'This team is full of winners': Detroit Lions open 2023 season with 21-20 win over Chiefs

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — C.J. Gardner-Johnson has played for nothing but winners in his NFL career.

He helped the Philadelphia Eagles reach the Super Bowl in February. He won 13 games as a rookie. He has never played on a team that's finished below .500.

"Winners know what winners look like," Gardner-Johnson said Thursday. "This team is full of winners."

The Detroit Lions beat the defending Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs, 21-20, in the NFL's season opener at Arrowhead Stadium on Thursday night, stifling the league's best offense and spoiling the Chiefs' banner-raising ceremony while unveiling themselves as legitimate title contenders to the rest of the world.

David Montgomery scored the game-winning touchdown on an 8-yard run with 7:06 to play, and the Lions got two key defensive stops in the final six minutes to start 1-0 for the first time in three seasons under Dan Campbell.

As the game ended, they were serenaded by chants of, "Let's go, Lions," from thousands of fans in Honolulu Blue jerseys.

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"I didn't learn anything (new about my team today)," Campbell said. "I got verification on what I already knew. This is a resilient team. It already was a resilient team and we added pieces to that resilient team. So we're built to handle some stuff and we did that today against a very good opponent.”

Montgomery, playing his first game as a Lion after four seasons with the Chicago Bears, ran for a game-high 74 yards on 21 carries, but it was the Lions' rebuilt defense with three new starters in the secondary that was the star of the night.

Facing a Chiefs team that led the NFL in scoring and total offense last season — but was playing without All-Pro tight end Travis Kelce — the Lions held the reigning Super Bowl champs to 316 net yards and did not allow a touchdown in the second half.

The Chiefs, who had won eight straight openers (tied for the fifth-longest streak in NFL history) and 16 straight games against NFC opponents entering Thursday, had fewer yards in just two games last season.

“I feel like we put ourselves in some bad situations," Chiefs running back Jerick McKinnon said. "When you play against a good team, you can’t do those things, and if you can’t come up with points, this is what happens."

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The Lions trailed, 14-7, at halftime, but held the Chiefs without a third-down conversion in the second half and got two big defensive plays from rookies to flip momentum their way early in the third quarter.

Jack Campbell, the Lions' second of two first-round picks in April, made a diving deflection on a Patrick Mahomes pass to Kadarius Toney that would have gone for a first down, and second-round pick Brian Branch intercepted a Mahomes pass that deflected off Toney's body two plays later and returned it 50 yards for a touchdown.

Entering Thursday, Mahomes, the reigning NFL MVP, had 18 touchdowns and no interceptions in season-openers for his career.

Mahomes led two field goal drives to give Kansas City a 20-14 lead early in the fourth quarter, but after Montgomery followed a block from another rookie, tight end Sam LaPorta, into the end zone for his touchdown, the Lions turned the game back over to their defense.

Josh Paschal stopped Rashee Rice for a 3-yard loss on a third-and-1 trick play to force a Chiefs punt, and the Lions pinned Mahomes in a fourth-and-25 on Kansas City's final series.

Paschal's tackle came after tight end Blake Bell, playing in place of the injured Kelce, took a direct snap under center and handed the ball to Rice on a jet sweep from the Chiefs' 34-yard line. Linebacker Alex Anzalone said the Lions recognized the play from something Kansas City ran in the preseason, when the tight end under center took the snap and converted a quarterback sneak.

"That’s just a guy that executed at the right time, had the right keys," Anzalone said. "It’s really encouraging to see that player make that play in that situation, cause good dude, works hard, and it was one of the biggest plays of the game, obviously."

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Mahomes, who finished 21-for-39 passing for 226 yards, albeit with at least five drops, said he had no problem with Chiefs coach Andy Reid's decision to try and convert on fourth-and-25 rather than punt with 2:09 to play and three timeouts left.

"I’m always hoping we go for it," he said. "The defense was playing good and we kicked the field goals and it set us up to have a situation where we just needed a field goal at the end of the game, we just didn’t convert on it."

Jared Goff completed 22 of 35 passes for 253 yards for the Lions. He threw one touchdown, a 9-yard pass to Amon-Ra St. Brown that came 10 plays after the Lions converted a fake punt on a direct snap to personal protector Jalen Reeves-Maybin at their own 17-yard line, and Marvin Jones lost a fumble deep in Chiefs territory.

"You get a coach like that who's ballsy and lets his nuts hang a little bit, it's big to be a part of that," Montgomery said.

For a team that hasn't made the playoffs since 2016, Campbell said it was big to be part of a win like Thursday's, too, even if it was just the start of what the Lions hope to accomplish this year.

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“We expected to win this game," he said. "We came in here and we knew what we needed to do, and we knew it wasn’t going to be easy. We did that. What it really means is that it is one. That is one. We have to clean up our issues that hurt us on some stuff today and be ready for Seattle in 10 days."

The Lions host the Seattle Seahawks in their home opener Sept. 17.

Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit Lions 'resilient' defense dominates in win over KC Chiefs