Thick glasses and a bow tie don’t exactly exude toughness, so when Nick Fairley showed up to the NFL draft looking like a nerd out of central casting, some folks did a double take.
One of those folks was Lions coach Jim Schwartz -- but he didn’t see what Fairley was wearing until Detroit already made Fairley its first-round draft pick.
“First, if we had seen what he was wearing . . . with those glasses, we might have passed on him at 13,” Schwartz said. “I got more texts yesterday after we picked him that said, ‘Why did you pick that big guy that looks like Urkel?'"
Of course, Schwartz also noted that when you’re a 300-pound wrecking machine of a defensive lineman, people are usually not going to call you a nerd to your face.
“Well, none of those people are here, and I think if they were here, none of them would say the same thing, and I know no quarterbacks said that last year,” Schwartz said.
For Lions fans, there’s a sense of excitement about the prospect of pairing Fairley and Ndamukong Suh -- enough excitement that no one really cares that Fairley dresses like Urkel. It beats the way things worked during the Matt Millen era, when the Lions drafted guys who played like Urkel.