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If Lions head coach Matt Patricia was looking to send a message by firing someone, it appears that special teams coach Joe Marciano was it.

Because while the Lions offense has been as much of a concern as the kicking game this year, offensive coordinator Jim Bob Cooter is still receiving praise from his boss — and paychecks from the Lions.

“He’s done a really good job for us here this year,” Patricia said, via Carlos Monarrez of the Detroit Free Press. “And we’re certainly always looking to try to get better, which obviously when you come out of week where we don’t perform well enough on Sunday it’s easy to kind of look at all of that. We do a good job of kind of self-assessing and moving forward getting ready for Chicago.

“I think Jim Bob has done a great job here with the offense for a long time and he continues to do that. We’ll just get better every week. I think offensively, defensively, special teams, it’s just a situation right now where we have to try to do obviously better than what we did last week and get going and start the second half of season off here the right way.”

That’s well short of a declaration of job security, and there are plenty of reasons to suspect changes on offense could be next.

The Lions ranked 13th in the league in total offense last year, and averaged 25.6 points per game. This year, they’re 21st in total offense and scoring 22.5 per game.

Cooter was plain-spoken when asked about the job he’s done this year.

“About 3-5,” he said. “Kind of like a wise, old coach once said, ‘You are what your record says you are.’ So need to improve, need to keep getting better. That’s part of our weekly process. I expect to help our team win at a higher level offensively.”

Cooter wasn’t going to speculate about his own job security, but it’s reasonable to wonder about plenty of jobs there, as they’ve performed well short of expectations.