To say the current offseason has been a bit different than in the past would be the understatement of all-time.
COVID-19 has wreaked havoc on our world and NFL football has not been spared.
Rather than meeting and coaching up players face to face while in the same building or field, NFL coaches have been forced to pivot in order to adhere to social distancing guidelines that have now been in place for over three months.
In an exclusive interview with Albert Breer of Sports Illustrated, Detroit Lions head coach Matt Patricia debriefed on the current offseason, noting that he is hopeful and confident that he, his assistants, and the players have learned a lot, not only about football but about each other as men.
From Sports Illustrated:
In his own effort to take care of the little things, Lions coach Matt Patricia tried to focus his staff’s teaching through the spring by taking advantage of the technology—establishing small breakout rooms off the bigger meetings to get his players the individualized instruction they wanted.
Two months later, Patricia hopes, and thinks, it made a difference across the board. But there’s one area where he’s pretty sure it did.
Detroit has a new special teams coordinator, Brayden Coombs, and assistant special teams coach, Marquice Williams, which means there’s one phase of the game where relatively radical change is coming for the players. So all spring, guys working in that area got specialized training. In one example Patricia raised, the core of the punt team might have been in the main special teams room, with the gunners in a breakout room at the same time.
The upshot for the staff was it allowed for the big and small picture to be handled simultaneously, and as needed. In the aforementioned cases, Coombs might have made the call that the gunner needed the intimate lesson more than he needed to know what the right guard is supposed to be doing.
“So Brayden might be in the protection room working on stance and punch and fundamentals there, where he’s gotta move the camera around and show footwork,” Patricia explained, “and then Marquice might be showing tape on hand fighting in the other room.”
Suffice it to say, by the time the Lions were doing this part of their offseason program, Patricia had come a long way from where he was around the draft, when he was wondering what they’d be able to get done with the players through the technology.
“I tried to lower the expectations, because we were all just so new to it, we didn’t know how it was gonna work,” he said. “I just thought in general we’d have a lot of problems. I thought there’d be a lot of technical issues, I thought it’d be hard for the players. And really in the end, the players were phenomenal. They were much more adaptable than the coaches were from that standpoint, because they’re just so used to all the different technologies.
“And I was really impressed with their commitment to it all the way through.”
Patricia also saw it, on his end, as an opportunity to grow, and there were two areas where he thinks the Lions made that happen collectively.
One, the coach believe bonds were strengthened through everyone’s personal lives being broadcast to each other—players and coaches got to see their teammates and staffmates’ surroundings, their kids and wives, their dogs and cats. “That stuff was amazing,” Patricia said. And the second part, he continued, was how he became more adept at reading players’ faces, which, he hopes, made for more effective teaching than you might get otherwise.
“So many times, in classrooms, you’re trying to see everyone’s face, but you’re also working the room, or working the board, or working something,” Patricia said. “With this, you’re fully focused on a person’s face and his facial expressions, and trying to learn to see how they’re taking the information in. … We’d be in meetings, and I’d see something, and you know everybody’s like, They can’t see all of us. I would see something, and I’d be like—and everyone’s muted—hey, Albert, bless you, saw you sneeze there.”
Patricia laughed, but there’s a larger point here.
“I’ve got 120 guys on the screen—Hey, I just saw your daughter run through the room, is she OK? And they’re like, Whoa! How did you see that?” Patricia said. “It’s those observation skills, and then you learn how to read people, read their expressions, either, OK, he’s getting this, or He’s really dialed in or No, I need to reexplain this, because it’s confusing.”
And if he’s better there, he’s a better coach for it, and the Lions are better off too.
