Lions share positive update on Jack Campbell after scary neck injury: ‘Your prayers are working’
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- Lions linebacker Jack Campbell sustained a neck injury in the team’s game Sunday against the Vikings.
- The team said Monday that “preliminary indications are positive” as Campbell continued to rest and recover in the hospital.
- Detroit rallied around Campbell, then held on for a gritty 19-15 victory over the previously undefeated Vikings, with teammates saying the win was “all about Jack.”
The Detroit Lions have shared a positive update on linebacker Jack Campbell, who was carted off the field with a neck injury during the team’s game against the Minnesota Vikings on Sunday.
“Jack Campbell continues to rest and recover at a local hospital,” the team posted Monday on X. “Preliminary indications are positive and out of respect for Jack and his family we will not share further information at this time.”
“Your prayers are working,” coach Dan Campbell told reporters on Monday. “Please continue to do that.”
Jack Campbell, a fourth-year player who made his first Pro Bowl last season, was lying face down and motionless on the field after tackling Vikings tight end T.J. Hockenson early in the fourth quarter of Detroit’s 19-15 victory.
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Players were emotional as they knelt on the field, and the crowd watched in concerned silence as medical staff tended to the injured player for around 10 minutes, before strapping him to a backboard and carting him off the field. Campbell was said to have been breathing and alert when he was taken to the hospital.
In the locker room, the coach was fired up as he congratulated his players on a gritty victory over an NFC North rival that had entered the game undefeated. He quickly became emotional when the topic turned to their injured teammate.
“I do not have any more information on Jack,” Dan Campbell said. “We don’t know anything else at this point. So here’s what I want to do, man. We’re gonna take a knee and I want to pray for Jack, OK? And let’s keep him in our thoughts and prayers, man.”
The Lions said Sunday on X that Jack Campbell was resting and would stay overnight at a hospital “for continued evaluation and monitoring.”
Campbell was injured on the first play of the fourth quarter, with the Lions clinging to a 12-7 lead. Vikings quarterback Kyler Murray completed a 10-yard pass to Hockenson on the play, with the tackle by Campbell and teammate Jimmy Rolder setting up fourth down and five yards to go for Minnesota. Rolder also suffered a hamstring injury on the play and did not return to the game.
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Before play resumed, Detroit edge rusher Aidan Hutchinson gathered the defense and delivered a few heartfelt words.
Then he and his teammates went back to work, with Hutchinson applying pressure on Murray and Lions cornerback D.J. Reed knocking the ball away from intended receiver Jordan Anderson for an incomplete pass and a turnover on downs.
“I was filled with a lot of emotions,” Hutchinson told reporters after the game. “We were more united than we had ever been before that play. It’s a weird dynamic, between football being a game, and then snap out of it to seeing a dude being carted off, and then right back in it. Riding that roller coaster, it’s a little foreign, for sure.”
Immediately after returning to the sideline, Detroit’s defensive players gathered in a circle.
“In those type of moments, you forget football,” Lions linebacker Derrick Barnes told reporters after the game. “It’s about the person. Football was the last thing on my mind when that happened. It was all about Jack.”
