2 months later and we have some actual news. Martha Ford stepping down as owner, her daughter to replace her.

I know some Lions fans like to harp on ownership as the root of all their problems. Maybe that was largely true under the WCF regime. WCF Sr. was a crappy owner because he would hire unqualified morons like Millen to run the team and leave them in their roles long after it was obvious they didn't belong. Martha has at least made some of the right moves. They cleaned house in 2015 when it was due, and then she brought in Quinn who at least had the right resume for the job. I don't completely hate the decision to give Quinn one more year. All I really want from an owner is someone who will constantly evaluate their GM and move on if it's clear they are moving the team in the wrong direction. We'll see what Sheila Ford Hamp brings to the table.

Giving Quinn one more year of playoffs or bust is the height of dumb.

Building a winning organization is about planning and preparing for the future. Quinn’s sole incentive is now to win this year which affects drafting and personnel strategy.

Look at what SVG did to the pistons future with the Blake trade.

A new GM or one backed by the ownership and we might have drafted the lord and savior TUA.

Adrian Peterson! Sure he's 35 but he is coming off a relatively productive season. He won't be like Blount. I expect him to get 5-10 carries per game. Hopefully he is like Boldin was when he was here. The #3 option who was VERY productive when his number was called.

As for the rest of the 53 man, not many surprises. They went light on oline in a year when you can dress 2 extra players on gameday as long as you have 8 olinemen. They must not like what they see from their aging vets. Although you can put some vets on the practice sqaud this year so maybe Wiggins or Aboushi end up there.

Any thoughts or info on how the rookies looked in camp? Any surprises, particularly outside of Okudah and Swift (who are pretty well covered).

Cephus has performed much better than those who knocked his combine performance feared. Should see the field a fair bit. Jonah Jackson has been solid and will start at right guard. Okwara seems like he'll just be a situational rusher this year unless something really really clicks or lots of bodies are IR'd. They've raved about his athleticism (that was known). The Huntley situation stings a little, wish he would've made it to the practice squad.

Thx - man would love to see Cephus pan out. And if Jackson is an average starter that's great too.

Huntley's pick was from the Quandre Diggs trade so basically we gave away a solid safety and got nothing. Not that 5th rounders usually make much impact, but you at least expect them to make the team and play a backup role.

Another narrative coming out of camp is Hockenson came in looking like he got the weight room pretty hard in the off-season and was shredding his coverage in camp. Hopefully he bounces back after an up and down and injury plagued rookie year.

Danny Shelton showed some pass rush skills from NT, which is good because in order to have a fighting chance this year the DLine needs to over perform.

Finally Jamal Agnew made the team as a WR. His role is still 99% as a returner, but apparently he looked pretty good playing in the slot at camp. I thought he looked serviceable at CB before, but I am willing to see what someone with his athleticism can do getting fed the ball on offense.

I'm excited for the season. Playoffs or fire the coach IMO. Go lions!

Hope springs eternal for Lions fans.


If the AP signing gives a healthy Stafford an extra 50-100 plays this year then maybe I wont start pounding bourbons and throwing **** at the TV by November

Offense should be solid as long as Stafford stays healthy and there are no weird regressions.

Defense is a massive ? There's some good and bad here.

Bad: No major pass rush help. On paper they only got worse by losing Slay. The two big rookies in Okwara and Okudah may struggle. At it's core it's still a Patricia defense.

Good: It's different than last year which was historically bad. Lots of new FA additions. Patricia handing over play calling duties.

My prediction for the defense is a bell curve where the mean is slightly better than last year but inconsistent, with wide tails on either side.

So Okudah struggled in camp. He wasnt even projected to start anyways. Now out for the game with a hamstring. Not the start you want for your 3rd overall draft choice CB zzzzzz.

CGI crowd is not believable. No paper bags. SOL

That certainly was a Lions game. Bears are terrible lol.

That might be the worst loss of all time

Up 17 vs an anemic bears offseason led by a terrible QB

Who had ANOTHER 3 TD game

How many 3 TD games has MT against teams that aren't the lions?

0

And drop game winning TD in the end zone


It's just so ****ing stupid every ****ing year

Just fire this fat **** already.

Seriously just Fire Quinn and Patricia now.

I know I'm not normally the guy to overreact to one game, but we just watched them drop a gimme, literally and metaphorically, to one of the worst teams in the NFL.

This defense is still pure trash. Can't cover, can't pressure, can't stop the run. Trubs put 21 on them in the 4th. Swift dropping the game winner is going to be a symbol for this whole season I think.

Their marquee free agent got booted for head butting the ref.

I will at least do this much. The good from this game:
AP was a good signing.
Stafford is at least still average Stafford, which is pretty good.
The pass rush seemed a little better than last year.

I know you're never supposed to overreact to one game, but... I mean... I just can't imagine forcing myself to think about this team again. We are on the road next two vs. good teams (I guess the Rodgers demise prediction was a bit premature), then home vs. probably the best team in the conference. Most likely scenario is probably 1-3, with 0-4 an an incredibly close second-most-likely. (For fun I assumed 20% likely to win @ GB, 33% likely to win @ ARI or home vs. NO - that gives 44% chance 1-3, 36% chance 0-4.)

SOL

Same old lions.

I wanted to be excited for the season. People hyping us etc you know how it goes. Really we basically are the same team as last season. We added some guys but we also subtracted.

Fire everyone!

If anyone finds someone who does the analytics on the 4th quarter field goal decision, I'm curious. Roughly 4 minutes left and a 10 point lead. Yeah you have Matt Prater, but a good NFL coach should know that even the best kickers are what, 65% or so to make from that distance? Clearly win equity skyrockets if you can make it and go from 10 to 13 points. But the risk of a miss is spotting your opposition an average of about 35 yards or so with only 4 minutes left. Yeah your secondary is getting hurt, but you are playing against Trubs who has been missing open guys all day. I'm all for aggressive playcalling, but even my gut reaction on that one was to try to pin them deep and make them go the full length of the field. I'm willing to consider the FG was the right call though, just more curious than anything.

If there has ever been a Lions game that is a microcosm of an entire Lions season, this was it. I experienced the whole range of emotions it normally takes 17 weeks to get. The slow starts against crappy opposition yet somehow remaining competitive. The stretch where you feel like it's finally coming together and maybe they are actually good. Then the meltdown that you see coming from a mile away that you hope gets averted with some rungood that never actually comes. This was it.

When asked if he is a crappy 4th qtr coach (paraphrasing) he referenced the Malcolm Butler play from 5 years ago, as if somehow makes up for his team continually shitting the bed late in games for 2+ seasons. There are two times I can remember the Lions actually signing a coach that I was moderately excited about. One was Mooch (lol) and the other was Patricia. Maybe this guy coming out of an engineering school similar to mine and having the reputation of a rocket scientist got to me. I should have known. I knew a lot of idiots that coasted and cheated their way through school and are barely functional adults. He is in so far over his head it's ridiculous.

I grew up in the Wayne Fontes era. It got me thinking about how laughably inept the long string of Lions coaches has been. I was thinking about coaching rankings. Does this seem right?

1. Wayne Fontes - they were at least playoff contenders most years despite having little talent besides Barry.
2. Gary Moeller?!? One of only two Lions coach to actually have a winning record. He took a team that was so bad Ross quit mid-season to the brink of the playoffs.
3. Papa Jim - Actually had a winning record, despite his teams always under performing down the stretch and in the playoffs. You could argue he had the most talented rosters on the list and squandered it, so there's that.
4. Bobby Ross - More of the same from the Fontes era I suppose. Laughably quit mid season.
5. Gym Shorts - Lead the recovery after the 0-16 year. A bit of a clown and seemingly always outcoached.
6. Dick Jauron - A career losing coach, he had to finish off the 05 season after they put Mooch out of his misery. Those mid 2005 teams had starters that weren't even backup grade players.
7. Mooch - Finally a coach who had taken teams to the playoffs gets hired here. And they still sucked.
8. Patricia - Hard to say where he should go. It feels like his teams underperform their talent levels more than others, so maybe lower?
9. Marinelli - lol 0-16. Although that team had been stripped bare of any NFL caliber players not named Megatron. Maybe this guy wasn't really that bad?
10. Mornhinweg - Taking the wind in overtime and then losing on your first posession will put you at the bottom of this list, likely forever.

I remember watching lions as a kid(im 37) and my dad always raging about Wayne Fontes. Here we are years later and hes likely the best coach we ever had.

LOL taking the wind that epic. I'd say Patrica is worse then Marinelli.

I'm ready for the draft. Cant wait to grab another RB in the first 3 rounds. Fire everybody.

thanks Koss, been lol'ing for a few minutes about taking the wind almost forgot about that classic

It’s amazing that Belichek can surround himself with absolute morons on his coaching staff and still win.

Quinn/Fatty obviously need to be fired, but not before the season is over. We need to let their parting gift to us be Trevor Lawrence.

Fatticia’s smugness is what gets me. Like dude, you have to rape women to have sex. You try to big time your players in meetings routinely to show everyone you’re alpha... just enough man. You’re fat. You’re stupid. You’re a terrible coach...And worst of all.... you don’t realize that you’re anything of these things.

0-4 is a lock.

The Belichick coaching tree thing is funny. I've thought about it a lot. I'm sure I'm not the first person to write something very similar to this. There's probably a few things going on here. A simple explanation is the Peter Principle thing. Belichick may be very good at hiring guys who he knows will make good coordinators, which may be a different skillset from head coaches. Because our culture tends to promote people who succeed at lower levels, rather than looking for people who exhibit the often different skills to succeed at the next level, everyone just gets promoted until they suck or reach the top. It's a real problem in many industries. All there this evidence MP wasn't even that great as a DC. I'd have to pull the #'s, but from what I remember his defenses were some of the worst of the Belichick era.

Another factor is more nuanced, and may relate to training and development. I see this sometimes in my professional career as well. Someone learns a craft under a true expert. Because they are learning under a master, they are never put in a situation to struggle. The master just passes down the "what to do" part of the job. But without learning the "why" which requires both a desire to dig deeper, a master who is willing to teach it, and some amount of learning through mistakes, they don't know how to adjust to new situations. There is something to be said about trial by fire. If you teach someone to swim in a kiddie pool then drop them in the ocean a mile from shore and say swim back, that's a recipe for disaster. In some cases the training they received may have been counterproductive. Rather than having to learn to swim for themselves the first time in the ocean, they may keep mistakenly trying to apply the kiddie pool lessons which don't apply out in the pacific, rather than trying to understand how to swim in the ocean.

How many times have we seen this play out on this very site? People read one poker book that teaches a specific style meant for specific games, they don' have the fundamental background to understand how that style was arrived at and why it works, and they keep coming here complaining of losses in tough or wild games.

That is Matt Patricia right now. He's a 2+2er who learned some GTO tricks from Pros on YouTube and complaining that 2.5x raises and 1/5 pot bets on dry boards don't work at Motor City $1/$2. He effectively learned how to coach and manage a team from a master. But now he finds himself in a different situation with different players, and keeps trying to shove a square peg in a round hole, because he doesn't know anything else. He knows Belichick is a master, and that he learned for 15 years under that master, so he must be an expert now too right? Except it rarely works that way.

Quinn has at least shown some signs of learning from his mistakes. Although hiring Patricia show's he's still stuck to the "Patriot Way."

There's not much point in canning these guys now though. If I were in the owners box, I'd tell Quinn all trades now go through me, and can him as soon as they are eliminated from the playoffs or hit 8 losses, whichever comes first. I don't see a point in blowing up a team mid-season. Weirder turnarounds have happened, I'll at least give them a shot. Firing anyone now just satiates the short term bloodlust rabid fans have. But once it's over, it should be over for Quinn. Get a head start on rebuilding the front office, with the expectation the new guy will make a head coaching change.

the funny thing to me is that the recipe for success in the modern NFL is actually super duper straight forward. you build a dynamic offense that can put points on the board and for the defensive side you load up on pass rushers and DB's. that's it. literally. the hard part is accumulating those assets in the same window of time with one another, having them come together as a high functioning personnel group, all while staying under the cap.

I get that maybe a lot of people were buying into the pundit hype of going worst to first in the division, but, looking at this roster without bias, we still only have one of the above 3 prerequisites for having a top tier team. the offense will be pretty good, but is it going to be top 10 good? top 5?

before the injuries the CB position wasn't complete aids but it was far from being an elite group. can Amani and Okudah get there in a couple years? I think they can. the safety position has some nice pieces, too.

as far as a pass rush goes... all kinds of lol there. like, we're talking bottom of the barrel.

Step 1 of winning in the NFL is to actually have a good QB, something many teams struggle with, and the Lions managed to pull off. Every Browns, Jets, Jaguars, and many other teams coaches of the last 20+ years would sacrifice their first born for a QB resembling Stafford's talent. Yeah, he's not in the elite tier, but he's better than half the NFL easy, and that can be tough to find. Yet he's likely going to end up squandered here because while there were some pieces in place here and there, they only had a few years in the middle there where they resembled a complete team.

What's also maddening is we all see that the Lions team isn't even built for doing what MP is trying to get them to do. He's using his old formula of establish & stop the run. Yet this O-Line isn't great at run blocking, your best runner is 35 years old, and you have a QB with one of the best arms in the league who can make all the throws. At least Gym Shorts and Caldwell knew to live and die by Stafford's arm.

On defense you just don't have anyone. You have one decent lineman in Trey Flowers but the rest of your pass rush is laughably anemic. They don't even stop the run well. Having big fatties up front who can hold their ground and let the LB's clean up is pretty vanilla, and this team isn't even great at that. They just keep getting gashed play after play.

I'm not sure this team really has the personnel to have even a top half defense if they played to their strengths. With no pass rush and mostly injured and young DB's, you're at a huge disadvantage. The only way this team is doing anything is if they just open up the offense, let Stafford air it out, and hope the defense doesn't completely blow it. But this coaching staff has shown it's incapable of even doing that.

nice post, 100% agree and that's kind of where I was trying to get to (unsuccessfully) above. They absolutely need a top 5 offense to even have a shot at playoffs with how poorly this defense is constructed. I actually think it could be that good if they ran super pure regarding injuries and had an optimal game plan. Unfortunately we're off to a bad start on both fronts.