Matt Patricia should be his own man, fire Lions OC Jim Bob Cooter

Be your own man, Matt Patricia.

Make your own decisions. Hire your own staff. Your successes and your failures should be yours and yours alone.

Be your own man and fire offensive coordinator Jim Bob Cooter.

If the Detroit Lions hire you, as expected, to be their next head coach, the job should come with no strings attached. You should not feel any pressure to keep any player’s favorite coach around. In fact, you should insist on this because it sets a bad precedent.

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Patricia is, by all accounts, one New England Patriots loss away from taking the helm of the Titanic … I mean the U.S.S. Allen Park, otherwise known as Detroit’s beanbag NFL entry that has exactly one playoff win since the Eisenhower administration.

If the Patriots lose to the Jacksonville Jaguars in Sunday’s AFC championship game — (I can’t believe I just wrote that) — Patricia could be named the Lions’ coach Monday. The biggest question about Patricia’s hiring revolves around Cooter and whether Patricia would keep him. The league-wide perception is that he would keep Cooter.

There are only two reasons why Patricia would choose to keep Cooter on his staff, and they’re both terrible.

The first and most likely is that Patricia would be pressured to by general manager Bob Quinn or quarterback Matthew Stafford to retain Cooter.

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Their arguments would be that they don’t want to disrupt the steady progress the offense has made in 2 ½ years under Cooter.

The second reason would be that Patricia lacks the confidence to pick his own offensive coordinator. Think about that for a second. As clueless as Rod Marinelli often was, even he made his own choice his first year as a head coach in 2006 and hired Mike Martz.

And do you really believe Patricia wouldn’t have his own ideas about which offensive coordinator he wants to hire? All he does is have ideas.

Patricia has an aeronautical engineering degree, and probably sleeps with that pencil in his ear when he even has time to sleep (because apparently he’s too busy thinking about football to sleep more than a couple hours a night).

Do you really believe Marinelli is smarter than Patricia? (I can’t believe I just wrote that.) Patricia probably has posters of offensive coordinators pinned up in his bedroom the same way teenage boys have posters of Lamborghinis in their rooms.

Before anyone starts mounting a defense for keeping Cooter, let me say this: I couldn’t care less about stats or trends or signs that point to steady progress or any other theoretical nonsense about reasons for keeping him. If Cooter was the second coming of Don Coryell, that would be one thing. But how amazing can Cooter be if he hasn’t had a single interview with another team since Jim Caldwell was fired?

Patricia shouldn’t keep Cooter for one simple reason: Urgency.

The Lions have a chance to win now. They’re an average team. A few more players here, a little better health there, sprinkle in some luck, and you have a team that can make the playoffs and even win a playoff game (I really can’t believe I just wrote that).

But if the Lions don’t win right away and especially if the offense doesn’t catch fire in the next year or two, then Patricia has a ready-made scapegoat for the team’s struggles. He can fire Cooter and hit the reset button — along with Quinn and Stafford.

In the NFL, two years is an eternity. Quinn bought himself two years by not firing Caldwell after the 2015 season. Now he might be offering Patricia the same deal: Keep Cooter, keep Stafford happy and keep your job safe for at least two years.

Stafford openly lobbied for Cooter and if you don’t think it’s a problem he meddled with the hiring decision, I can tell you this: You don’t want the Lions to win; you want Matthew Stafford and the Lions to win.

Here’s the problem with that. Quarterbacks are overrated. They are important but they are overrated. Don’t believe me? Take a look at which QBs are playing in the conference title games: Case Keenum (an undrafted backup to a backup), Nick Foles (a third-round backup), Tom Brady (a sixth-round backup before he became the Hall of Famer everyone knew he would be) and our star of the show, Blake Bortles (a first-rounder who passed for 87 yards in the wild-card game).

Stafford hasn’t earned the right to wield decision-making power. He’s little more than an above-average quarterback. The only thing he’s earned is a reputation for having a strong arm, throwing for 5,000 yards and getting really good at playing the role of the hero, franchise QB who helps the Lions sell lots of No. 9 jerseys.

I won’t pretend to know the machinations behind all the offensive coordinators Patricia could hire. But I can tell you one intriguing candidate is Todd Haley, who guided the Pittsburgh Steelers’ offense to no worse than a seventh-place ranking the past four years. Haley is the antithesis of a player’s coach and was even considered abrasive — but his team performed. Do you want happy players or do you want productive players? Do you want a happy QB who is 0-3 in the playoffs or do you want a QB who’s a little upset but plays for a conference title?

I’m not saying Haley is the answer. What I am saying is that Patricia, or any head coach the Lions hire, should offer his own answer without any suggestions or pressure or meddling by anyone in the organization.

Be your own man, Matt Patricia.

Contact Carlos Monarrez: cmonarrez@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @cmonarrez. Download our free Lions Xtra app on your Apple and Android devices.



