After the Detroit Lions had their season end with four straight losses to playoff teams and a blowout in Seattle in the wild-card round, general manager Bob Quinn and head coach Jim Caldwell both made one thing pretty clear.

They felt the Lions were a long way from the Super Bowl.

Many of Lions GM Bob Quinn's biggest hires came from New England, including his Chief of Staff, Kevin Anderson, and his right-hand man, Kyle O’Brien. AP Photo/Carlos Osorio

On the surface, that’s true. Detroit has a bunch of needs -- from high-end playmakers to continuing to strengthen the team’s depth. But there is reason for hope if you’re the Lions. All you need to do is look to Houston and the Super Bowl.

Super Bowl LI, featuring New England and Atlanta, features front offices that come from the same general philosophy. Both organizations are a testament to how successful things can be for franchises that come from the New England mold. The Patriots, of course, are the standard-bearer led by Bill Belichick and a specific system of evaluation and scouting set up by Belichick and learned from Bill Parcells.

But the tree Belichick has spawned around the NFL hasn’t always been successful. The Falcons, this season, have proven that the basis of what New England does can work even without Belichick running things. In Atlanta, the two main decision-makers are Belichick disciples: general manager Thomas Dimitroff and Scott Pioli.

Both spent significant portions of their careers learning under Belichick before starting off on their own, much like Lions general manager Bob Quinn. The connections run deeper, too. Pioli was part of the reason Quinn landed with the Patriots as an intern out of the University of Connecticut. Quinn worked under all three people at various points during his decade-plus in New England.

This Super Bowl has shown that even those who leave Belichick and build on their own can have success using similar tenets.

If one thing has been made clear during Quinn’s first year in Detroit, it's that a lot of things will have some structure from the Patriots. Many of Quinn’s biggest hires came from the New England structure, including his Chief of Staff, Kevin Anderson, and his right-hand man, Kyle O’Brien. The team’s strength coach, Harold Nash, came from the Patriots. And Quinn has also brought lower-level scouts from New England, too.

A lot of his scouting and player personnel philosophy comes from New England, with wrinkles of his own that will only increase as he continues to become more comfortable running an NFL franchise.

"The grading scale is very similar to what we had in New England," Quinn told ESPN last year. "I made a few tweaks here and there based on things that I’ve talked through here with my staff and how we’re trying to construct this team, but the general scale and how you look at players is pretty much the same."

He spent this past season revamping how the Lions evaluated prospects. A lot of that came from Quinn’s time with Belichick -- a mentor he still talks to and bounces things off of regularly.

But one of the lessons Quinn learned from seeing others leave New England and not have the success the Patriots -- or Falcons -- have had is to not try to be Belichick or emulate everything the Patriots do in a new place.

Each franchise has its own philosophies and nuances. So attempting to completely remake a franchise into New England West or Patriot Way South is likely to result in failure. Dimitroff, who has a lot of Patriots influences but also has done enough on his own, is a good example. And for Quinn, that’s a good way to model what he’s doing in the future.

"I want to take most things and make them mine, but over time, things will be similar," Quinn told ESPN before the 2016 season. "I think people that have worked for seven months with me know that there have been a lot of changes here, and we’re trying to do them for a reason, because the way that I’ve known they can be successful with some tweaks here and there based on what we’re dealing with in terms of the building, the team, the coaching staff, the personnel staff, trying to mesh that all together."

Many of those changes came because of the things he learned from Belichick, Dimitroff and Pioli. Quinn understands he needs to do things his own way, but the experiences he had with the three men leading their franchises to the Super Bowl helped shape him.

And that can only be a good thing for a franchise trying to become a consistent playoff team with aspirations of reaching the Super Bowl for the first time.