Notes: Brockers preaching ‘any given Sunday’ mentality to get through losses

The veteran’s looking ahead to get through the brutal beatdowns.

The atmosphere surrounding a team that has lost six games in a row can’t be full of sunshine and daisies, so leadership from the team’s veterans is likely more important than ever.

While there’s merit to examining the past week’s mistakes, speaking to the media Monday, defensive lineman Michael Brockers emphasized his “next-step mindset.”

“Whoever is our next opponent, let’s focus on them because we’ve had some bad losses and we’ve had some losses where we barely lost — lost by a field goal — but they’re still losses at the end of the day,” he said. “A lot of guys want to linger and stuff — I choose not to linger because you can’t focus on the next opponent if you’re still thinking about your past opponent. That’s kind of what I preached to the guys.”

It’s probably easy to linger on a 34-11 beat down at home, especially if you’re among many of the younger players on this Detroit Lions team. But Brockers said he’s both lost a lot of games and won a lot of games and his biggest takeaway: “It’s any given Sunday.”

No one thought this season was going to go well, but that doesn’t make the losses any less disappointing. That’s why the words of veterans like Brockers are important to watch in these especially low times, as they can have a major effect on how this team responds to adversity.

Speaking of adversity, remember in his opening press conference how Dan Campbell said the team would deal with losses: “This team is going to take on the identity of this city. This city’s been down and it found a way to get up. It’s found a way to overcome adversity.”

Well the Lions are certainly down, so here’s to watching how they possibly get back up.

And onto your notes.

• From our friends at the Rams Wire — Matthew Stafford weighs in on the upcoming matchup, as he and Jared Goff face their former teams this week.

• “Campbell’s vibe Sunday was unlike anything we’ve seen from him during his 10 months as Lions head coach.” The fellas at The Athletic offer their takes from the ugly loss. ($)

• A bright spot in an otherwise brutal outing:

• Sometimes sleeping on it helps. Four observations on how the Lions offense struggled after failing to properly restock receivers. ($)

• The Detroit Free Press’s Jeff Seidel offers a spicy take. I’ll let the headline speak for itself: “Don’t be fooled: Matthew Stafford didn’t escape Detroit Lions, he was part of the problem” ($)

• ​Cool, cool, cool.

• The Lions are officially the only winless team left in the NFL. Ken Haddad with Local 4/clickondetroit.com takes a stab at when this losing streak could end. Maybe.