Dave Birkett

Detroit Free Press

Bob Quinn will have a decision to make on Jim Caldwell's future after the season, but the first-year Detroit Lions general manager said he won't make a decision about his coach solely on whether the team qualifies for the playoffs.

"There is no mandate of number of wins and there is no mandate of playoffs," Quinn told the Free Press in an interview this week.

Quinn made the somewhat unusual decision to keep Caldwell after he was hired as GM in January, when the two spent a dozen hours getting to know each other over the span of several days.

Caldwell, who had no previous relationship with Quinn, led the Lions to a surprising 11-5 record and playoff berth in his first season as coach in 2014, but the team slumped to 7-9 under his watch last year.

They started the season with seven losses in their first eight games, then rebounded to go 6-2 down the stretch and finish in third place in the NFC North.

GM Martin Mayhew and president Tom Lewand were fired midseason, and Quinn was brought in to overhaul the roster and build a winning culture in a franchise that has had only one playoff victory in the Super Bowl era.

Quinn said he and Caldwell are long "past the feeling-out process" and are now in the state of trying to make the Lions a perennial winner.

"We’re at the point in time where I’m in Jim’s office probably four to five times a day during training camp," Quinn said. "He’s probably coming down to my office once or twice. And we always talk, probably, at the beginning of practice."

Despite that relationship, Quinn acknowledged that he’ll review the head coaching position after the season.

Caldwell, who said Thursday that he’s “gotten along extremely well” with Quinn so far, has one year left on the four-year contract he signed in January of 2014.

“It’s my feel for, like, his coaching style. The decisions he makes for the team. The way he handles the staff and just how competitive a football team we are,” Quinn said. “Jim’s a great man, he’s a great coach, he has great presence with the team. He has unbelievable presence in front of the team, and I know that the players are going to play hard for him. Like, I can see that, already seven months in, that we’re not going to have an issue with guys loafing around on the field. Like, I can’t imagine that would happen this season.

“So listen, it’s a combination of wins-losses, decision making. How’s he handle the team? How does he handle adversity? Got players go down, I’m trying to shuffle guys in. Can we get those guys up to speed and get them ready to play? It all goes into it; it’s not just one thing.”

Caldwell said at a news conference before the start of training camp last week that a realistic expectation for the Lions this year is “to be better” as a team.

“There’s a lot of things we have to work through, but I believe this is going to be a good football team,” he said.

Quinn, who won four Super Bowls in various front office positions with the New England Patriots over the last 16 seasons, likewise cited “improvement” as his expectation for the year.

“I want to see an improved product on the field from last year -- last year ended well, but the beginning wasn’t very good,” Quinn said. “So when I look at last season from afar and then when I got here and learned about each game and watched all the tape of everything, I got to take the 2015 season as a whole. I can’t just look at the last good part of the season.

“I think the roster has improved, in my opinion. I think Jim would say the same thing. Is it where we want to have it right now? No. It’s still kind of a work in progress. So my expectations are to be a competitive team that battles hard.”

Though Quinn was given complete control of football operations when the Lions hired him in January, he’s involved Caldwell and his staff heavily in the scouting process and said this week that “Jim and I are in this together.”

“Yeah, I decided to keep Jim, but we’re in this together and we have to improve,” Quinn said. “That’s the bottom line. We were (7-9), they were (7-9) last year. Improvement is what everyone strives for. Now is that equated to wins and losses? It’s hard to say. It’s hard to say because of injuries. Things happen during the course of the season.”

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Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter@davebirkett

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