NFC Notes: Dan Campbell, Ejiro Evero, Jared Goff, Lions, Packers

Lions

Lions HC Dan Campbell spoke to the media after the loss to the 49ers and admitted it could be a difficult road for the team to get back to the NFC Championship Game.

“I told those guys, this may have been our only shot,” Campbell told reporters after the game, via Pro Football Talk. “Do I think that? No. Do I believe that? No. However, I know how hard it is to get here. I’m well aware. And it’s gonna be twice as hard to get back to this point next year than it was this year. That’s the reality. And if we don’t have the same hunger and the same work — which is a whole ‘nother thing once we get to the offseason — then we got no shot of getting back here. I don’t care how much better we get or what we add or what we draft. It’s irrelevant. It’s gonna be tough. Everybody in our division’s gonna be loaded back up. And, you know, you’re not hiding from anybody anymore. Everybody’s gonna want a piece of you. Which is fine, you know. Which is fine. So it’s hard. You wanna make the most of every opportunity. And we had an opportunity and we couldn’t close it out.”

Lions

Lions HC Dan Campbell had no regrets about going it for it and coming up short twice on fourth down against San Francisco, with QB Jared Goff noting that he loved the decisions but the team was simply unable to convert.

“It’s easy hindsight. I get it. I get that, but I don’t regret those decisions, and it’s hard,” Campbell said, via Eric Woodyard of ESPN. “It’s hard because we didn’t come through, and it wasn’t able to work out, but I don’t. And I understand the scrutiny I’ll get — that’s part of the gig — but it just didn’t work out.”

“A few third downs we wish that we could have converted,” Lions WR Amon-Ra St. Brown added. “We went for it on fourth down a few times; I wish we would have had those. They played well on defense that second half. We were still moving the ball quite a bit, a turnover and whatnot. We both had one turnover, so it was tough.”

“He believes in us,” Goff noted, via Dave Birkett of the Detroit Free Press. “I don’t know what the numbers are but we had a lot of big-time conversions this year that changed games and I don’t know what we were today. I know we had the two we didn’t convert. It can change a game if you convert them and we didn’t. And that’s part of the reason why we lost.”

Packers

• Albert Breer of SI.com mentions the Packers as a potential fit for Panthers DC Ejiro Evero should he move on from Carolina in the coming weeks.