A few years back I spoke with a sports psychologist for a piece on the psychology of fanati cism and it really opened my eyes a lot to why Detroit Lions fans and fans of every team are the way they are.
One of the big things I learned about in that piece is coping mechanisms. It's the idea that fans will find any way they can to cope with a loss. That includes inventing reasons for why things happened. For a lot of Lions fans, they chose to rightly blame the coaches, but they chose to blame them for the wrong reasons.
I won't touch too much on the breakneck speed in which some fans turned on their coordinators and suddenly act like they were the problem and they were happy they were leaving, but the idea that coaching interviews were the reason they weren't prepared is just not what happened.
The Lions maneuvered around the interview process incredibly well. Probably better than most teams. After the Lions beat the Vikings in Week 18 and got their bye week set up, they had a couple of walkthrough practices and then gave coaches and players Wild Card weekend off.
It was during that time that both Ben Johnson and Aaron Glenn conducted all of their interviews. In fact, they got all of them done before they even knew who their Divisional opponent would be. The Commanders vs Buccaneers game was the final game of the Sunday night stretch before the Lions came back the next day.
Then the Lions came back on Monday and began their prep and were not interrupted by interviews at all during the week. In fact the only people who did bring it up were in the media. That's it.
I'm fully with Lions fans on the idea that this was a poorly coached game and that the coordinators did not draw up a good game plan, but being unprepared because of coaching interviews is just not what happened here.
