The Detroit Lions 2019 training camp will be different
By Robert Jones
As training camp opens for the Detroit Lions, it has all the earmarks of being very different from what fans have seen in years past.
Training camp opens today for the Detroit Lions. The air seems to smell different, the food tastes different and hope is in the air for die-hard fans.
Football is back!
Yes, for those of us who have been waiting patiently or even impatiently, Detroit Lions football is back. For better or worse. Which could have been the team motto for a few decades. After all, when the Lions won their last title in 1957, they were just Navy Blue and Silver.
It was after William Clay Ford purchased the team that Honolulu Blue became a color, in any shape or form.
But as the Lions changed their colors and the way they operated under Mr. Ford, they also changed from the team of the decade for the 1950s (both the Lions and Cleveland Browns won three titles in the decade, but Detroit won two out of the three championship meetings between the two teams) to a team that couldn’t get out of their own way.
From 1971 until 2014 when Matthew Stafford made his first and only Pro Bowl appearance, the Lions had no other quarterbacks make the Pro Bowl. Greg Landry‘s 1971 appearance started a long and painful search for a Pro Bowl quarterback.
Coaches have come and gone, some stars like Billy Sims, Barry Sanders, and Calvin Johnson have come and gone and the results haven’t varied much. Mostly because of the mismanagement of this franchise.
They just haven’t been able to get the pieces right to make a true Super Bowl contender. Depth has constantly been an issue and losing was mostly the rule, not the exception.
But as the Lions 2019 training camp opens today, it is eerily different from so many that have proceeded it. Different to the point that maybe, just maybe, the Lions are headed in the right direction.