goingon

Lions fire Patricia and Quinn
Monday, November 30, 2020

(ALLEN PARK, MI) – The Detroit Lions fired head coach Matt Patricia and general manager Bob Quinn on Saturday after two straight seasons under .500 and a third season where the team was again under .500 at midseason. Patricia's record was 13-29-1 since taking over as the Lions coach in 2018. Quinn had been the team's GM since 2016, and the Lions were 31-43-1 during his tenure. Owner Sheila Ford Hamp says this was a hard decision because they are both terrific people and worked very hard and tirelessly for this organization. Hamp says it just clearly wasn't working and it wasn't what we had hoped for when we hired them. Lions offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell will be the team's interim head coach. A combination of front-office executives Kyle O'Brien, Mike Disner, Rob Lohman and Lance Newmark will handle general manager duties for the rest of the season and will report to team president Rod Wood. Bevell, along with Hamp and Wood, addressed the team and staff in a video call Saturday to discuss the decision. Hamp said some players spoke in the meeting as well. Hamp said the team's back-to-back losses to Carolina and Houston, where the team was blown out despite having chances to still be in the playoff hunt, weighed into her final decision to dismiss both Quinn and Patricia. Hamp said she and Wood are going to conduct a comprehensive search for general manager and head-coaching candidates and no decision has been made whether they would have a traditional GM-head coach structure or something different. When Quinn made the decision to fire former coach Jim Caldwell after the 2017 season following back-to-back 9-7 records and then hired Patricia, one of his former New England Patriots counterparts, it tied the two of them together in success or failure. Soon after Patricia was hired, Quinn was given a matching time-frame contract going through the 2022 season.

MORE HEADLINES