Matt Patricia is struggling. He’s struggling to win football games and seems destined to lose his job as the coach of the Detroit Lions. And he’s struggling to take accountability for his … struggles.
Following the Lions’ 35-29 loss to the New Orleans Saints, Patricia faced a tough question: Why should anyone still believe in him?
“Obviously, we just lost to the Saints. Let’s just give them credit for this game. They played extremely well and I know we’ve got a lot of work to do.” Patricia told reporters Sunday. Then came the zinger: “Certainly I think when I came to Detroit there was a lot of work to do, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”
That pointed critique caused former Lions coach Jim Caldwell’s supporters to emerge. They are not happy. Dan Orlovsky, in particular, was furious. The current ESPN analyst backed up Matthew Stafford in 2014 and 2015, the first two years of Caldwell’s four-year stint in Detroit. Patricia replaced Caldwell after the Lions went 9-7 and missed the playoffs in 2017 (it was Detroit’s third winning season under Caldwell.)
“First of all, we were 11-5 in 2014, and a real good football team,” Orlovsky said on ESPN Radio’s morning show, “Keyshawn, JWill & Zubin,” on Monday. “(In) 2015, we go 7-9, it’s because we turn the football over, but the last eight games, we were 7-1, so flipped our season around. The next two years, we were 9-7, and I believe we were playing Green Bay in both years with a chance to win the division.
“To come in and say that you had a lot of work to do is completely false. It’s a bunch of trash!”
Former Lions QB @danorlovsky7 RIPPED head coach Matt Patricia for his post-game comments about what the team was like that he inherited from Jim Caldwell. #KJZ pic.twitter.com/TigGSjI2WY
— Keyshawn, JWill & Zubin (@KeyJayandZ) October 5, 2020
“To come in a say you had a lot of work to do is completely false. It’s a bunch of trash. Because that wasn’t the case in Detroit. We were a good football team. Matthew Stafford was playing as good as he has in his career. That was because of Coach Caldwell. And we were an organization that was ascending, we were building.”
“The culture was amazing. The culture was fantastic. So, you had a winning record in three of your four years. The culture was great and your quarterback was playing really good football.
“So for (Patricia) to say there was a lot of work to be done is a bunch of trash.”
To a degree, it makes some sense that Patricia thinks he needed to do a lot of work — even if he is also wrong. At the time, the Lions had struggled to win games at big moments. In particular, Caldwell lost both of his playoff appearances.
The thought at the time was that Patricia, a three-time Super Bowl champion as the Patriots’ defensive coordinator, could help the Lions deliver in big games. And perhaps that would require the installation of a new way of thinking — not dissimilar to The Patriot Way. But of course, that didn’t go well. In his first training camp, Patricia began losing his players, according to the Detroit Free Press. Veterans like Darrius Slay, Quandre Diggs and Glover Quin were among the Lions veterans who almost immediately rejected Patricia’s methodology. So the Lions started purging those players, preferring culture over talent. That certainly appears to have been a mistake: Lions were 36-28 under Caldwell and have gone 10-25-1 under Patricia.
When The Patricia Way failed early in Detroit, the Lions began paying for former Patriots to join the team to help with assimilation. The problem, however, was that the true Patriot Way is also built upon buying low on players, adapting them into the system and the culture and moving on before those players get overpriced. The Lions, meanwhile, are overpaying for the Patriots’ leftovers: Trey Flowers, Danny Amendola, Duron Harmon and Jamie Collins. It hasn’t been a recipe for success.
Patricia’s inability to win over the Lions led to a much more involved rebuild than the organization needed. Patricia is cleaning up his own mess, not Caldwell’s. It’s never dignified for an NFL coach to point fingers, but in this case it’s worse because Patricia isn’t even pointing in remotely the right direction. This is all his fault.
Patricia replaced Caldwell because the Lions couldn’t get over the proverbial hump and win big games to make playoff runs. But he’s now lost 12 of his last 13 games. Caldwell couldn’t win playoff games. Patricia does not appear even remotely capable of getting the team near the playoffs.
It’s time to rebuilt in Detroit, and that starts with getting rid of a failed coach and evaluating what’s left in his wake.
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