The Pressbox

While watching one of the football games today, they talked about candidates for NFL Coach of the Year. Listed right up there with Tony Dungy and Bill Belichick was Rod Marinelli of the Detroit Lions.

When was the last time a Lions coach was included in that kind of company?

Marty Morniheg? Steve Mariucci? Wayne Fontes?

Not likely.

But Marinelli deserves it. He has done a wonderful job of getting rid of the troublemakers and changing the attitude of this team.

These guys play like they believe in their coach and each other.

There is a lot of season left, but it’s nice to be able to talk about the Lions as a playoff contender after their recent miserable history.

I am not ordering my Super Bowl tickets just yet, but the Detroit Lions had a pretty impressive performance against Tampa Bay today.

It’s not he level of play that I am talking about. The Lions were outplayed on many levels by the Buccaneers, but they showed tremendous resiliency, an ability to capitalize on mistakes by their opponent and a knack of coming up with big plays at the right times.

Good teams find a way to win when they don’t play particularly well. That hasn’t happened with the Lions much in recent years.

Monroe, SMCC, Airport, Milan and Dundee have qualified for the state football playoffs. Flat Rock and Whiteford will wait until Sunday night to see if the computer spits out their names.

Here are some quick thoughts on the playoff teams and the hopefuls.

Monroe: What a run this team went on at the end of the season, winning seven in a row including the last four against playoff teams. The quick, aggressive Trojan defense is a joy to watch.

SMCC: This was supposed to be a rebuilding year for the Falcons after suffering heavy graduation losses. Jack Giarmo and his staff have done a wonderful job with this young team.

Airport: The Jets have developed such a great program that they expect to be in the playoffs every year. This might be the best offense I’ve seen at Airport.

Milan: Ron Spears has put together one of the greatest seasons for a Monroe County Region running back ever and the defense has improved dramatically over last season.

Dundee: It’s great to see the Vikings enjoying success again. Ryan Irwin is one of the real nice guys in Region coaching.

Flat Rock: I’d love to see the Rams slip into the playoffs. They are small in size and numbers, but play with tremendous heart.

Whiteford: Coach Jack Luettke didn’t sound hopeful about his team’s playoff chances Friday night. I hope he’s wrong. It would nice to see the Bobcats’ high-octane offense get to take the field for another game.

I was just looking at the NFL standings this morning and have come up with a bold prediction.

The New England Patriots will win the AFC East.

What a pathetic division. The Patriots are 6-0 and have a five-game lead in the win column, four in the loss column. The rest of the division is made up of Buffalo (1-4), the New York Jets (1-5) and Miami (0-6).

The Patriots were very impressive Sunday in handling previously unbeaten Dallas fairly easily. Tom Brady is master of the game right now.

I really like the way Rod Marinelli is trying to reconstruct the attitude of the Detroit Lions. But sometimes his macho stuff goes a little too far.

It made no sense to have Jon Kitna in the game in the final minutes of Sunday’s blowout loss to Washington. Marinelli says he is driving home the point that his team is going to play hard on every down.

That’s fine, but there has to be a point where common sense takes over.

Kitna already takes plenty of hits. Subjecting him to even more when the game is out of reach is not good coaching. If Kitna gets hurt, the Lions can start planning now for another Top 10 draft choice (and, with Matt Millen in charge, it will probably be a wide receiver).

Why couldn’t the Lions play hard on every down in the fourth quarter of the Washington or Philadelphia games with the backup quarterback on the field?

I covered tonight’s Huron League football showdown between Airport and SMCC.
I can’t remember ever seeing a game that featured such a dramatic turnaround.
Airport completely dominated the first half, outgaining the Falcons 283-21. The gap in first downs was 16-1.
SMCC stopped an Airport drove at the four-yard line and returned a kick-off for a touchdown, otherwise the halftime deficit would have been much greater than 17-6.
If you asked me at halftime if SMCC had any chance of coming back to win the game I would have said no.
But the Falcons showed how much I know, dominating the second half almost as thoroughly as Airport dominated the first.
That’s the great thing about high school athletics. These aren’t hardened pros. Emotions play a huge roll in these games.
It was a pleasure to watch two well-coached, talented teams battle before a big crowd.

Can the first game of an NFL season be a must-win situation?

Probably not, but the rules are sometimes different for the Detroit Lions.

Confident voices have been emerged from the Lion locker room during the preseason. Jon Kitna boldly predicted 10 wins or more. Many of the players supported their quarterback.

But that kind of talk quickly flies out the window if the Lions can’t open today with a win over the only team in the NFL that was worse than them last season.

What a blow it would be to the Lions if Josh McCown, who was traded to Oakland after not being able to beat out Kitna for the Detroit’s starting quarterback job last year, leads the Raiders to victory.

So, for the Lions, maybe Game 1 is must-win.

I was at Monroe High’s football game last night.
That was a good assignment for a couple of reasons.
First, it was one of the few games in the county that wasn’t delayed by weather and, secondly, the Trojans put on a great show.
Monroe completely dominated a team that came in at 2-0.
Ben Notario had as good a first quarter as you’ll ever see: three touchdowns, hard-running inside, a bone-jarring tackle that forced a fumble and a great one-handed catch.

The Trojan defense was very active, especially the linebackers, and quarterback Willie Jones threw the ball effectively.

There were a couple of silly penalties that frustrated the coaching staff, but all-in-all, it was a terrific way to bounce back from last week’s frustrating loss.

What a miserable weekend it was for sports fans in southeast Michigan.

Two frustrating Detroit Tiger losses were combined with a humiliating loss for the University of Michigan football team.

It might have signalled the end of championship hopes for both.

Michigan still has a lot of season to play, but teams that lose to Appalachian State don’t generally win national championships.

As for the Tigers, the weekend summed up how frustrating the season has become.

They made a nice comeback to tie Oakland in the ninth inning Friday night, only to lose in the 10th.

Then on Sunday, they built a 7-0 lead only to let it slip away in a 10-inning loss. It was a golden opportunity to gain ground on the rest of the teams in the playoff hunt with the Yankees, Indians and Mariners all losing.

The Tigers finished a six-game road trip to Kansas City and Oakland - two teams out of contention - with a 2-4 record. That’s not how you launch a playoff run.

I guess we’re just lucky the Detroit Lions didn’t play Sunday to add to the misery.

I must admit that I had never heard of Roger Goodall before he was promoted to Commissioner of the NFL.

It hasn’t taken him long to make a name for himself.

One of his first jobs was to stomp on troublemakers like Pacman Jones and Tank Johnson. Then, he had the Michael Vick mess thrown in his face. He dealt with that as well as you could expect. This was a no-win for the NFL and Goodall seems to have handled it with a minimum damage for the league.

Just last week Goodall visited Detroit Lions training camp to answer any questions and to make his stance on players who run afoul with the law clear to everyone.

He is not running from problems. He deals with the head-on.

I like his style.