Matt Patricia Says Lions Battling 'Here We Go Again' Mentality
Supporters of the Detroit Lions have seen it time and time again.
Quarterback Matthew Stafford launches a deep pass that is completed to wide receiver Marvin Hall for the go-ahead touchdown.
Oh, no!
A flag is on the field, and of course, it's on the Lions.
Not a holding call!
Not against Halapoulivaati Vaitai!
"Here we go again."
But, after Detroit head coach Matt Patricia spent all last week instilling in his team his desire to just focus on one play at a time, the Lions did not wilt this time around.
Instead, Stafford led his team right down the field, and secured Detroit's first victory in over 300 days.
In his latest MMQB column, Albert Breer explains that Detroit's head coach is battling a mentality that he started to see with his roster during the first two games of the regular season.
As Breer writes,
“In Detroit, that’s something that we deal with, that we battle, that sort of, 'Here we go again' mentality,” Patricia said to me, from the team hotel postgame. “We talked about it this week. What I said is we've got to stay in the moment. We can't make the moment bigger than it is. Because if you do that, then it's almost like it becomes too much for you to handle. It becomes bigger than what it actually is. And all it actually is, is the next play.
“That's all it is. We've just got to do a great job on that play, we've got to stay in the moment and do a great job of doing our job on that play and not tying in everything else to it.”
On Monday, Detroit's third-year head coach explained that he felt Sunday was the first time this season players actually played all 60 minutes without riding the emotion of the game.
"I think through the entire course of the game, actually just kind of felt the steady consistency of everyone taking it play-by-play," Patricia said. "I really thought yesterday, it was kind of the first time in a while that I felt like we haven't really rode the wave of the game and just we were going to play one play at a time and play all 60 minutes and get to the end and try to go win. So, I just felt that was consistent all the way through the game."
He added, "There were some ebbs and flows in the game. But, I thought that the group did a great job of staying consistent, so that by the time we got to the fourth quarter, everyone kind of felt that confidence that, okay, this is going to be right up until the end and we've got to go do a great job executing all the way through."
To read Breer's entire The MMQB column, click here.
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