Detroit Lions Weblog

Marinelli-weg, Ramaneers Quietly Embark Upon New Rebuilding Process

The perennial, interminable rebuilding process that the Lions have been mired in, shows no clear signs of ceasing. What makes this off-season different, in my eyes, is how the Lions current rebuilding process has been taking place with little or no fanfare, and no public mention, or sign, that a 7-9 team would be about to be undertaking one.

Rod Marinelli has improbably earned enough organizational “juice” that at this point, at least internally, he seems to have held sway over this off-season’s personnel moves. Marinelli, who I believe is about to embark upon his last season as the Lions head coach, seems determined to go down swinging, with his kind of players in tow.

So the current rebuilding process (Note:losing veterans T.Lehman, B.Bailey, F.Bryant, S.Rogers, K.Jones, K.Edwards, K.Kennedy, D.Woody, T.J. Duckett, J.T. O’Sullivan, 10 key players in all, constitutes a rebuilding process) under Rod Marinelli’s guidance, which if things play out as I believe they will, eventually means that in ‘09 the Lions, after hiring a new coach, changing schemes, etc., will have undergone this costly process five times during Matt Millen’s eight seasons, with a roster full or Rams and Bucs cast-offs.

It is completely surreal, almost to the point of being painful, that the Lions can continue to struggle, and with little competition, certifiably claim ownership of being the unprecedentedly, worst-managed franchise in all of professional sports.

The Lions negligent, incompetent, and quixotic organizational plan seems to be a microcosmic representation of the manner which the innumerable dysfunctional, and improperly helmed organizations, including the Oval Office in Washington, D.C., have been managed in the modern era.

My friend “Hondo” recently put the Lions untenable situation in a more complete perspective for me. He said that the Lions are more or less a “real world” implementation of a concept that was gestated, and manifested in the Mel Brooks movie “The Producers”. The Lions, and the Ford’s, want their franchise to be an abject failure.

Instead, implausibly, they find themselves, largely due to the incredible milieu which an NFL franchise currently operates within, an economic success with a loyal, to a fault, fan base. There really is no other reasonable explanation for what the Lions have subjected their fans to for so long.