Detroit Lions owner Sheila Hamp met with reporters Wednesday at practice, a rare occurrence for her. Maybe she heard about the planes full of despondent Lions fans flying back from Dallas on Monday. Or maybe she didn’t need to.
A 1-5 record is telling on its own, especially in the context of 3-13-1 and 5-11 and 3-12-1 and 6-10, the Lions’ win-loss record the last four seasons. Hamp surely understands context.
Here’s guessing she understands timing, too, and her timing Wednesday was smart. Not just because her team lost its fourth straight on Sunday, or that her coach has lost 18 of his first 23, or that her quarterback has lost his way the last two games, but because she senses her fanbase losing hope.
Again.
And because no fan base in the NFL gorges itself on hope like hers. It’s what keeps her stadium full in the fall and (mostly) full in the early winter. It’s what keeps the jerseys sellin’ and beer flowin’ and the media apparatus that covers the team hummin’.
Hope is at the center of this entire, cursed enterprise. So there stood Hamp, hard by the sideline of the indoor practice field, doubling down on the folks she hired to keep hope livin’, offering a “there there” to the millions who love her team.
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She feels the pain, she said. And acknowledgement of that pain is the first step in … healing? … redemption? … salvation?
For many, none of these will come until the Ford family sells the team. But that’s not happening, so let’s stay in reality, and the reality is that she hired a coach, Dan Campbell, and a general manager, Brad Holmes, who arrived with limited experience in the jobs they were hired to do.
In other words, we have no idea if they can do them, except for what they’ve shown so far, and what they’ve shown so far isn’t promising. Hamp said she believes in them and, more critically, believes in the process she and her team used to hire them.
She has to say that. It’s too soon to say otherwise. She also had to say this:
“We really had to take (the rebuild) down to the ground level. And it’s been not only the football side but across the organization. We’ve put in a lot of new talent at the top. I really believe in the top leadership in this organization, and I think we’ve got the people to do it, to carry this out. I think that’s what (is) different.”
She knows she’ll have to prove it’s different. There hasn’t been much proof so far.
Yes, she has changed the vibe in the building. Folks are allowed to smile now. No doubt this has made a difference for lots of people who spend their days at the team headquarters in Allen Park.
That’s … something?
It’s not an accident that when Hamp wrote an internal memo in late 2020, she talked about the laughter she’d heard in the locker room after interim coach Darrell Bevell led the Lions to a win at Chicago. She didn’t keep Bevell, obviously. But that spirit is what she sought after the dour tenure of Bob Quinn and Matt Patricia.
She found that spirit in Holmes and Campbell, and it looked delightfully joyous on camera during “Hard Knocks.” Losing doesn’t promote joy, though, and while she believes in that spirit and in the men she thinks embody it, no joy will keep them around without more wins.
Hamp wouldn’t say how long she would wait for the winning. (Why would she?) Nor would she say whether she’d reconsider the leadership at the end of this season.
For now, she would only say that the “we’ve got a long way to go in this season.”
And that “any turnaround there’s going to be ups and downs. It’s not going to be smooth. That’d be simple. But it’s not. There’s going to be fluctuations and the other thing is, you all well know our team is very young and that’s not an excuse, that’s a fact. And young players are going to make mistakes, so we’ve had some key mistakes that have cost us games. Hopefully we’re not going to repeat those, hopefully we learn. But it is a process. And that’s what it is. It’s hard, and it’s really hard to stay disciplined. I mean, no one hates losing more than I do, than my family does. But it’s just, we’ve got to get through it.”
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The problem is there haven’t been any “ups” in the cycle of “ups and downs.” Beating the Commanders in Week 2? Almost beating the Eagles?
Whatever glow coming out of Week 2 evaporated in the waning seconds against Minneapolis, and while Hamp can talk about young players and the mistakes young players make and while she would be right, her “leadership” cost her team the game against the Vikings.
Campbell showed growth against Dallas on Sunday, both in the plan of attack he and his staff prepared and in the restraint he showed at the end of the second quarter, when the Lions got the ball deep in their territory.
Instead of being aggressive and calling for passing plays and risking clock stoppage and a quick punt, he called for runs and the Lions ran out the clock, content to go into halftime with a 6-3 lead, knowing they’d get the ball back to start the third.
This was lost in the second-half implosion and turnover extravaganza. So that’s something, right? So is the fact that receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown is running at practice again after leaving Sunday’s game a little wobbly and entering the concussion protocol.
I mean, you’ve got to find the “joy” where you can, right?
If not, well, the cycle of misery seems endless. Hamp could renovate the house again this offseason and take a chance on someone else.
That someone else could draft a quarterback. That quarterback would be a rookie. Rookie quarterbacks, generally, make a lot of mistakes and lose a lot of games and even if Campbell and Holmes are here next year and they’re the ones who took the quarterback, next season looks like another sub-.500 affair.
Hamp understands it’s easy to get carried away like this, to look into the future and see a whole lot of the same. So, she decided to speak Wednesday. To tell her loyal customers that she senses their broken hearts.
“I know this is difficult,” she said.
And?
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“I don’t want to push the panic button and give up the ship because I think we’ve got the right people in place to pull this off,” she said. “And I truly believe that. And I wouldn’t say that if I didn’t believe it.”
There is logic here, I suppose. And though not giving up the ship may only delay the inevitable of this decades-long purgatory, it may not. I mean, one of these days, eh? One of these days she won’t have to seek out the press and tell this region she feels their pain.
At the moment, that’s about all she can do.
Contact Shawn Windsor: 313-222-6487 or swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @shawnwindsor.