'You just want this guy around': How a journeyman lineman became a cult hero in Detroit

DETROIT -- JUMBO 13! After three plays spent standing on the sideline to start the Lions' first drive, Dan Skipper's number is called. He runs onto the field with one white-gloved hand raised. "It's calm until it's not," he says of his job as the Lions sixth offensive lineman. "It's just the burst. You have to stay locked in. You can't have the mental lull."

The first thing he must do during this burst, and within the 40-second play clock, is find the white hat, or the referee, which isn't as simple as it sounds. "Sometimes they're hiding," he says, so he keeps one eye on the white hat at all times, another on the offense and, somehow, a third eye on offensive coordinator Ben Johnson, who he is careful to allow a 5-yard bubble on the sideline. "He's incredibly intense," Skipper says. "Don't get in his way."

This time, Skipper spots referee Brad Rogers pretty easily. "He's got great operational presence," Skipper says, but because not all referees are equal, he chatted up an official on Rogers' crew during pregame warmups to make sure they knew to expect him tonight.

"Brad! Brad! Brad!" he shouts, because using first names is the quickest way to get anyone's attention. Skipper moves his hands up and down his chest and tells Rogers: "Reporting!"

He catches Rogers' attention again for good measure, and this time the white hat points back at him. Message received. Now he needs to join the Lions huddle to hear his exact assignment and get lined up, all of this ideally before Rogers can officially announce his presence to the ...

"No. 70 is reporting eligible," Rogers says over his microphone to the Vikings' defense, but also to the 64,000 fans at Ford Field. "No. 70"

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH WAAAAHRHRHRRRRRHHHHHHHHHHHH YAHHHHHH WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

"If you hear a cheer during a replay, it usually means that Dan Skipper has reported eligible," NBC's Mike Tirico says on the broadcast.

But the cheers for Skipper are so deafening inside this sold-out domed stadium that he can't hear the formation call. The Lions have this 13 personnel (one running back, three tight ends, including Skipper) run the play out of two formations, buzz and bunch, and the well-intentioned Lions fans have drowned out quarterback Jared Goff's second syllable. Skipper flaps one arm up and down, a desperate plea to quiet the cheers, but the fans don't catch on.

There are eight seconds left on the play clock, and Skipper lines up just off the right tackle. He shouts at tight end Sam LaPorta to his right: "What are we in?"

As the Lions jumbo tight end and swing tackle, Skipper knows the guard and tackle assignments on each side of the line, as well as tight end motions, formations and routes. On Wednesdays, he shows up to find out what his job will be that week, and it's always different, because unlike most jumbo tight ends, he is a threat in the passing game. The Lions ran the fourth-most plays with six offensive linemen in the NFL -- 74 -- during the 2024 regular season, and he could have as many as 15 offensive snaps in a game, or none at all.

Just behind him, another tight end, Brandon Zylstra, points Skipper out to the right, trying to fix his teammate's alignment without words.

"I'm the Y!" LaPorta screams back.

Ahh, bunch. Now Skipper knows he's lined up wrong, so he quickly switches places with LaPorta and moves to the outside of the three-tight-end bunch formation, settling in for a split second before Goff calls for the snap with five seconds left.

After the game, Skipper's wife, Mackenzie, asks him what happened on the play, which resulted in a 3-yard loss, because something looked off. "I couldn't hear," he tells her.

A year ago, when Mackenzie first heard the crowd erupt specifically for her husband when he reported eligible, it freaked her out. "Did someone get hurt?" she remembers thinking. "Is he fighting someone? I didn't even know what was going on, because I saw him running on, and I was like, 'Why is everyone cheering?'"

"It's just funny to hear a fan base chant an O-lineman's name, Dan Skipper's name, and cheer when he goes in there," Lions offensive line coach Hank Fraley says. "It's awesome."

Where else in the NFL does an undrafted backup at one of the most unheralded positions in football take the field to the same level of applause typically reserved for a franchise quarterback?

Only in Detroit could a 6-foot-9 player labeled a "blue-collar" guy by his teammates and who self-identifies as "a catch-all bitch" become, as ESPN analyst Troy Aikman put it, "the most famous sixth offensive lineman in football."

"There are a lot of superstars in this league, and they become the idols," Skipper's dad, Ken, says. "A lot of people can relate to a guy that really has to work and that's had a lot of adversity throughout his career. Most people have faced that in their lives, and I think that's why a lot of people root for him."

SKIPPER WAS STILL sweating when he arrived for his post-practice photoshoot. He'd showered and changed into black Lions sweats after the team's final Friday regular-season practice, a fun one, where the offensive linemen always start by running routes and catching passes from Goff. But the shower only multiplied his body heat, and his cheeks were still flushed pink from the work.

He maneuvered his giant frame onto a too-small stool and phoned a friend in the locker room. "Hey are you dressed? Can you get a towel and run it up to me?"

Skipper has a hard time cooling down, because, as offensive coordinator Ben Johnson says, he knows only "green light, red light. It's stop or go."

"Sometimes he comes home and he's still so jazzed," Mackenzie says. "I'm like, you are not still at 222 Republic Drive [the Lions facility]. You need to take it down a couple notches."

That "sheer stop" and "emotional letdown," as he calls it, is why he regularly pukes postgame. He went viral this season when he couldn't make it out of the camera shot of head coach Dan Campbell's postgame speech to vomit in private. "There you go, Skip! Keep throwing up!" Campbell shouted at him.

"I've missed a fair amount of those [speeches] because I'm puking elsewhere," Skipper says. "You go from fourth-down conversion to win the game to you're in the locker room and it's just quiet. You're like, 'What just happened?'"

Skipper's all-out effort is the quality that endeared him to this hard-nosed, Campbell-coached Detroit team. The Lions valued him for that in a way that Skipper's previous six NFL clubs hadn't quite appreciated.

"He's tough, he's smart, he's gritty, he's got hands, he's a finisher," Campbell says. "I mean, you name it. He just fits everything that we're about. There's something about this guy that you just want this guy around."

"He's the guy that every couple of weeks was going to get in a fight during training camp," Johnson says. "Once we got him on the roster, we knew we wanted to get him out on the field, because we know what he's going to bring to the table."

Fraley says the Lions' defense has a love-hate relationship with Skipper, "because he's that guy."

"Every team needs someone who will push the envelope a little bit, try to get more out of guys," Skipper says. "In the first couple years, I think part of my job was like, we need some intensity."

Campbell talks a lot about the core group of Lions players that has been around since his first season in 2021, when the team went 3-13-1, and he recognizes Skipper as an important part of that group of "glue guys."

Returner Kalif Raymond, also a glue guy, remembers Campbell showing the team an insignificant play that Skipper made against the Bears in 2022.

"Skip is flying down the field, going to get a block. I mean, he's flying," Raymond says. "His effort was off the charts. And [Campbell] is like, 'Do you think this guy wants to play here? Look how bad he wants it!'"

Mackenzie likes to say the Lions' turnaround from 3-13-1 to 15-2 mirrors her husband's own NFL journey. Skipper was here when they weren't winning, and he didn't start a game until his sixth season in the NFL. This season was the first time in eight years that he made the 53-man roster out of training camp.

"It's not like he just walked in the door," Campbell says. "He's had to battle."

SKIPPER HAS A mental checklist of goals he wants to accomplish in his NFL career. He knows he's not a Pro Bowl player and likely never will be, so his goals are smaller, more reasonable. Start a game. Contribute to a team, "like, be an NFL player," he says.

Technically, Skipper has been an NFL player for eight years, but he hasn't always felt like one.

Despite being named first-team All-SEC as a left tackle and getting invited to the scouting combine, he went undrafted out of Arkansas in 2017. Mackenzie says they had put all their eggs into the draft basket.

"He felt like he let every single person down that was in that house cheering him on," she says. "Not that being undrafted is a loser, but he felt like a loser."

Skipper signed with Dallas as an undrafted free agent, but there wasn't any excitement when he signed out of rookie minicamp, because his expectations for himself had been so much bigger. "He didn't feel proud of himself," Mackenzie says.

Dallas signed Skipper to the practice squad out of training camp and then cut him three weeks later, on the morning of his 23rd birthday. He and Mackenzie were living in her parents' guest house, and she says when he came back home that day, he walked inside and immediately fell to the floor sobbing.

"I didn't see that one coming," Skipper says. "You're naive at that point."

"I could cry right now thinking about it," Mackenzie says. "That was the first real rejection, like, you are not good enough to be here."

His phone rang a few days later, and he went to Jim Caldwell's Lions, bounced on and off the practice squad, was elevated to the active roster once and then stuck around for the start of the Matt Patricia era in 2018. He was released from the practice squad three days after he'd signed to it after clearing waivers out of camp.

This time, weeks went by without a call. Skipper needed something to do, so he started working at his in-laws' pie shop in Texas, making 100 pie crusts per day, "with the big ass Hobart mixer making 50 pumpkin pies at time," Skipper says. "I still can't eat pies."

In mid-November, he got a workout with Washington, but it couldn't have gone worse. "They told me, 'You've got a ways to go,'" Skipper says. "'We don't see you as a fit here.'" He says a Washington personnel staffer told him the only way he could get an NFL job is if he went to train with a specific private offensive line coach. Skipper didn't agree with that.

Thanksgiving was quickly approaching, and he and Mackenzie had some brutal conversations about what their future without football would look like. "Those were the hardest weeks where I feel like he would not go to the gym," Mackenzie says. "Because he just was like, 'Literally, Mackenzie, nobody wants me.'"

Skipper did his best to stay in shape at the local rec center but says it was tough to stay motivated. "You're watching every Sunday, and you see guys that you're like, 'I'm better than this guy,'" he says. "Doesn't matter. I think we all have a self-inflated view, but you're sitting there like, why is nothing shaking?"

Finally, Denver called the week after Thanksgiving in 2018 to sign him to the practice squad immediately, no workout required.

And that January, he signed with New England's practice squad, just in time for the postseason. He says he "tripped and fell into" a Super Bowl ring the same season that he'd been out of the sport for 12 weeks.

He hung around New England the next summer, long enough to learn a valuable lesson from veteran offensive line coach Dante Scarnecchia, who Skipper says berated players daily with some "all-timers."

"I jumped offsides during OTAs, and he was like, 'You dumb motherf---er!" Skipper says. "And he threw a ball at me. 'You're so f---ing dumb, I can't f---ing deal with it. Why'd you f---ing jump offsides?'"

"I really learned how to let stuff roll off my back," Skipper says, "and not take things so personally."

(Scarnecchia laughed when Skipper's comments were relayed by ESPN, acknowledging, "We didn't have a whole lot of tolerance for [jumping offsides]," and adding, "I am really happy for Skip because he is such a great guy.")

For the next three seasons, 2019-2021, Skipper spent a few weeks with the Texans and the Raiders but kept landing back in Detroit. He estimates he has spent two years of his life at the Dearborn hotel the Lions use to house players.

In early 2021, Skipper called his position coach at Arkansas -- and now Arkansas' head coach -- Sam Pittman to see what his options were if his NFL days were over. Detroit had just hired Campbell, and Skipper wasn't sure how he'd fit in with the new staff. Maybe he could join Pittman's staff as a strength coach? But Pittman says he told Skipper: "I don't think you're through yet."

"He's a fighter," Pittman says. "I just kept saying, 'Keep fighting, you'll get a break.'"

Skipper expected to make the Lions' roster out of camp in 2022, but he was cut, once again, in an emotional scene that made the final episode of "Hard Knocks."

"Is there anything I can do?" he asked Campbell and general manager Brad Holmes. He shook his head back and forth and looked like he was on the brink of tears.

Skipper signed to the practice squad that season and, after injuries on the interior offensive line, just two weeks later, he started his first NFL game at left guard.

Campbell called him out in his postgame speech, and the entire locker room cheered for Skip.

"He's the one person that's been told no ... 24 or 25 times, and he has still made it out on the up," Mackenzie says. "That was a moment of pure joy for our whole family. I'm totally ratting him out on his crying, but he just broke down, and he just kept telling me, 'I did it, I did it.'"

The following offseason, Skipper says Campbell told him during the free agency period that he didn't see a spot for him on Detroit's roster. So Skipper signed with Indianapolis in August and showed up a few days before the first preseason game.

Six times in his career he'd gotten the call during camp to come in to see the general manager or head coach, or both, to get the bad news. But Skipper says the way the Colts handled it last season "really stung." Instead of hearing it from head coach Shane Steichen or general manager Chris Ballard, Skipper says a pro personnel guy did it. "If you're going to fire me, at least be man enough to have the head man fire me," he says.

He signed to the Colts practice squad but was cut a few days later, and by late September, he was back in Detroit on the practice squad. In October, he was elevated to the active roster, and he stayed there.

"He seems to always find his way back here," receiver Tom Kennedy, another glue guy, says. "It's just cool to see somebody who's been through a lot of roster transactions, still in the league for this long. He's obviously doing something right."

Skipper signed a one-year, $1 million contract with the Lions in March, and the 10 months since then are the longest he has gone without some kind of transaction.

On the afternoon before 53-man rosters were due to the league office in August, Skipper sat in his hotel room and stared out the window into the parking lot, doing the math in his head as one by one, his teammates walked out to their cars and drove off to the facility to get cut.

By the time the deadline hit, by his count, there were 10 offensive linemen left. Skipper had expected the team to keep the usual number, eight, and couldn't figure out how they were going to cut the group down. He believed he'd earned that third tackle spot, and when he showed up the next day, he was surprised to see the team kept 10. He called Mackenzie, who was at their home in Orange Beach, Alabama, with their twin toddler sons, and this time she was the one who started crying.

"Our way of celebrating is just talking about how far we've come, and that just fills our cup so much," she says. "Can you believe it? Like, can you believe that you did it?"

Says Skipper: "Everything from here is the good life."

What was such a big deal to Skip didn't register the same way for his Lions teammates. They've pretty much always thought of him as the contributor and NFL player he has yearned to be.

"You feel like he's always been on the team," says tight end Brock Wright, another glue guy. "It's like, 'Hey, congratulations, had a feeling you'd be here anyways.'"

Skipper checked off another couple "good life" goals this season: start at tackle and score a touchdown. Skipper filled in for three games when left tackle Taylor Decker was hurt, and against Green Bay at home, he allowed one pressure on 44 pass blocks.

Against Buffalo at home in December, he caught his first touchdown pass just a few minutes after Mackenzie left the stadium for the hospital for her scheduled induction to deliver their third child, a daughter.

After that game, he caught up with his counterpart on the Bills, Alec Anderson, who sees the field the most of any sixth offensive lineman in the league.

"He was like, 'Man, of course, they threw the ball to you,'" Skipper says. "'Like, all I do is f---ing block.'"

"That's what's so different about how we do it. We'll throw out of 12, 13 [personnel]."

"I would have never guessed it," says Matt Loyd, Skipper's coach at Ralston Valley High School near Denver, of his former player's touchdown. "I could have bet my home on that one."

While some would assume Skipper's Super Bowl ring is his biggest achievement, Skipper and Mackenzie treat it more like an experience for other people to enjoy. Their Alabama neighbors have come over to the house to try it on, but Skipper doesn't believe he contributed enough to that team to really claim it as his own.

"That's why the past couple years have been so special," he says of Detroit. "Like, hey, you're part of it."

MACKENZIE WAS WAITING for her husband in the family room at AT&T stadium in December 2023 when quarterback David Blough urgently pulled her away.

"You need to come back here," he said, and led her to a small room in the tunnel where Skipper was sitting and fuming, alone. Blough stood in the doorway to make sure they had privacy.

Just minutes earlier, referee Brad Allen confused which Lions offensive lineman reported eligible for what would have been the go-ahead 2-point play. Left tackle Taylor Decker reported, but Allen didn't look at him and instead announced Skipper as the eligible pass-catcher. Skipper ran onto the field signaling the Lions personnel, not the eligible signal and never verbally reported. What the Lions intended as some trickery and deception for the Cowboys' defense ended up fooling the officials, too, and Decker's catch on the 2-point play was called back for illegal touching. Detroit's subsequent two 2-point conversion attempts also failed, and the Lions lost by one point. Allen said postgame that Skipper reported, and in the following days, the league office backed the referee and sent a rules clarification video and memo to all 32 clubs. Skipper became part of a multiday national news cycle.

Skipper says he plays best at a six out of 10 on the emotional scale, but after that mix-up, he was at least a 12. "I was too hot," he says. "After that, I would have been no good in the game."

He has done a lot of work on emotional regulation with Lions sports psychologist Michelle Garvin, who has taught him to reset by focusing on visual cues when he's feeling worked up during games. At Ford Field, his visual cue is often a certain season ticket holder who sits right behind the Lions bench. "I don't want to blast this guy," Skipper laughs. "A lot of times he has a different girl with him. It has nothing to do with football, so I'll just watch their interactions."

But Skipper says this moment in Dallas was too intense for any cue to connect him back to reality. "He's yelling motherf---er at everybody, losing his mind," Decker says.

The "Sunday Night Football" cameras caught him red-faced, screaming in a rage. The vein in his neck pulsed with each word. I DIDN'T SAY A F-ING WORD! The clip went viral, as Lions fans rallied around their wronged offensive linemen.

"Although he knew it wasn't his fault, he never wants to be the reason that they didn't win," Mackenzie says. "It's always less about what he did or what happened, and more about how did he affect everyone else that had worked hard that whole game?"

Mackenzie told him that night that he needed to channel his anger and energy for the next game, but Skipper was still so worked up when he left to get on the team bus that she was worried about him.

That's when Goff, sensing Skipper's anguish, sat next to him as they waited for the bus to leave for the airport. Normally Goff would sit a couple rows back, but this time, Skipper says his quarterback snuck into the empty seat to tell him it wasn't his fault. In the long run, it wasn't going to matter, Goff said. Skipper was so beat down, he didn't have much to say back, but he was thankful. Then the star quarterback and the jumbo tight end sat together in silence.

When Campbell talked about that controversy the following week, he took responsibility, which meant a lot to Skipper. As a bottom-of-the-roster player, he was used to being "put on blast in the team room" in previous NFL stops and blamed for broken plays that were out of his control, like when a linemate stepped on his foot.

"It's a cover-your-ass league," Skipper says. "There's a lot of coaches that will blame someone else when really, it's no one's fault, but they're looking for an escape code. Typically, s--- rolls downhill. So that would have been a great opportunity. 'Oh, Skip f---ed it up. Here you go.' Then I'm public enemy No. 1."

Instead, that worst-case scenario became what Skipper calls "the trampoline moment" to becoming a bona fide star in the most unlikely role.

"I don't think our fans are going to forget that anytime soon," Decker says.

"It sends chills up your spine when you hear the fans yelling for him like that," Skipper's dad says.