I looked at this tweet and all I could think about was Hendon Hooker and everything that was said about Hendon Hooker by the Lions coaching staff over the summer.
“He just needs reps. And it doesn’t matter if it’s us or it’s them or it’s a game, he just needs reps and reps and reps, and he goes to bed and he needs reps, and he wakes up and he needs reps.”
That was Lions head coach Dan Campbell talking about Hooker in August. The Lions would get him some reps in all three preseason games, but then he promptly went and sat down for the rest of the season until he got to come into some blowout wins and hand the ball off because the Lions wouldn’t let him throw.
The guy is just kind of doomed at this point because he’s wasted two years in the NFL, and he’s already 27 years old. The first year was understandable since it was due to injury. The second one was him getting some reps for the first time. Who knows what the third will be and if it will even be in Detroit?
It really makes you think of what could be if the NFL utilized the UFL like the NBA does with the G-League or MLB does with their farm system or the NHL does with the AHL.
If the Lions could send Hendon Hooker down to the Michigan Panthers this spring, he’d get 10 games of actual football to play and hone his craft up enough to come into training camp for the Lions in the summertime and have his best chance to nail down that QB2 spot.
At this point, he played three preseason games, came in during the end of three blowouts, just handed the ball off, and then got replaced by Teddy Bridgewater and now his season is done. It’s just not really fair to Hooker or any quarterback that’s looking to get in some time on the field to show that they can be more in the league.
It makes sense to a degree. Football is a contact sport and these players are investments for their team. They don’t want to see those investments go out and get hurt in a secondary league and then have that affect things in the main league.
But the reality is that teams are wasting investments by not allowing them to get a chance to properly ply their trade. In most cases, they wind up cutting a lot of these players and lose out on draft picks.
Maybe someday the NFL will move to do something like this, but as for right now, players like Hooker are getting lost in the shuffle.