Is losing two coordinators a death sentence? What can we learn from teams who have experienced Lions' plight
Allen Park — In the closing scene of "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air" series finale, Will Smith stands alone in an empty living room — hands in his pocket, fighting back the tears — after the other characters have departed for new adventures.
A still shot from the iconic television moment has become a meme, symbolically applied to those staying behind while the people around them go in different directions.
Even before coordinators Aaron Glenn and Ben Johnson accepted head coaching jobs this week, Detroit Lions fans were already comically attaching the meme to Dan Campbell. After four years of maintaining unusual levels of continuity with his staff, strong winds of change are blowing through Detroit’s organizational ranks.
This is commonplace in the NFL, even if it's new territory for the Lions. Struggling franchises consistently look to the successful ones for new leadership, hoping to emulate models of prosperity. For nearly the entirety of the Super Bowl era, the Lions were in the other bucket, trying to copy-and-paste others' success, most recently failing with an attempted recreation of the "The Patriot Way."
Now, the shoe is on the other foot. The league is envious of Detroit's success. It's the Lions who seemingly have the blueprint for how to rebuild a cellar dweller into a contender. Three years ago, the mere suggestion would have had you drawing back the shades and looking to the sky to see if a pig might fly by.
What's unique about Detroit’s current predicament is the concentration of the attrition. Successful teams lose coordinators to hiring cycles every year. And teams with long strengths of success, such as the Patriots, Rams, 49ers and Eagles, have seen multiple departures across their runs. But losing both an offensive and defensive coordinator in the same offseason? That's rare.
If we loosen the parameters slightly, it's happened five other times in the past three decades. And given the legitimate concerns about regression in Detroit with this forced overhaul of the coaching staff, it's worth looking at what has historically happened to the franchises that got double-dipped in one offseason.