Everything started off perfectly for the Detroit Lions on Monday Night Football as they used an interception return for a touchdown by Quandre Diggs to take an early 7-0 lead on the New York Jets.
Unfortunately, that was just about the only thing that went right for the Lions in their home opener at Ford Field. When all was said and done, the Jets beat the Lions 48-17 in what was one of the most embarrassing home losses in team history.
Following the game, first-year Lion Ricky Jean Francois spoke to the media about playing hard until the final second comes off the clock.
From Detroit Free Press:
“It shows you a lot about your players,” Lions defensive end Ricky Jean Francois said. “You got to keep going. I understand what the score was, but you couldn’t let up. We had to keep playing football. It didn’t matter what the score was. I understand what it was, but we still had to execute and we didn’t go out there and execute nothing. We started, we had the ball rolling, came in the second half, did what we needed to do and just like everything stopped at that moment.”
When asked if he was implying that his teammates quit, Francois had the following to say.
“I’m not talking about anybody individual,” he said. “But that tells you a lot about a team, you’re going to keep fighting. Kept fighting on defense. We had to keep doing it no matter what the score was. We had to control the score. At one point we didn’t, but we had to keep playing football. We still had like two more quarters to go and we did what we needed to do, but at the end we (gave up) 48 points. That looked bad on our defense.”
Nation, do you take this as Francois thinking that some of his teammates quit playing their hardest?
