The Lions won 15 games in 2024 and a repeat in 2025 will take navigating a schedule that is one of the hardest in the league in paper.
Only the Giants have a schedule of opponents with a higher 2024 winning percentage than the one Detroit will play this fall. The gauntlet starts in Green Bay in Week One and that game is one of 11 that they will be playing against teams that were in the postseason last year. Their non-divisional foes include both Super Bowl teams, the Ravens, Rams, and Commanders and they are currently scheduled for seven prime-time or standalone games.
On Friday, Lions head coach Dan Campbell made it clear that he’s a fan of the challenges his team will face. Campbell called the schedule “fricking awesome” because it “builds you for the postseason.”
“It’s awesome, man,” Campbell said, via Dave Birkett of the _Detroit Free Press_. “I mean, to me, by the end of the year [we ought to be just scarred up](https://www.freep.com/story/sports/nfl/lions/2025/05/30/dan-campbell-detroit-lions-schedule-2025/83944191007/). We should be scarred up and ready to go, hardened for battle and ready for the playoffs. And there’ll be nothing easy about it. You still, just to get through our own division is going to be brutal, but it’s the right kind of brutal.”
Time will tell if Campbell is right, but there should be little doubt about the Lions’ battle-readiness once Week 18 is in the books.