Amon-Ra St. Brown says the Detroit Lions are carrying a different kind of energy into 2026. He said the team feels more motivated after last season’s 9-8 finish and believes its edge is back.
He made the comments while speaking with FOX 2 at Community Partner Day practice at the Allen Park Meijer Performance Facility, where the new season is already starting to take shape. St. Brown said the Lions will open the 2026 preseason on Thursday against the Bengals, a first chance to see whether that mindset shows up on the field.
That matters now because the Lions are in training camp and, by St. Brown’s own description, camp is going great. The timing gives his remarks more weight than a typical summer optimism session. The team is trying to move past a season that ended at 9-8, and St. Brown is framing the next step as less about noise and more about repetition, urgency and finishing stronger.
He also put a blunt edge on the mood around the Lions. “No one’s really talking about us,” he said, a line that fits the way Detroit has been approaching camp: motivated, but not interested in making declarations that are bigger than the work in front of them. St. Brown said he and the team have heard enough to know that the response now has to come from the field, not the conversation around it.
That same forward-looking tone carried into one of the clearest parts of his interview. St. Brown said that when a play is over, the next one matters most, echoing a message he says he learned from Keary Colbert and one that Dan Campbell talks about often. It is the kind of answer that fits a team trying to reset after a frustrating finish without pretending the frustration disappeared.
St. Brown also pointed to a much more personal date on the schedule. On Nov. 15, the Lions are set to play the New England Patriots in Munich, Germany, a game he said he is “super excited” about because of what the trip means to him and to the sport’s reach there. He said he is half-German, and that his mother is an immigrant from Leverkusen, giving the game a meaning that goes beyond the standings.
“I feel like me being half-German, I feel like it’s my duty to kind of grow the game in Germany,” he said. “I feel this is the first step towards it.” He added that he expects the fans to be amazing and said he is happy to play football in Germany with family nearby and teammates beside him.
Off the field, St. Brown also used the interview to talk about the St. Brown Foundation, which he and his brothers started a year and a half ago. He said the foundation focuses on literacy, global experiences and health and wellness, with school at the center of that work because not every child will become a professional athlete or reach college. His point was plain: education is a tool that can carry into life no matter what happens in sports.
The Lions now have a clear test for whether that renewed edge is real. Thursday’s preseason opener against the Bengals comes first, and Munich follows in November. If Detroit wants the confidence St. Brown described to mean anything, it will have to show up in those moments and in the weeks between them.
