For the National Football League’s Detroit Lions, this was not a good week. First quarterback Charlie Batch got slammed to the ground — sustaining a concussion in the process — and fans at the Detroit Silverdome booed Batch when he stood up after the hit (i.e. they would have preferred he stayed down with the concussion because the fans hate him). To add insult to injury, coach Bobby Ross then threw in the towel citing burnout.
What is going on here? Batch is a decent quarterback and Ross is a phenomenal coach. Unfortunately they are and were hamstringed by an organization that doesn’t have a clue about how to put together a winning football team.
For years, for example, the Lions tolerated underperforming head coach Wayne Fontes who actually turned around and sued them after he was finally fired saying all that standing on the sidelines caused his back problems. Fontes was a player’s quarterback who was more concerned about being loved by everyone on the team than winning games. Fontes had the best running back in the NFL, Barry Sanders, for much of his tenure and still managed to go nowhere. The frustration of all those years on Fontes teams with no hope of making a serious run in the playoffs contributed to Sanders sudden retirement a couple years ago.
Ross is a football genius who got driven out of Detroit because the team’s owners are more worried about luxury boxes in the new stadium under construction than they are about the woeful offensive line. Several years ago they lost key members of the offensive line who left saying the Lions could not pay them enough to stay in Detroit.
The choice of new coach Gary Moeller seems like a step back to the Fontes days. Although he is a competent coach, Moeller is best known in Michigan for being fired from the job as University of Michigan football coach after he started an altercation in a restaurant.
It is personnel decisions like that which have left the Lions 246-290-13 since current owner William Clay Ford bought the team in 1964. The best chance the Lions have of ever being successful is for the Ford family to sell the team to somebody who understands what it takes to win in the NFL.