On the final day of offseason workouts, plenty of teams have mimicked the Man who made this marble on which mankind meanders.
There will be no similar rest for the Lions.
Coach Jim Schwartz opted against substituting the final day of minicamp practice with an outing.
“We had no sporting clays today or no amusement parks or water parks,” Schwartz said Thursday, according to Dave Birkett of the Detroit Free Press. “Work day of minicamp.”
The Lions had a charity fishing tournament earlier in the week, but they scrapped no practices along the way.
“We take a lot of pride in the fact that we play for a blue-collar town and we try to reflect that kind of work ethic, and we have very few opportunities to practice this off-season,” Schwartz said. “Ten OTAs, one minicamp and we talked in the beginning, every one was crucial and couldn’t afford to waste any of them. And that’s our point as a team.”
Schwartz, who has an economics degree from Georgetown, is smart enough to crunch the numbers. Teams now have more limited opportunities to prepare for the regular season. So why give up one of the relatively scarce days of practice as the players move toward a five-to-six-week break before the start of training camp?
Maybe Schwartz would have been inclined to give the players a break, if a handful of them hadn’t made all of them look bad with a rash of off-field situations. Regardless, Schwartz chose to treat his professional football players as professionals, expecting them to work hard before they spend the next month-and-a-half playing hard.
But, hopefully, not too hard.