray was a uniquely athletic and cerebral linebacker, and Marvin’s years working under Dom Capers in Pittsburgh had sharpened him into one of the best defensive minds in the league. But as the two developed together, and the Ravens defense steadily established itself as one of the league’s top units, Ray’s uncompromising, gritty personality and Marvin’s aggressive, unorthodox scheme began to meld into a full-blown identity for the Ravens defense. As the defense fell in line behind the Lewises, those standards, rituals, and patterns of play that are the hallmark of a true culture began to emerge and pay dividends on the field. In 2001, the Ravens defense arguably had the greatest season of any unit in NFL history, carrying Baltimore to a Super Bowl while allowing 10.3 points per game, including a playoff run where they didn’t allow a single touchdown.

MLB Ray Lewis, along with DC Marvin Lewis, were at the heart of the Ravens defensive culture. (Nick Wass/ AP)

But it was a year later, when Marvin Lewis was hired away as the head coach of the Cincinnati Bengals, that the Ravens truly started reaping the fruit of the culture they had sown. Rather than look for another defensive architect or ace play-caller to replace Lewis’s tactical acumen, the Ravens promoted their wide receiver coach, Mike Nolan, to defensive coordinator*. Nolan had been around the Ravens’ organization for years prior and had been steeped in both the tactical and spiritual identities that made up the Ravens' defensive culture. The intention from the Ravens was clear: rather than looking outside the building for the best play-caller, they would look inside for the coach most capable of building on their existing structure.

The Ravens’ gamble on Nolan paid off, the defense continuing their dominance without missing a beat. Before long, the Ravens were forced to repeat that trick when they replaced Nolan, who got the HC gig in San Francisco, with linebackers coach Rex Ryan. After Ryan rode the defense’s excellent performance to the New York Jets head coaching job he was replaced by his linebackers coach Greg Mattison. What the Ravens have demonstrated with their success promoting assistants to DC is that once a strong culture is established, the best person to steward it is someone who has spent time learning it, even if they’re lacking the play-calling experience a top job like Ravens DC could easily demand. The team has continued to double down on that idea: Through the 2024 season, all eight Ravens defensive coordinators following Marvin Lewis have been former Ravens assistants.

The benefits of the Ravens culture extends to continuity on the field as well. It begins in how the team evaluates potential new players - the Ravens’ concrete tactical identity makes clear exactly what attributes are needed at each position. Just as the Ravens front office identified that Marvin Lewis’s zone-blitz required a cerebral, athletic middle linebacker, leading to them selecting a sliding Ray Lewis at the end of the first round (teams were worried he was too undersized to make it in the NFL), the team grew to understand the complementary qualities required on the line or in the secondary to maximize their system. Safeties were ideally a Swiss-army-knife like Ed Reed or Rod Woodson, linemen needed the agility and footwork to drop into coverage, etc. With these clear archetypes in mind, the team was able to find relative bargains in the draft - players like Lewis who didn’t fit the universal archetype for the NFL linebacker but who suited the Ravens’ scheme perfectly.

As the team stacked these well-suited players at each position, they also got better at developing incoming players to eventually take over from their stars, focusing on sharpening the specific skills that matter in their particular style. That idea becomes clear when you look at the remarkable progressions the team has had at certain positions over the years. When Lewis retired in 2012, the middle linebacker mantle was taken over by standout C.J. Mosley, then Patrick Queen, and today, Roquan Smith. The procession at safety is perhaps even more impressive, with the Ravens going from Rod Woodson to Ed Reed, then Eric Weddle, and today, Kyle Hamilton. That is without even mentioning the excellent linemen like Tony Siragusa, Haloti Ngata, and Terrell Suggs.

It’s hard not to see the cyclical effect the Ravens’ culture has had on maintaining their excellence. By starting from a clear understanding of how they play, they are able to find and develop exactly the players and coaches they need for their scheme. There is perhaps no better example than the success of Ravens first-year defensive coordinator Zach Orr, who was an All-Pro Ravens middle linebacker and then linebacker coach before taking over as the unit’s DC and leading it to its 8th-place finish in 2024. As ephemeral as the idea of culture has become, the advantages that the Ravens defense has reaped over the years have been anything but.

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The Lions Going Forward

Dan Campbell’s culture in Detroit runs contrary to many of the classic examples, including the Ravens’ defense. It isn’t centered around an elite player like Brady, Manning, or Ray Lewis. Nor was it just built around winning - Campbell’s famous “biting kneecaps” speech came before Detroit won three games in 2021, and the season after, they started 1-6. 

In understanding Campbell’s culture, however, contrarianism is a good place to start. In a league that increasingly worships nerdy, play-calling savants in the mold of Shanahan and McVay, and, yes, Ben Johnson, Campbell is a gritty, hard-nosed throwback. Rather than the playbook, what he established first in Detroit was an ascetic mental toughness and a physicality that came from the more violent NFL in which  Campbell himself played. They also embody a unique selflessness that draws from Campbell, too - despite having some of the best players in the NFL, Detroit operates effortlessly as a well-balanced ensemble.

Campbell is able to keep the Lions moving so smoothly against the grain because his ideals are authentic and unshakable. As Zak Keefer writes in his excellent profile of Campbell at The Athletic, “If you want Dan Campbell, you get all of him.” You get the nutty press conferences, the digressive speeches at practice, and the daredevil fourth-down attempts. Campbell’s way is weird, but he has also shown these Lions that it works. It turned Detroit from a perennial loser into a powerhouse. It took in quarterback Jared Goff when nobody wanted him and helped make him one of the league’s best quarterbacks. It’s the spiritual blueprint that led to the breakouts across the roster, from Hutchinson, Sewell, and St. Brown to Gibbs, Montgomery, and Joseph. And so this Lions team has adopted Campbell’s soulful identity as their own - both on the offensive and defensive side of the ball.

When Campbell’s choices are seen as a mechanism for continuing and entrenching this intangible but powerful culture, his new hires make perfect sense. The choice for DC, Sheppard, is a recently retired linebacker who played under Campbell when he was an assistant in Miami. He took over as the Lions’ linebackers coach in 2022, spending two years learning Glenn’s system and Campbell’s culture before getting the promotion to DC. Sheppard’s hiring shows Campbell’s ambition to maintain the defensive identity established under Glenn while also potentially beginning a Ravens-esque cycle of developing and promoting defensive play-callers in-house.

New Lions DC Kelvin Sheppard (left).

While Morton is unlikely to be the play-caller that Ben Johnson was in Detroit, he is intimately familiar with the playbook, as he was brought in as a consultant in 2022 to help Johnson put it together. Combine that familiarity with Morton’s history working under coaches like Jim Harbaugh, Jon Gruden, and eventually, Sean Payton, where Campbell worked alongside him as the tight-end coach, and you see that while Morton isn’t an internal promotion, he seems like a very natural fit to take over the powerhouse Lions offense and keep it humming.

It’s counterintuitive, but in their own way, these low-profile hires are a high-risk, high-reward proposition for Campbell. He is wagering that what drove Detroit last season did not leave on a plane to Chicago or New York - that it was beyond the tactics or the personalities that Johnson and Glenn lent their units. Campbell is betting that everything the Lions need to win the Super Bowl is already there and that by leaning more deeply into the culture he has formed in Detroit, he will get more out of it. That gamble is not for the faint of heart, but as Campbell has shown throughout his Detroit tenure, he isn’t shy about going for it.

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Edited Excellently by Greta Gruber

1. For the real sickos among you:

2. Regrettably, the Ravens defense never got a cool name like “Patriots Way” or “Legion of Boom.”