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| Patricia wearing a shirt with Goodell as a clown was a very "takes one to know one" situation |
As a lifelong Detroit Lions fan, I’ve seen plenty of pain and sadness in my 26 years on this earth. The 2008 Lions remain the worst team in the history of the NFL (the only other team to go 0-16, the 2017 Cleveland Browns, was much better than the 2008 Lions). I’ve never seen the Lions host a playoff game. I’ve never seen them win a playoff game. The team’s last division title was a year before I was born. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers have more titles in the Lions’ division in my lifetime; the Bucaneers haven’t played in said division for 18 years.
My family owned season tickets to the Lions for most of the last decade. This means I was able to witness many heartbreaks firsthand. I attended games during that dreadful 0-16 season. I saw the Jim Schwartz Rule live as it happened. I saw the Suh Stomp in another Thanksgiving Day loss. When Aaron Rodgers and Jay Cutler missed a significant part of the 2013 season, the NFC North was the Lions’ to lose. I was at the game where Justin Tucker single-footedly kicked the Lions out of contention that year. The walk to the car with my father after that game felt more like the aftermath of a funeral than a football game.
Yet none of this sadness or heartbreak ever made me want to stop being a Lions fan. I’ve been hooked on this team for my entire life. In good seasons and bad seasons, they’ve always at least kept me entertained. Matt Millen as GM couldn’t break me. Neither could Steve Mariucci, Rod Marinelli or Marty Morninwheg as coaches. Not even the quarterback play of Scott Mitchell, Dave Krieg, Don Majkowski, Charlie Batch, Frank Reich, Gus Frerotte, Stoney Case, Ty Detmer, Mike McMahon, Joey Harrington, Jeff Garcia, Jon Kitna, Dan Orlovsky, Daunte Culpepper, or Drew Stanton could keep me from loving this stupid, awful football team.
Matt Patricia was different, but now he’s gone. Patricia was fired last Saturday after going 13-29-1 in his career as Lions coach. That’s one more loss and one more tie than his predecessor Jim Caldwell had. That’s also 23 less wins than Caldwell.
Patricia was hired specially by his friend from New England Bob Quinn, who was also fired on Saturday. They spent the last two and a half years completely dismantling everything that was good or fun about Jim Caldwell’s teams. They broke me as a fan in ways I didn’t think possible
Even when Caldwell’s teams (and even Jim Schwartz’s teams before him) were losing games, they were often at least entertaining, the classic Lions finding new and interesting ways to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. When they won, it was exciting. Matthew Stafford leading game-winning drives in the last few minutes of a game was a regular occurrence. It was a rollercoaster that had plenty of downs, but man, those ups felt good.
The Matt Patricia/Bob Quinn Lions weren’t a rollercoaster. They weren’t much of anything other than losers. The few wins the team has gotten in the past three years have mostly been ugly, grit-it-out wins. The losses were mostly ugly late-game collapses or complete domination at the hands of the Lions’ opponents. There was nothing exciting about this football team. Even when Stafford was playing perhaps the best football of his career before an injury cut his 2019 campaign short, the team couldn’t win games. The Matt Patricia Lions were the least competitive Lions team since 2008. Even Jim Schwartz for all his faults was putting out better teams.
This is because the Quinntricia team was dead-set on doing things their way no matter how little it was working. The Lions wanted to establish the run on offense and stop the run on defense. These are good and noble things to want your football teams to do, but they shouldn’t be your main goals in the modern NFL.
Patricia and Quinn seemed to have an active disdain for pressuring opposing quarterbacks. On offense, they seemed dead set on running the ball up the middle even when it was clear it wasn’t going to work. Defenses knew when the Lions had the ball, it was going to be run-run-pass-punt. Like clockwork.
As little fun as fans were having during these losses, players seemed to be having even less fun. Matt Patricia came into the locker room wanting to be a hard-assed, disciplined football coach. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it only works if you can get the respect of your team. By all accounts, Patricia failed to do this in his first season. As opposed to Caldwell, who was absolutely adored by his players, Patricia butted heads with a ton of his best players, especially those that had bigger personalities or posted a lot on social media. There’s a difference between being a hardass coach and just being a dick, and the Lions lost out on a lot of talent because of Patricia’s approach. Here are just a few of the players that Patricia and Quinn alienated in Detroit:
Golden Tate: Pro Bowl WR, one of Stafford’s favorite targets, 7th all-time in Lions receiving yards, 5th all-time in receptions. Traded to the Eagles for a 3rd round pick.
Glover Quin: Pro Bowl safety, former second team All-Pro, team captain, one of the best Lions defenders of the last decade. Retired after a down year in 2018.
Quandre Diggs: Starter at safety and team captain. Traded to Seattle for a 5th round pick after struggling a few weeks. His play immediately bounced back with the Seahawks.
Darius Slay: Three-time Pro Bowl corner, All-Pro, Detroit’s best defensive player from 2014-2019. Traded to Philadelphia for a 3rd rounder and 5th rounder. Perhaps the most well-known critic of the Quinntricia front office.
Eric Ebron: Cut from the Lions after a killer finish to 2017. Became a Pro Bowler the very next season with the Colts. Might win a ring in Pittsburgh this year.
Graham Glasgow: No accolades, but one of the Lions’ most consistent offensive linemen who was a quality starter at any position on the interior. Wasn’t even approached about a contract extension despite great play and Quinn being a GM who always talked about the importance of the trenches.
With the exception of Ebron who always got a raw deal from Lions fans, these players weren’t just quality starters; they were fan favorites. Patricia’s style ran all of them out of town.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. A’Shawn Robinson, Ziggy Ansah, Travis Fulgham, Toby Johnson, and Elijah Lee are just a few of the former players that danced on Patricia’s grave as he left. Star receiver Kenny Golladay liked a post on Instagram announcing the firing. I’ve been a fan of the NFL my entire life. I’ve never seen former players come out like this after a coach was fired. This was a complete and utter embarrassment from the front office and coaching staff.
To add insult to injury, the players this front office did bring in were rarely much better. And the more Patriot-like “culture fits” that Quinn would sign often seemed undisciplined and prone to stupid mistakes in games, even veterans like Jamie Collins and Danny Amendola, who are still two of the better players they brought in.
But the actual quality of the players never mattered. It was doing things their way, in opposition to any reality. Instead of building on what Schwartz and then Caldwell did, Quinntricia tore it down. They wanted their archaic vision of football to work, even if it meant completely dismantling the Lions roster trying to fit this square peg through that round hole.
Now the Lions are back to square one. The next GM and head coach will inherit one of the biggest messes in the NFL. The defense that Jim Caldwell and Teryl Austin left was bad, but “defensive genius” Matt Patricia’s is even worse. There are some really solid pieces on offense, but the team only has one receiver signed after this year, and it’s the fourth man on the depth chart. Matthew Stafford isn’t getting any younger, he’s dealt with lingering injuries in the last few seasons, and his play has gone down this season. The new powers that be might see that and look to draft a new franchise quarterback.
And some of this could have been avoided. It was abundantly clear after last year that this wasn’t working, but these two losers were given another half-season to make “the Patriot Way” work before they were fired on a holiday weekend. Maybe if they were fired after last season, the next GM could’ve mended things with Slay. Maybe Golladay would have signed an extension by now. Maybe Jeff Okudah could be showing more signs of life in his rookie season if he was working with better coaches than Patricia and Cory Undlin.
But what’s done is done. The Lions let this dumpster fire burn for an extra eleven games, but now the arsonists are gone. I don’t envy the next coach and GM, but I am excited to get excited about football again after two and a half years of this regime beating my love of the sport out of me.
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