Dan Campbell: I would love to have a pet lion at practice

[Roary]

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Lions head coach Dan Campbell wants his players to bite the kneecaps of opposing teams and he’d like to have a pet capable of doing a lot more than that around the practice field.

Campbell was a guest on Pardon My Take this week and the first-year head coach shared one of his ideas for creating livelier practice sessions. Campbell said that he asked Lions owner Sheila Ford Hamp about having an actual lion at the team’s facility.

“I don’t think we’re going to be able to do it, but I would love to literally just have a pet lion,” Campbell said, via Dave Birkett of the Detroit Free Press. “Just a legit pet lion on a chain, a big ass chain, and he really is my pet. We just walk around the building, we go out to practice, we’re at 7-on-7, we’re behind the kicker when he’s kicking.”

Campbell said that he’d like the lion to play a role in letting a position group know they were underperforming by training it to “take a dump right there in the middle of where their section is” during a bad practice. He also acknowledged that he could wind up losing an arm to his new pet, “but that would be even better because it would validate what, this is a freaking, this a creature now.”

Campbell added he’d be willing to give up his arm if it meant a Super Bowl. That is a little less extreme than the lengths Titans coach Mike Vrabel said he’d go in order to get a ring, although the lion would ultimately make the decision about which pieces of Campbell’s body would wind up on the menu in Detroit.