Matt Patricia is Making Lions Players Run and the Detroit Media Won't Stand for It
The leader in the clubhouse for my favorite controversy of the NFL offseason has got to be the Detroit media ripping Matt Patricia for the unpardonable sin of … I’ll pause here a moment to give you time to move over next to your fainting couch … making Lions players … brace yourself … run. Sometimes even – take a deep breath – as punishment when they screw up in practice.
Get a load of these three turds complaining about it:
From Freep:
The Detroit Lions’ rookie coach wants things done his way. And his way means running as punishment. Lots and lots of running.
That’s not likely to endear him to his players, many of who whom are experienced professionals who don’t need or care to be treated like junior varsity tryout players. …
Patricia’s tactic smacked of amateurism and even though it was generally downplayed as an innocuous slap on the wrist, I can guarantee you most players don’t care for it.
For one, it’s insulting at this level.
For another, it’s a waste of time.
Imagine you’re a roster-bubble player and you’re having a good practice and ready for your next rep when Patricia decides to get mad and makes everyone run, thereby cancelling one of your reps. How exactly does that help anyone? The usual way players are corrected is they get chewed out by their position coaches.
Even Jim Schwartz (who thought he was the smartest man in the room) and Jim Caldwell (who knew he was the smartest man in the room) didn’t punish players with running very often during minicamp or training camp.
The running, on its own, won’t lose players for Patricia. But you have to assume if he’s using these tactics in front of reporters, he could be using others privately that are equally distasteful to players.
The horror. The horror. I can’t believe Amnesty International hasn’t filed a protest because I thought mankind banned this kind of abuse around the time we outlawed poison gas and torture.
And now a few days later, this has become a thing to the point the NFL Network is actually asking Lions players if Patricia is losing their respect with this cruel and unusual punishment. To their credit, no one is taking the cheese. Today Marvin Jones told Good Morning Football, “Shoot, it’s football. We run. You know what I’m saying?. Nobody is complaining. Everybody is just going out here working hard and we’re having fun doing it. So, whoever’s grandma wrote that story, I don’t know.”
So riddle me this: Is this what happens to beat reporters when they’ve been covering loser franchise for too long? Do they become losers too? Just by osmosis? Does covering one of the only two non-expansion teams to never make the 52 Super Bowls that we’ve played rub off on you to the point you’re holding up Jim godamned Schwartz (29-51) and Jim fucking Caldwell (36-28) as your standards of excellence Matt Patricia should aspire to? I guess it’s like what the guy told the Knights in The Natural, that losing is a disease, as contagious as syphilis. And the people covering the team get the clap when they’re 0-3 in the playoffs since the year 2000 and having won a postseason game since George HW Bush was president.
God, I think there are plenty of cities with really terrible, old school sports media types who think they know better than the people running the teams and their own readers. Including my own, believe me. But not even one of the dinosaurs from the Boston newspapers would be caught dead trying to turn RunningGate into an actual controversy. Fucking grandma.