Detroit Lions Weblog

The Lions and “Character” Players

Lions Head Coach Rod Marinelli has repeatedly mentioned that acquiring players with “character” was a prime directive for the franchise moving forward. Unfortunately, given the rash of recent news about players spending time in court for arrests, one has to wonder if he had something different in mind altogether when he said that the Lions needed to add players with “character”.

The recent press releases about the arrests of ‘08 draft picks OT Gosder Cherilus and LB Jordan Dizon, along with the heavy, alleged charges on restricted free agent S Kalvin Pearson, the Lions have had an interesting off-season, to say the least. Football players aren’t choir boys, and any unstructured free time, especially among males of their age group, will often lead to trouble.

That being said, in the past, the Lions seem to have been able to keep their players off of the police blotters, regardless of the franchise’s struggles. I wonder if the complexion this organization is going to take in the future will change dramatically soon, under the auspices of acquiring players with “football character”. Could the Lions, out of necessity, select players of questionable character and backgrounds in order to win, rather than maintaining high expectations about players and their off-the-field conduct.

The off-season has been rather uninteresting for the Lions, other than these few infractions. The Lions pre-season games are going to be televised on a different channel, so instead of the gentile, old school Frank Beckman, Lions pre-season broadcasts will feature the emphatically vociferous Detroiter Gus Johnson and Desmond Howard, who will likely struggle to interject any sort of commentary among the annoying din of Johnson, if Johnson’s NCAA tourney work serves as any sort of template.

The Roy Williams contract situation looms in the background, too.   Other than that, the Lions are racing towards training camp, and hopefully, could surprise people given the generally low expectations that fans have for the team.