Years ago, I was walking out of the Detroit Lions locker room with Dre Bly and Ndamukong Suh. Bly was a veteran closing out his career in his final training camp. Suh was a prized and promising rookie.
“You wanna trade game checks?” Bly casually asked Suh.
I chuckled quietly.
Suh, humorless as ever, quietly said, “Nah, that’s all right.”
I forgot how much I missed Bly’s familiar, fun energy until it returned to Allen Park on Wednesday, when the Lions’ new cornerbacks coach spoke with reporters about his latest tour of duty with his old team.
The 20-minute news conference was classic Bly.
Comparing his size to new corner Cam Sutton while going out to eat: “I was measured at 5-9½. I think I’ve grown since then. I think I’m right at 5-10.”
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Speaking of winning a championship as a rookie season with the St. Louis Rams: “I was 23 years old, winning the Super Bowl, showing up in Nelly videos, bro.”
Bly was raw and real and he sounds more than ready for the job after working the past four seasons as North Carolina’s cornerbacks coach and serving as a coaching intern with New Orleans before that while Dan Campbell and Aaron Glenn were on the Saints’ staff.
It’s easy to see why Campbell hired Bly. He was so fun and inspiring Wednesday that even I felt like playing for Bly. I just need to lose 10 or 30 pounds, de-age myself 20 years and finally finish that “Football for Dummies” audiobook.
Now, let’s not kid ourselves. We don’t know how it’s going to work out with Bly. Campbell has a strong preference for hiring former NFL players as coaches. But that doesn’t ensure anything.
Anthony Lynn won two Super Bowls as a running back and Glenn made three Pro Bowls. Lynn lasted half a season and Glenn was in charge of the NFL’s worst defense last year. Meanwhile, Ben Johnson never played a down in the NFL and he’s on the cusp of becoming a head coach.
This is just a longwinded way of saying no one really knows anything in sports. Any. Thing.
Except Campbell knows this. He needs playmakers in what was the NFL’s worst group of corners by far last year after the unit gave up 2,807 passing yards, which was the most by nearly 400 yards, according to Pro Football Focus.
Bly and Campbell spoke about needing playmakers. It’s good that it’s been identified and will be prioritized. Bly needs to adjust to coaching in the NFL, but he should be qualified for the job. His ball skills made him a two-time Pro Bowler while he racked up 19 interceptions with the Lions from 2003-06.
But Bly knows there’s only so much that coaching can do and he spoke the truth — maybe a little too much truth — about the realities of playmaking ability in the NFL.
“It’s just not a lot of guys,” he said, “in my opinion, defensive backs throughout college in the league, I wish they could make a little bit more plays. And so it’s either in you or it’s not in you.”
This is precisely why the Lions signed Sutton, safety C.J. Gardner-Johnson and cornerback Emmanuel Moseley in free agency. They had 10 combined interceptions last season.
Short of a brain transplant, Campbell can’t expect Bly to teach his players how to be instinctive ball hawks. Bly almost seemed to concede the ability to teach that instinct because of the way young players are specializing at an early age, rather than playing multiple sports and multiple positions within those sports.
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But there is a quality Bly possessed as a player that Campbell definitely expects him to impart to the Lions’ corners.
“You know, I wasn’t the tallest player, I wasn’t the fastest,” Bly said. “But I was able to do some things in this league because I was instinctive and I was smart. And I was very confident and competitive.
“And that was one of the first things that Dan said that he was looking for out of his corners coach was a guy that was very competitive, a guy that had a certain amount of confidence about himself.”
If Bly can instill even a smidgeon of his swagger in his players, Detroit will still be deep in the throes of celebrating the Lions’ Super Bowl victory around this time next year.
But there’s something else Bly can teach. It will be a quiet lesson, but a deeply meaningful one. In fact, you could still hear the hurt and disappointment in his voice when he spoke about it Wednesday. Bly spoke about the fleeting nature of success, about how he tasted success so early in his career by winning a Super Bowl as a rookie and returning to the title game two years later.
“After that,” he said, “I never went back to the playoffs. Never. I played eight more years in the league and never went back to playoffs.”
Fortunes change quickly in sports. For the good and the bad. After they lost Super Bowl 36 to the Patriots, the Rams won only one more playoff game in St. Louis.
That’s something the Lions should keep in mind. They finished on an 8-2 streak. Only three teams had a better finish. It made the 9-8 Lions the darlings of the offseason and a popular pick to take a leap this year.
But let’s not forget that failed leaps can lead to spectacular falls — even by a team that was nearly a dynasty. Bly learned that hard lesson 20 years ago. Ultimately, it may be the most important thing he teaches his players.
Contact Carlos Monarrez: cmonarrez@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @cmonarrez.