Lions special teams coordinator Dave Fipp highlighted why it’s so hard to be a coach in the NFL. Instead of celebrating a Lions division title and enjoying Christmas after Detroit won in Minnesota, Fipp couldn’t stop thinking about a mistake his extra point unit made in the game.
The Vikings blocked an extra point by new Lions kicker Michael Badgley in the third quarter of Sunday’s game. Badgley’s kick never had a chance. Fipp agonized over the error.
“Well, I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about it,” Fipp told reporters in his weekly press conference. “I woke up – yeah, I mean, a million times you think about those plays. The negative plays stick with you much more so than any of the positive plays. In my time, we’ve made a lot of plays too, but the ones that really stick with you the longest are all the negative plays.”
Fipp didn’t want to reveal which player made the costly mistake, but he clearly wasn’t happy about the poor execution. The block came in the gap between Benito Jones and James Mitchell.
“Yeah, I’m not going to get into it in detail, but we had one player who didn’t execute exactly how he should’ve,” Fipp said. “The first rep of the game was perfect and then didn’t do his job the way he was supposed to do on the next one and so that happened.”