As soon as the 2019 NFL regular season ended, it was pretty obvious that Damon ‘Snacks’ Harrison would not be a member of the Detroit Lions by the time the 2020 season kicked off.
In late February, the Lions announced they were cutting Harrison, despite giving him to a contract extension prior to the 2019 season. The move was on that both the Lions and Harrison agreed was mutual.
Since being cut, Snacks, who loves to just blurt things out on Twitter, dropped plenty of hints that he was not a fan of playing for the Lions.
Now, Harrison has decided to go into further detail about his time with the Lions, including how he tried to get out of being traded to Detroit in the first place. He recently joined the Green Light Podcast with Chris Long and opened up about how unhappy he was from the moment he got the call that he was being traded to the Lions.
From 97.1 The Ticket:
“When I got there last year it was fresh, it was new and I was a bit angry. And to be completely honest with you, I didn’t want to go to Detroit because of some things that I heard from some guys in the past and some guys who were there,” Harrison said on the Green Light Podcast with former NFL defensive end Chris Long. “When I got the call that that’s where I was traded, I didn’t answer the phone for a couple hours. Bob Quinn was calling me and I didn’t pick up the phone because I was trying to figure out a way to get out of it.
“When I got there I didn’t know anything about the scheme. I was a nose tackle my entire career, 1-technique, shade, zero, some 2-wide. I get there and it’s 2-, 3- techniques. Now for me, in my career, the most frightening thing was playing 3-technique because of how far back the guards would sit.”
When Harrison found out he’d be playing mostly 3-technique in Patricia’s defense, he said “I tried to get out of it.”
“We had some conversations about not doing it anymore, and they kind of incorporated some of that zero nose, shade to kind of fit my play style. But it was something that I wasn’t comfortable with. I had some success doing it, but this past year I think it kind of came back to bite me in the ass. I wasn’t prepared for the season mentally. I came into camp in shape, but during the first three weeks of camp I think I kind of worked myself out of shape because I wasn’t doing anything.
“That was a time where, to be honest with you, we were trying to facilitate a trade. I was hell-bent on getting out of there. It’s nothing against the people of Detroit, the city or anything like that. I’ll forever love the city of Detroit. But I just had to go try to put myself in a situation where I saw myself there for two or three years to end my career, and I just didn’t see myself in Detroit for that long.”
Towards the end of the interview, Snacks made sure to add that Matt Patricia is a great coach and that he respects him.
“Matt Patricia’s a great coach, a great guy,” he said. “I have a lot of respect for Matt Patricia. It had nothing to do with him personally.”