The Detroit Lions season is sadly over too early and we’ll not be able to talk with players again anytime soon. Luckily we got one more shot to talk with Lions punter Jack Fox at the grand opening of Canes Chicken in Canton, MI on Tuesday.
We talked with Fox about the Lions losing Ben Johnson, Aaron Glenn, and a decent amount of assistants and positional coaches and he seemed to confirm that the Lions will keep one of their coordinators, their special teams coordinator Dave Fipp.
During the build-up for the Divisional round, Lions’ head coach Dan Campbell talked about how he believes that Fipp could be a head coach in the NFL. Fox talked about that and what having Fipp around means to him.
“It’s incredible. He’s obviously an incredible coach. He’s a great mentor, and I’m lucky to have him. He’s my position coach, but I think our whole team is lucky to have him because he really does Coach up the whole team.” Fox said. “He’s an incredible leader, the way he gets up in front of the team. In special teams meetings, we have basically the whole team outside the quarterbacks in there, and he’s just an incredible leader. And he really does a great job just connecting with everybody, different situations, different positions. And I guess that’s kind of what you need out of a head coach.”
Speaking of head coaches, after the Lions lost in the NFC Championship game in 2023, Dan Campbell infamously got in front of the team and talked about how that might have been their one shot and that it would be twice as hard to get back to that point.
We asked If anything like that was said this year and Fox said that the Lions didn’t have a big takeaway for players to walk away with like they had the year before. The general thought and feeling was that the team didn’t do enough, but that he feels the team is now more motivated than ever to get back to the spot they were in.
We asked Fox about the losses of Ben Johnson and Aaron Glenn and how he feels about some of the new coaches like new offensive coordinator John Morton who he worked with in 2022.
“My reaction is that I’m really happy for both of them (Johnson and Glenn.) They’re honestly great football coaches, but they’re honestly really nice people to be around every day. So I’ll miss them. I’ll miss seeing them in the building, but I’m just really happy for them.” Fox said. “(John Morton and Kelvin Sheppard are) both excellent people, just like the last guys, and great football coaches. So I’m really excited to see how they operate as coordinators, and I’m sure they’re gonna be great.”
In terms of what Fox hopes to work on and improve in his game, he says he’s looking forward to being better at shorter punts where he can pin the opposing team inside the 10-yard line, direction and hang time.
The big takeaway from this sit down was that the Lions are upset about not playing this weekend. Fox said he planned to watch the Super Bowl, but that he also didn’t really want to. Added to that is that the Lions haven’t lost any motivation after this early exit and the loss of some coaches. The confidence and motivation very much seemed like it was still there.