Bill Parcells coined a saying that’s become a familiar part of the football lexicon when he said that “you are what your record says you are” during his coaching career.
The record says that the Lions aren’t a good football team this year. They fell to 3-9-1 by extending their losing streak to six games in a 20-7 loss to the Vikings on Sunday.
After the game, though, head coach Matt Patricia offered an alternative view to the one that Parcells espoused many years ago.
“The hard thing for us, what I appreciate about this team is we don’t look at our record and say, ‘This is what we are,’” Patricia said, via Chris Burke of TheAthletic.com. “I think we look at our record and say, ‘That’s not what we are,’ and we gotta do better and try to figure out how to get the record to match up with what we are. I think that’s where we’re struggling right now.”
It makes sense that Patricia would be trying to sell the notion of progress that hasn’t shown up on the scoreboard at this point and playing without Matthew Stafford has done them no favors, but the NFL is a results-oriented world and the Lions’ results under Patricia the last two years with Stafford have not been good enough to sell the idea that a breakthrough is right around the corner.