Lions owner Martha Firestone Ford is 93 years old. So it stands to reason she’s not here for a long rebuilding project.
But Lions president Rod Wood said that she’s much different than her late husband, who had a reputation for hanging on too long to bad hires.
“I think Mrs. Ford is a very different owner than her husband and has a lot less patience and a lot less tolerance for mediocrity, which is why we’ve made some of the changes that we’ve made,” Wood said, via Fox 17. “Certainly when I was hired and we had the opening for a General Manager, I wanted to go to an organization and hire somebody who was used to winning and had come from an organization that doesn’t know anything other than winning. That’s why we landed on Bob Quinn. And then after we decided to make a change with the head coach, we kind of went back and looked for the same kind of opportunity to add a coach who doesn’t expect anything less than competing for the Super Bowl every year.”
Since William Clay Ford bought the team in 1963, the Lions have won one playoff game. Since Martha Firestone Ford took over the team upon her husband’s death in 2014, she has been willing to move more swiftly, firing president Tom Lewand and G.M. Martin Mayhew during a 1-7 start to the 2015 season.
They were then willing to get rid of Jim Caldwell for going 9-7 too often (twice in four years, with just one losing season), and replacement Matt Patricia went 6-10 in his first year in charge.
So if the matriarch isn’t interested in a long process and they start slowly, things could get interesting for Patricia, and Quinn, and Wood, and everyone else involved.