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Lions featured on cover, picked to win Super Bowl in Sports Illustrated’s season preview

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Lions featured on cover, picked to win Super Bowl in Sports Illustrated’s season preview

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Detroit — Winning 12 games last season, coming agonizingly close to winning the NFC Championship Game and returning the majority of your key contributors will lead to high expectations for any team in the NFL, and the 2024-25 Detroit Lions are no different.

As if expectations weren’t already high enough, they rose again Thursday morning when Sports Illustrated dropped its season preview and featured the Lions on the cover, with writers Conor Orr and Greg Bishop picking Detroit to win Super Bowl 59.

“All of it suggests — no, screams — that these Lions are ready for more,” Orr and Bishop wrote. “More expectations. More wins. More success. They’re ready to grab the wheel from (coach Dan) Campbell and drive this franchise straight to New Orleans in February, to the Lions’ first Super Bowl.”

The Lions are coming off their best season, in terms of win total, since 1991. They began the 2023-24 season with a 5-1 record and defeated both the Los Angeles Rams and Tampa Bay Buccaneers in the playoffs on the way to the NFC Championship Game against the San Francisco 49ers.

Detroit held a 17-point lead at halftime, but the 49ers battled back and tied the game in the third quarter. San Francisco took a 3-point lead with just under 10 minutes to play and never looked back.

The Lions extended or re-signed multiple pieces this offseason, namely quarterback Jared Goff, wide receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown and offensive linemen Penei Sewell and Taylor Decker. Detroit also brought in a couple of key free agents, in cornerback Carlton Davis III and defensive lineman DJ Reader.

It’s all a part of Detroit’s pursuit of unprecedented heights for the franchise; the Lions have never won a Super Bowl, though they’ve won the NFL Championship on four separate occasions before the Super Bowl era began in 1967.

The heightened expectations are surely a welcome change from the doom-and-gloom outlook many have had with Detroit in recent years. However, the Lions aren’t letting that outside noise influence their preparation for what could be a historic season.

“I feel like our coaching staff, they know we got here because of the work, and so they’re making sure that we don’t forget that,” third-year defensive lineman Josh Paschal said Tuesday. “We’re working just as hard, definitely harder than even before. We all know what it takes to get to where we want to get to, and we’re willing to do whatever.”

rsilva@gannett.com

@rich_silva18

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