ALLEN PARK — Matt Patricia was brought in to elevate a challenger. He then placed last that season and the following one as well. The Ford family consented to have him return in 2020, but with a mandate.
Improve yourself. Engage in meaningful gaming during December. Make a run at the postseason.
That’s a fairly low standard for a player who was expected to be contending for titles three seasons prior, and Matt Patricia was unable to even approach meeting it. Just halfway through a five-year deal, Patricia was fired by the Detroit Lions because they had had enough after being blown out 41-25 versus Houston on Thanksgiving. Patricia was employed by general manager Bob Quinn, who was also let go.
After Steve Mariucci in 2005, Patricia is the first head coach to be sacked by Detroit in the middle of the season. Several reports state that Darrell Bevell, the offensive coordinator, will assume the role of interim coach.
With the exce
ption of Marty Mornhinweg and Rod Marinelli, Patricia’s 13-29-1 record in her more than two seasons as head coach is poorer than any full-time coach in Lions history (.302). That is all. That is the list. He lost his last nine games in a row there overall, won only two games in the division he was meant to be competing for, and never defeated Minnesota or Chicago. Not even once. Furthermore, during the last two seasons, the defense he was meant to rebuild has given up more yards than any other in the league.
By all accounts, the man who was supposed to be the final missing piece that made the Lions a legitimate contender had a spectacular fall. And now, after just 43 games, his run of mistakes is gone.
In 2018, Patricia was employed to take Jim Caldwell’s job. Coming off three consecutive winning seasons—he had actually won more than any other full-time Lions coach in team history—Caldwell twice led the division race to the last day of play. However, he also dropped both of those games against Green Bay, failed to win the North, and in his two postseason games, Dallas (2014) and Seattle (2016), dominated him.
Caldwell was infamous for having difficulty defeating strong teams. In 2017, he went 1-7 against victorious teams, ended 9-7 overall, and was left out of the postseason. Quinn let him go the next day, making it quite evident that the stakes had been heightened in Detroit.
Quinn remarked, “We didn’t defeat the genuinely strong teams. “We had better than average results. Although we have a 9-7 record over the past two years, we have not had a great record versus the league’s top teams.
Quinn spoke with a number of potential players in an attempt to identify the one who could lead Detroit to greater heights, but Matt Patricia was always the front-runner. Together, they ascended the ranks for 12 years in New England under Bill Belichick, and Quinn used the first two years of his Detroit stint to court his old friend Jim Caldwell while he was still employed there.
Team president Rod Wood reportedly remarked, “I had heard about Matt from Bob for two years before we had the chance to meet.” “And I believe he undersold him, as I believe I recently told him.”
Outside the company, the hire received excellent feedback from both local and national sources. With a degree in aeronautical engineering, Patricia was hailed as a literal rocket scientist and a very intelligent defensive football coach. However, it didn’t take long for others to start questioning him. Three months after Patricia was hired, it came to light that she had been charged with serious sexual assault during a 1996 trip to South Padre Island, Texas, but the case had never been brought to trial. Patricia continues to insist on his innocence, and the Lions have consistently backed their new coach.
Patricia tried to establish a new standard in Detroit during those initial months on the field. Though he thought Jim Caldwell did a good job leading the locker room, he felt the club was too soft to play competitive football on a regular basis. Through harsh practices on the field and personnel changes off it, he attempted to fortify the team.
During training camp, the differences were immediately apparent. It did not take long to notice the difference—Patricia, in stark contrast to the Jim Caldwell era, was lighting up players in front of the team with showers of F-bombs. Players in the NFL are accustomed to working hard and playing in a brutal environment, but this was different. Patricia bullied them daily on the field and subsequently in the conference rooms, to the extent that several players thought he was disrespectful and not professional. That caused a rift in the changing area. The harsh practices, the constantly changing meeting schedule, Patricia’s tardiness for almost everything, and her subsequent yelling at players on the field infuriated several Caldwell holdovers.
On the practice field, he nicknamed a star player the C-word, which turned off some players. During joint practices with the New York Giants, he once attempted to humiliate standout cornerback Darius Slay in front of the team by sharing a picture of himself guarding Odell Beckham. Slay’s friendship with Patricia never fully healed, and in an effort to appease his teammates, Patricia eventually banished him from the locker room, adding him to the long list of former players
Everything culminated in the first Monday Night Football game of 2018, which was meant to serve as the national inauguration of the new administration. Rather, a dismal New York Jets squad paced by rookie quarterback Sam Darnold destroyed the Lions 48-17.
That season, the Lions were 6-10 and took last place in the NFC North. They were much bad a year later, winning only three games. Naturally, Patricia’s early relationship with Matthew Stafford was tense, and Stafford missed eight games due to a fractured back. However, there were more serious issues elsewhere, particularly with defense. Patricia was meant to be an expert in it. However, things just grew worse. The Lions’ franchise record for defensive ineptitude in 2008 was nearly matched in 2019 by just 64 yards.
The Ford family started debating what to do with Patricia around Thanksgiving of last year, as public pressure mounted for the Lions to fire their coach in the final stretch. They fell back into last place in the NFC North with a loss over Chicago, dropping them to 3-8-1. However, the Lions were also beset by injuries, particularly at the quarterback position. Patricia persuaded the family that a stronger future was in the works and that all it would take was one more season with a healthy Matthew Stafford.
The Fords decided to stick with what they knew and brought Patricia and Quinn back, but they also demanded better.
The team’s then-owner Martha Firestone Ford told a small group of beat reporters, “We expect to be a playoff contender (next year),” with her daughter and current owner Sheila Ford Hamp seated to her left. “We have communicated those expectations to both Bob and Matt.
Stafford was back for the Lions to begin the season, but they gave up a 17-point lead to the Chicago Bears on the first play of the season. The week after they took a double-digit lead against New Orleans, they were destroyed at Green Bay, and two weeks later, they were destroyed once more. That was the first time in NFL history that Detroit has lost six games in a row when leading by double digits.
After taking a beating from the Saints, Patricia remarked, “I think there was a lot of work to do when I came to Detroit.” And that’s our goal right now.
More people took offense at that remark, both nationally and locally. Notable former players who took offense were Glover Quin, Darius Slay, Quandre Diggs, Josh Bynes, and Dan Orlovsky.
Orlovsky remarked, “To come in and say that you had a lot of work to do is completely false.” “It’s a pile of garbage.”
Under Caldwell, the players felt close, but Patricia never saw the position that way. When he assumed leadership, he thought the team had a long-term rebuilding project ahead of it because Detroit was culturally too soft and content to be better-than-average. It’s difficult to argue against the idea that Detroit needed improvement given that the team hasn’t won a division title since 1993—the longest streak in the league—hasn’t won in the playoffs since 1991, and has never made it to the Super Bowl.
The issue is that Patricia destroyed the team and never gave the impression that he could put it back together. In 2018 and 2019, the Lions were last in their respective divisions. In response to his remarks about needing to improve after the Saints’ season-opening defeat, he went on to win consecutive games against Jacksonville and Atlanta to return to.500. And he had a chance to get back into the postseason hunt and keep his job by just playing well against some bad teams during the worst portion of their schedule
Rather, they were destroyed by Indianapolis, then humiliated by Minnesota, who was in last place, then managed to escape Washington despite blowing a 21-point lead, only to be shut out by a Carolina squad that had already suffered five straight losses, and finally, they were dominated by a Houston team that had already sacked its coach.
A humiliating defeat to a dreadful team on national television marked the beginning of Matt Patricia’s reign, and it also marked the end of Matt Patricia’s reign. The numbers in between tell the tale. His defense, the reason he was hired, gave up more yards in the last two years combined than all other defenses in the league. He was employed to contend for titles, and he never experienced a December day other than finishing last. Although he was hired to win the North at last, he has struggled against the North for the past nine games and has only ever defeated Chicago or Minnesota.
Romeo Crennel, the interim coach of the Texans, stated, “There are only two types of coaches.” “Those who have already been let go, as well as those who will”
Patricia has now joined Detroit’s cemetery of the fired, a team that has lost 10 coaches and still has no division titles, postseason victories, anything at all. It will now shift to lucky number 11, with young guns like Robert Saleh, the defensive coordinator for San Francisco, and Eric Bieniemy, the offensive coordinator for Kansas City, sure to become hot commodities in the upcoming weeks.
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