Detroit Lions: New teaching tool helping to catch early mistakes
A new teaching tool is helping the Detroit Lions new head coach, Matt Patricia, and others catch some early mistake during practices.
This offseason, the Detroit Lions went through several changes. That’s despite posting three winning seasons in the past four years. Unfortunately, that success did not continue in the playoffs, resulting in the firing of head coach Jim Caldwell in January.
In his place, Matt Patricia was hired to take the helm of this Lions’ franchise. By doing so the former New England Patroits defensive coordinator would also make many changes to Detroit’s coaching staff. The biggest shift being on the defensive side of the ball as Patricia is expected the bring his elaborate schemes to the Motor City.
In order to make that transition as smooth as possible, the Lions are using a new teaching tool to help catch some early mistakes. This spring, Detroit installed a massive video screen on the north-side of their practice field.
The large screen allows both players and coaches to watch replays on a delay. It’s an opportunity to correct any mistakes that take might take place while everyone is still on the field, instead of only reviewing the footage afterwards in a classroom setting.
"“It’s really good to be honest with you, from a correction standpoint,” Patricia told the Detroit Free Press when asked about the new video board. “Immediate correction. We see something, you look at something, basically when you’re on the field you can look at it, see what happened, see what went wrong in the play and you can get that instant kind of correction to the player right away.”"
The Lions figure to have a lot of teaching to do. Not only are they attempting to install Patricia’s new defensive philosophy in the Motor City, but they have also added several new players to teach it to. As a result, you have to imagine the Lions got plenty of use out of their newest tool throughout OTA’s and minicamp.
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On Thursday, the Detroit Lions actually got a surprise visit from a Hall of Famer. Former Chicago Bears linebacker Mike Singletary stopped by the Lions’ minicamp session to checkout the new video screen.
Singletary is also a former NFL head coach, being at the helm of the San Francisco 49ers from 2009-2010. The soon-to-be head coach for the Memphis franchise of the new Alliance of American Football league was no doubt studying the possibilities of using a similar technique for improving his practice sessions.