In nearly 20 years of covering the Detroit Lions, I’ve had a player throw a bucket of water on me, another fling a chair toward me and yet another barred me from his locker by creating a “no-reporter zone” with athletic tape.
And these were some of the nicer interactions I’ve had with players when we haven’t seen eye to eye.
So yes, I’ve developed a thick skin — even if it gets a little wet sometimes. Even so, I try to avoid conflict whenever possible. But as a reporter, if you’re doing your job right, you have to be comfortable with uncomfortable situations and be willing to ask hard questions that might invite any number of scornful acts, like having random furniture hurled at you.
I’m telling you this to explain why I wasn’t looking forward to speaking with A’Shawn Robinson in October when I spent a week with the Los Angeles Rams while writing about Matthew Stafford.
Robinson had a good tenure, but not a great one, with the Lions from 2016-19, though he never quite lived up to his second-round pick status. He wouldn’t speak with reporters because he was angry at someone about something, even though we could never figure why. When my colleague Dave Birkett privately asked Robinson if there was a way to mend the relationship, Robinson said something that has gone down in Lions beat-writing lore.
“It’ll never be mended,” he told Birkett with a fierce and determined finality.
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That’s why I was surprised Robinson agreed to my interview request. It didn’t help that I had to postpone the interview a day because of a scheduling conflict. (Thanks, Aaron Donald.) When Robinson approached me the next day, he barked, “Man, you made me wait all (expletive) day yesterday!”
I wondered if my life insurance policy was up to date as I calculated how far a 6-foot-4, 330-pound NFL defensive tackle could shot put me. I started to explain it was Donald’s fault.
“Nah, man!” Robinson said, stopping me as he broke out in a big smile. “I’m just messin’ with you.”
Disneyland was a couple hours south, but somehow the Rams’ training facility in Thousand Oaks had been transformed into the “Magic Kingdom” — magical things were happening. Any animosity that lingered between Robinson and Detroit reporters had been wiped away, maybe by the warm Ventura County winds blowing off the Pacific Ocean, maybe by the attitude of his new teammates, coaches and front office, or maybe by all of it.
“The sun’s out a little bit,” Robinson said. “Get a nice little vibe going. It’s different out here.”
It was different, and that was a massive understatement. As a visiting reporter, you never know what to expect. Most teams are welcoming, but some are suspicious. But at every turn, and with every interaction, the Rams impressed me.
There was general manager Les Snead, the architect of the whole thing, standing around outside the weight room speaking casually with a colleague and laughing as they looked out over their creation.
There was coach Sean McVay, who comes off as intense and self-serious on television, fooling around with D-linemen before practice as they threw footballs into empty cold tubs.
Donald was constantly smiling and I got a chuckle out of him when I tried to prod him into telling me how upset he was that the Lions passed on him in 2014 and drafted Eric Ebron.
After I wrote a column critical of Stafford’s decision to turn down my one-on-one interview request, one of the Rams’ public relations people gave me some good-natured ribbing and offered me a tissue.
When I couldn’t find my way to the press box inside labyrinthine SoFi Stadium, director of football operations Sophie Harlan — the first woman in her position in the NFL —asked an assistant to give me a ride in a golf cart.
This wasn’t just a well-oiled machine. This was the well-oiled machine that makes well-oiled machines. When I got back to Detroit, I sent the Rams a note of thanks with some Sanders chocolates and Better Made chips, with the only caveat being to not let Stafford have any.
The Rams were only 5-1 at the time and I wasn’t convinced they could go all the way. They had issues on defense, in the secondary and at linebacker. They lacked an elite receiver opposite Cooper Kupp. Could the Rams get past the undefeated Cardinals? Could they beat the Bucs twice? Could they beat the Chiefs or the Bills in the Super Bowl?
Of course, all those questions were answered ultimately by Snead himself, who wore a T-shirt at the Super Bowl parade with his own meme, featuring the words “(Expletive) them picks” written across his face.
I will never forget that L.A. trip for two reasons. Even in Week 7, while watching the Rams practice, I had a strange feeling I was watching a championship team at work. It’s hard to describe, but the way the team carried itself —from support staff to personnel people to coaches to players — felt much different than the way I’ve seen the Lions or other teams carry themselves.
By no means did I predict the Rams would win it all, but I left L.A. with an uncanny feeling that I had witnessed something special, something I hadn’t seen before. That uncanny feeling led me to another feeling — albeit a sinking one — which still resonates with me; it’s the second reason I won’t forget the trip.
Watching the Rams that week, and in the weeks that followed on their march to their first Super Bowl victory in L.A., underscored how far the Lions are from winning their own first Super Bowl.
Please understand: I’m not trying to compare the Lions to the Rams. No matter how much of a so-called “copycat league” the NFL is, all 32 teams are unique entities. Even though so many teams have tried to become the Patriots, it hasn’t worked because there are too many variables — from ownership to GM to coach to quarterback to culture and players — to produce the same results.
But when I look at how the Rams were constructed, I see a team that had everything going for it: A genius offensive minded at coach, a likely future Hall of Famer on defense, a former No. 1 overall pick at quarterback in Jared Goff and an owner with extensive experience running successful franchises in various sports worldwide.
And when all that didn’t work, the Rams had the boldness to set out on a different — and much riskier — route, gambling away high draft picks to find the right guy under center and adding a steady stream of free agents to bolster weaknesses.
Forget the Lions. How many teams would have gambled this way? How many teams would have had an owner like Stan Kroenke who kept signing the checks and staking his poker player when all he was doing was bleeding chips?
So what do the Lions have? Really, they only have promise as they enter Year 2 of yet another rebuild.
They have a coach in Dan Campbell who is proficient at curbing drama and getting players to buy in, though he lacks any apparent elite skill. They have a GM in Brad Holmes who took the safest approach to his first draft and had mixed success in free agency. They have a new owner in Sheila Ford Hamp. She’s still learning the ropes of leading an NFL franchise, but she isn’t arrogant enough to think she knows everything, and she hired a tutor of sorts in Chris Spielman.
But there are no stars on the roster. And it’s hard to tell where the whole thing is going. They changed offensive coordinators midway through the season and they’re changing their defensive scheme after one year. Their team identity is far from established.
The Lions also don’t feel unique. They’re like most NFL teams, hoping to build a solid foundation and at some point draft their star quarterback who will lead them to sustained success and, eventually, a championship.
What the Lions, and most teams, are really following is the path to being the Super Bowl runners-up, like the Bengals with Joe Burrow, or the Rams with Goff, or the Falcons with Matt Ryan, or the Panthers with Cam Newton. Because if you look at the champions, more often than not they make a bold move such as trading for Stafford, or get lucky that Patrick Mahomes fell far enough in the draft in order to trade up, or that Nick Foles became a postseason savior, or that Drew Bledsoe got hurt so that Tom Brady could have a career.
Maybe there will a newfound boldness from Holmes with so many draft picks next month. Maybe Ben Johnson is the offensive genius no one saw coming.
But that’s only hope. Hope that one day I’ll look out at a Lions practice and have the same feeling I had in L.A. last fall. For now, that day feels as far away as Disneyland.
Contact Carlos Monarrez at cmonarrez@freepress.com and follow him on Twitter @cmonarrez.