How much urgency are the Detroit Lions really feeling?

When this past season ended on New Year’s Eve with a win over the Packers to give the Lions a winning record for the third straight year under former head coach Jim Caldwell, no one was even awake or coherent the next morning on New Years day when Bob Quinn announced the dismissal of Caldwell with the edict that it simply wasn’t good enough.

He didn’t stop there when he also added that he hadn’t done a good enough job himself either and needed to improve his game.

So what had started out upon his arrival with the basic admission that this was a rebuilding project, seems like it has obviously grown to fruition in Quinn’s eyes and now the mandate is to win. Pretty clear, right?

Maybe not as clear as we’d like to think.

Quinn hired Matt Patricia claiming that he was the one who will lead the Lions to the Super Bowl and bring the Vince Lombardi Trophy home to a city that is beyond starved for it.

Quinn has staked his job on this hire and if it doesn’t work out, then it won’t just be Patricia that will be swept away to the trash heap, it will most likely be Quinn as well. So again, the mandate has to be to win now, right?

Not necessarily.

Bob Quinn and Matt Patricia authored a very ‘run-oriented’ draft this past April. They added to the offensive line, selected their running back of the future, which is probably also now, and for the most part ignored their defense which struggled so much last season.

The results are that the offense looks like it is talented enough to possibly be one of the better scoring units in the entire NFL.

Meanwhile, the defense appears to carry the majority of the question marks on this team. Considering Matt Patricia was a former Super Bowl-winning defensive coordinator, that seems to be sort of odd.