No, Brad Holmes doesn’t want to talk playoffs. Not this year. Maybe not even next year.
“We’ll just take it one week at a time,” the Detroit Lions general manager said Thursday, narrowly avoiding a 15-yard personal-foul penalty and a league fine for using the worst cliché in sports.
Instead, Holmes wanted to talk about mentality. You know, playing tough, playing smart … playing with grit. I believe I’ve heard that somewhere. Because mentality — an improved mentality — is what the Lions are banking on for some kind of improvement from last year’s 3-13-1 disappointment.
“Again, if we have the right mentality and we control what we can control,” Holmes said, “then we’ll just see what the results are going to be. But we’re not going to guess a record, ‘We’re going to be this win team or that win team.’ ”
Speaking 10 days before the season opener, Holmes sounded encouraged, even optimistic. He said all levels of the defense are improved and that quarterback Jared Goff is now surrounded “with a little bit better supporting cast.”
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But he balked at talk of expectations — or the dreaded “P word”: playoffs.
“When you say ‘expectations,’ ” he said, repeating the word a reporter had just used, “we just want to make sure that we’re aligned in terms of what the mentality is going to be and just make sure that I think that we kind of laid the foundation that we’re going to compete and play really, really hard regardless.”
Then Holmes said something else about the team’s mentality. He and coach Dan Campbell want to set a different expectation. In the first year of the rebuild, the Lions had a poor record but they deserved credit for staying in games and rarely getting blown out. This year, Holmes and Campbell want to move beyond just keeping games close.
“You don’t go into the games saying, ‘Well, we’re the underdogs and — no, you’re going into the game saying, ‘Yeah, no, we’re going to win this game,’ ” Holmes said. “And I think that’s the mindset that you’ve got to have. And I think Dan’s done a good job making sure that that message has come across.”
Ah, yes, the message. Has it come across? Well, if you’ve watched even a little bit of the four episodes of HBO’s “Hard Knocks” series featuring the Lions, you know full well that message has been delivered, mostly by Campbell, with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer.
National exposure can be a useful tool in the right hands, and the Lions have actually wielded it well. Campbell comes off as a sincere guy, while being fun but tough. Holmes has stayed almost entirely in the background but finally emerged in the fourth episode as a careful and collaborative evaluator.
“Hard Knocks” has helped the Lions’ brand. But that help has come at the price of inflated hype. Sure, Holmes wants the Lions to control what they can control, but the hype train — and all the rabid fans who climb aboard and stick their heads out the window — has a way of jumping the tracks and raising expectations to unrealistic levels. That’s something few people can control.
And these rabid rail riders aren’t freeloading hobos, either. They’re putting their money where their mouths are. There’s a so-called “Hard Knocks effect” on some betting websites, on which Campbell was the recent favorite to win coach of the year and the Lions were the second-most-popular bet to win the NFC North.
With a “Hard Knocks” camera pointed at me and Holmes from 15 feet away, I asked him how he expects the Lions to handle the extra hype and expectations from the show. Holmes may not want to speak about heightened expectations, but he knows they’re there, and he knows how to read a room and a fanbase. He proved as much when he said, “If we go out there and win three games again, then it’s all for naught.”
“So, like, we can have as much buzz and all this stuff as you want,” he said, “and I really appreciate that the fans, this fanbase, is so passionate. They deserve to have hope and belief, but we’ve got to hold up our end of the bargain.”
Holmes wouldn’t discuss a playoff future, but he could surely see the dire potential of another poor season.
“So we can have all this buzz and hype and all that, but we don’t go out there and equate it to wins, then it really doesn’t matter,” he said. “So then next season, we’re sitting down here right now at this time of the year saying, ‘Well there’s all this buzz, but the Lions just let us down.’ Like no, that’s not — that’s not what we’re trying to be. We understand that this thing’s got to equate to wins.”
How many wins? Well, that’s anyone’s guess, and maybe one that even a well-heeled hobo with an HBO subscription and a Honolulu Blue tongue might have a hard time pondering.