Detroit Lions: The keys to build upon last week’s success

Today’s NFL is a far cry from those long ago years of the 1970’s when the rules where in favor of smart teams being able to keep the good players they found as long as they wanted them.

There was no free agency to upset the apple cart. If your team found good players, those players belonged to that team until they were no longer wanted. Regardless of contract status. One of the biggest examples of how free agency changed the game was the 1990’s Dallas Cowboys.

The 1992 team Jimmy Johnson built and won Super Bowl XXVII with is still one of the deepest teams, from a talent standpoint, that the NFL has ever seen. It benefited from great coaching, but the depth was unbelievable. Yet it eroded away quickly as free agency robbed them of young talent and established veterans over the next few years.

So bearing that in mind, a dynasty is a far fetched and very difficult thing to build in today’s NFL. Yet it is reasonable for teams to be built to contend for a period of a handful of seasons.

That is the basic task that Lions general manager Bob Quinn and head coach Matt Patricia are charged with. That is also what they should be judged on, whether they are able accomplish that lofty goal or not.

Last Sunday night they played like the contenders that the city of Detroit has dreamed about since their last championship in 1957. If they fall flat on their face in Dallas today, then everything that they displayed last week will be considered nothing more than a mirage.

Fans will think of it like a Bigfoot sighting; so rare and mysterious, that the shock and awe of it will simply become a legendary tale by those of us that witnessed it.

But despite the obvious fact that these Lions have definite needs, they do have an opportunity to turnaround their season. And that opportunity lies within the very source of their success they had last Sunday night; the trenches.