With the NFL dead zone upon us, it’s time for thoughts and reflections to rule the internet for the next few weeks. Pro Football Network did some reflecting of their own when they put out their list of worst coaching hires in NFL history. Somehow, former Detroit Lions coach Matt Patricia didn’t make the cut.
All five of those were pretty bad, but Patricia feels like he beats out everyone not named Urban Meyer. Here’s the case for why he should be near the top of this list:
To start it off, I once compared Matt Patricia to Thanos. The idea behind that was that he came into a perfectly good world and snapped his fingers and half of that world disappeared.
When Patricia arrived in Detroit, he was supposed to be the guy that would take a good Lions team to the next level. He had Matthew Stafford, Darius Slay, Quandre Diggs, Glover Quinn, Kenny Golladay, Marvin Jones and Snacks Harrison. After two and half years in Detroit, all these players were gone.
He immediately didn’t get along with most of the roster which led to the trades of Darrius Slay and Quandre Diggs. Two players that were near the top of their positions at the time. Glover Quinn’s retirement had something to do with Patricia and A’Shawn Robinson celebrated his firing on Twitter after he claimed that Patricia told him he would take his career away from him.
Patricia left the Lions in ruins in 2020 and it seemed like they would never get out of the hole that they were in at that time. He took a team that was supposed to be a playoff team with him at the helm and made them one of the worst teams in the league and gave them a bad reputation among potential free agents.
“Especially with Matt ‘I think I’m Belichick but I haven’t done s—’ Patricia,” That’s an actual quote from an NFL agent in 2019 when he was asked why his clients wouldn’t sign with Detroit.
Richard Sherman was about to sign with the Lions in 2020, but backed out due to the culture in Detroit. It was that bad. He came in and stripped out everything that was fun for the Lions and started coming at everyone like he was a bad high school coach who thinks the only way a team can be good is if they run a lot.
He wound up finishing his time in Detroit with a 13-29-1 record and was fired after a horrible Thanksgiving loss. To this day, any time his name is brought up in Detroit, it is usually met with explicit words. He should have made the list.
Update: Turns out there was an article written that did include Matt Patricia in their ranking that thye did not link to in their graphic. He’s ranked seventh. Thanks to Brad Berreman for pointing that out to us.