Brad Holmes didn’t put cart before horse in Lions rebuild
By Robert Jones
The Detroit Lions have plenty of work to do before they are winners. Luckily, Brad Holmes won’t put the cart before the horse as he rebuilds this franchise.
This is week two of OTA’s for the Detroit Lions and everything we hear continues to be positive. Everything continues to be working towards molding this franchise into the shared vision of Brad Holmes and Dan Campbell.
The team that Campbell and his staff are molding on the field will look different from last season’s Lions. In almost every way that should be a good thing.
Especially given the state of the defense under former head coach Matt Patricia. The former Patriots’ defensive coordinator not only completely failed in his attempt to transform the Lions into winners, but he proved that he wasn’t even capable of making Detroit’s defense respectable.
The good news for Patricia is that he is still a highly regarded puppet, I mean coach, by his mentor Patriots head coach Bill Belichick. So I suppose that none of us should have been surprised that he was able to slink back to New England with his beard between his legs to rebuild his resume.
Meanwhile, here in the Motor City, Patricia left behind a team that was running virtually on empty. But the Lions are hoping to find a new identity under its new leadership. A team that wants to be more physical, control the line of scrimmage, and be more aggressive, especially on defense.
Here in the embryonic stages of the Dan Campbell/Brad Holmes era, it is too early to know for sure whether their vision will work, however, how they have gone about laying the foundation of this team is different from what we’ve become used to in the past. The idea that this regime wants to own the line of scrimmage is definitely a different approach.
Yet there are those who would claim that the Lions offseason has missed the mark and because this franchise isn’t doing what they have done for the last 60 years, it is destined to fail. My response; Like Bill Murray said at the end of Groundhog Day, ‘anything different is good’.