Is the Detroit Lions’ poor play the result of weary legs?
By Robert Jones
So is there hope for these Lions? Well, there’s always hope. Yet the nagging sloppy, undisciplined play that has been their calling card this exhibition season is hard to ignore.
It is something that would probably be easier to dismiss if we knew just exactly why they have played so poorly. After all, Matt Patricia is formerly a very accomplished defensive coordinator that many though extremely high of this past offseason when teams with a head coaching vacancy were jockeying for position to find the next ‘great’ coach.
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That’s not even mentioning the fact that he’s a literal rocket scientist.
Yet for some reason, they have not performed well as a team so far. This leaves the problem to be one of four possibilities; first would be that perhaps Patricia’s coaching skills have been overrated. Maybe he’s just not that good of a coach. Second would be all the questioning about Patricia’s methods for actually working his players in practice. Has all the running made this team weak in the knees?
Another possibility is that the players just do not have the capacity to process his system and execute it properly. This would make more sense on defense where these players are learning a new system that is complex and requires quick, decisive thinking. The final reason would be that the Lions just simply don’t have enough talent, which would speak for itself.
Let’s take a look at these and see if we can find an answer.
Patricia has no end of coaching success stories from his days in New England. Players that credit Matt Patricia, not Bill Belichick, for making them the players they became. Does it really seem possible he would forget how to coach by simply moving from Massachusetts to Michigan? Not likely.