On Sunday, Detroit Lions head coach Matt Patricia met with the media prior to practice and said quarterback Matthew Stafford would be sitting out for the second-straight day.
In all, Stafford will end up having six-straight days of rest between practices, something that has not happened in his career.
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Following a tweet from Dave Birkett of the Detroit Free Press on Saturday in which he said he asked Stafford how his arm was feeling, we published a piece asking for you to be the judge of whether or not the Lions could be covering up an injury.
Well, it looks like out article reached the right members of the media (or we would like to think it did), which resulted in Patricia giving a detailed explanation as to why Stafford was getting so many days of rest.
From Detroit Free Press:
“This was a scheduled kind of break in the middle of camp that he and I had talked about before in July, where we thought it’d be a good opportunity coming out of New England before we head to Houston — which will be another really kind of intense couple days of practice — that’d be just a good opportunity for him to be at practice,” Patricia said. “He’s a professional, he handles himself really well, prepares really hard, he’s great in meetings, so just thought it was a good break in the action in the middle part of training camp to do that.”
“I don’t really do the pitch count thing,” Patricia said. “I know a lot of people like to do stories about the quarterbacks and the pitch count in baseball. I’m not a baseball guy. I think for me it’s just, it’s really just a feel thing as far as having the game on Saturday. You really got to think about the games and the practice weeks that we have and what’s leading up to it.
“What’s different about the preseason is you can really get into some unusual weeks. (Game on) Thursday, (then) Saturday, (then) Friday, (then) Thursday (on a short week). Now we know the fourth one, when that is, and then to get ready for the regular season. Some of the patterns are just different then they would be normally during the regular season. … So it’s kind of just a weird sort of weekly schedule, where in the regular season it is what it is. You have to just prepare and go normal. But where we can maybe control some of that in the preseason we always look at those options.”
So, it sounds like Stafford is just fine and Patricia is just doing what he believes is best for his veteran quarterback.
That being said, it sure would be nice to see the starting quarterback getting as many reps as possible with a brand new offense in place.
But…maybe this is why I am not an NFL head coach!
