In the past if you were a depth guy looking to make the Detroit Lions roster, special teams alone might be your ticket to making the roster. That’s no longer the case now. Now you have to be much more than that according to Lions’ special teams coach Dave Fipp.
“I tell the players in the old days of like, ‘Hey, you’re gonna make this team on special teams, that’s over.” Fipp said Saturday. “You really make the team on offense, defense and special teams. And the more you can do in this business, the better off you’re gonna be. And it’s really good. I mean, it’s how it should be. We want to build a good football team and we need a a bunch of guys to do a lot of different things.”
That makes a ton of sense. The team is a lot better and lot deeper. There for it’s going to be harder to make the team. If you want to, you’re going to have to show that you can do multiple things. If you’re a receiver, you have to be able to play on special teams and then be ready to go play receiver on offense and be good at it.
The same goes for defense, if you’re linebacker, you better be ready to play on defense if you’re needed at the drop of a hat and you better be sure to be on your special teams game.
In some ways you can see that this might make the job harder for the guys that are selecting the players, but on the other hand it might make it a little bit easier because you’re picking fewer players and you can zero in on the guys that you feel good about.