The Detroit Lions are rebuild ready barring a miracle
The Detroit Lions are at a huge crossroad this season. Bob Quinn and Matt Patricia need to figure things out quickly if they want to keep their jobs.
The Detroit Lions have finally won a game this year and it feels much better than the collapses that we watched to start the season that put us at an 0-2 record.
According to many, like former football great and Fox NFL Sunday‘s Terry Bradshaw, the Detroit Lions need to clean house and find a new general manager and coach by the end of the year. The team is ready for a rebuild if Bob Quinn and Matt Patricia don’t perform a miracle turnaround.
Reaction One
You read that first paragraph and had one of two reactions, one is anger. How dare a writer, fan, or ex-player be so negative with less than a quarter of the season decided.
“Building a winner takes time“, you’ll type in the comments. “You can’t fire everyone every three years; great teams don’t do that“, someone else will say.
Those are true statements to different degrees. That doesn’t mean that a rebuild isn’t the best answer.
There’s a reason that football voices like Hall-of-Fame quarterback and Fox Sports announcer, Terry Bradshaw, would say that both Quinn and Patricia have got to go by the end of the season. He summed it up well by saying, “Nothing’s changed there.”
The former Steelers great and four-time Super Bowl winner was discussing the Lions situation on Fox NFL Sunday just a couple of weeks ago and went on to say that they needed to clean house, get rid of Bob Quinn, and fire Patricia. “Finding the right people”, he indicated, was what ownership needed to do.
With the right people, time to build and keeping them around are both good, helpful things.
We understand not wanting to rebuild. We also understand that being 1-2 isn’t necessarily the end of the season. We undeniably get that you may view this as an overreaction to a couple of losses or just jaded, “Same Old Lions” fandom.
It isn’t. We will explain.
Perhaps you’re the sort of Lions fan who will cling to one win as a sign that everything is on the way to being better. Maybe you’re right. We would be happy to be wrong but feel inclined to remind fans that the most likely way to get better is to start over and rebuild (assuming that the ownership won’t make the same mistakes again).
Sustained success, the goal of a great team like the New England Patriots, isn’t determined by one 3-point victory. Matt Patricia and his staff broke some tendencies, used more zone coverage for example in Week 3, and managed to not give up too many big plays against a decent team lead by a dynamic, young quarterback, Kyler Murray.
Those are good signs if they can figure out how to turn what they did into a consistent formula for winning. Color us skeptical; we are skeptical not just because we’ve seen this before but because there are a plethora of other indicators that say that the current regime just isn’t winners or at the very least- won’t consistently win in Detroit.