Tag: NFL Protests

Lions cancel practice to speak out as a team on police shooting of Jacob Blake

For the second time in the last few months, the Detroit Lions have altered their plans to speak out against police violence.

On Monday, several NFL players and coaches spoke out about the Kenosha, Wisconsin shooting of Jacob Blake, a Black man, who was shot multiple times in the back by police after he tried to break up a fight. The Green Bay Packers also released a team statement, and as it turns out, they’re not the only NFC North team that felt compelled to address the shooting as a group.

The Detroit Lions cancelled their Tuesday practice and instead came out to address the media at the team’s facility.

“We’ve been able to have some real conversations as a team… Just to hear the pain, the fear that the people I love are going through, it’s not OK,” said offensive tackle Taylor Decker, per The Athletic’s Chris Burke.

“The Detroit Lions organization is going to take a stand that what happened to Jacob Blake is not okay,” Harmon continued, per Petry. “We are going to speak out on it until we create change. We’ll do everything we can to win football games, but we’ll also do everything we can to create change.”

“Been a lot of days in my life I’ve been proud to be a Detroit Lion,” quarterback Matthew Stafford said, “but probably never more of an offseason or of a day than today that I’ve been proud to be a part of this team.”

This is not the first time in recent days the Lions have addressed police violence against Black men. After George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, died at the hands of Minneapolis police on May 25, the team released this statement:

“Honestly, I was just disgusted, angry, sad, depressed,” Lions head coach Matt Patricia told Sports Illustrated’s Albert Breer about Floyd’s death. “The range of emotion, you watch the video, someone being murdered and you’re like … I didn’t even know how to process it. And the range of emotion I know I felt in watching that was only one-tenth of a fraction of a minute percent of what my players must’ve been feeling. So when I got up on Friday, I didn’t sleep much. I’d been grinding on stuff all night, it was just, ‘This isn’t right.’”

So, instead of going through with any particular phase of training camp, the Lions organized a forum in which players and staff could let their feelings be known.

“I think for us, what we hope, and how we gotta hold each other accountable, is to make sure that we are continuing the conversation, and we are setting up time to do that, and we’re trying to come up with ideas to follow through outside our building to have the conversation,” Patricia concluded back then. “It’s amazing when you get a group of men together, and you start to listen, and you get to the point where you feel comfortable talking through it.

“And listening to some thoughts and ideas, I think that’s when you gotta make sure you follow through. You gotta try. And they’re not all gonna work. But if a couple of them work, and you make change, you connect. … We gotta try, and we gotta stick with it and we gotta persevere through that. And we talk a lot about leadership and the team driving that leadership. And I think that’s important for us to make sure that it’s an everyday thing.”

Kudos to the Lions for making it an “everyday thing” when it needs to be, as tragic and unfortunate as the necessity may be.