Nobody really cares if the Lions are bad. They're the Lions! They can go through season after season without winning many games and every football fan outside of Michigan will just spend their time thinking about something else. So it takes something special, a real dedication to not only losing but losing ugly, to get everyone to turn their attention towards Detroit and ask, collectively, "Holy shit, what's wrong with the Lions?" This year, Matt Patricia and his team have reached that special level of losing.
The Lions jumped out to a 14-0 lead against the Saints yesterday, and then proceeded to surrender touchdowns on the Saints' next four drives. Things didn't get much better in the second half, and the Lions ended up losing 35-29 to drop to 1-3 on the season. That's a bad loss, but even more so because it fit neatly within the tapestry of crap football that the Lions have been busy creating:
So we've got an historically embarrassing losing streak, but what we really need now to get the whole country united in pointing and laughing at the Lions is someone in the organization to take all of this with as little grace and humility as possible. Thankfully, the Lions are still coached by Matt Patricia, who stepped up to provide us with this shit-eating postgame quote, which was delivered in response to a question about whether he was still the right person to coach the team: "When I came to Detroit, there was a lot of work to do. That’s what we’re trying to do."
Former Lions quarterback and current ESPN talking head Dan Orlovsky did the necessary work of explaining the brazen inaccuracy of that quote, but the particulars are worth reiterating here, because the amount of arrogance required for a person in Patricia's position to give a quote like that is truly astounding. The Lions had a winning record in three of the four seasons before Patricia's tenure began, and made the playoffs twice. Jim Caldwell, who coached the team in each of those four seasons, went 36-28 during his time in Detroit. Patricia, meanwhile, is 10-25-1 as the Lions head coach, and has, incredibly, lost 12 of his last 13 games despite having a lead in all but one of them.
Matt Patricia stinks! God, does he stink. But more than that, he manages to be an unsympathetic asshole at every opportunity. It's no wonder that the man who once scolded a reporter for slouching, despite looking like a pile of dirty laundry himself, would try to shift blame onto his predecessor during his team's lowest point. The Lions are really bad right now, and most people are probably rooting for them to get worse. Congratulations to Matt Patricia for pulling off that unlikely feat.
