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Eli Lucero/Associated Press

Matt Patricia has accomplished so much in so little time as the Lions head coach.

His roster is now so stacked with ex-Patriots—Trey Flowers, Duron Harmon, Danny Shelton, Jamie Collins, Danny Amendola—that it's practically a parody. The rest of the roster is a hodgepodge, but it's his hodgepodge, with very few holdovers from the Jim Caldwell regime.

The problem, Patricia must realize as he now takes stock of it all (replacing the work pencil behind his ear with his contemplation pencil), is that he's now very short of the one commodity a mediocre head coach cannot afford to be without: an excuse for when everything goes wrong again.

There's probably only one viable excuse left: Matthew Stafford, the expensive franchise quarterback coming off an injury. Stafford, with over a decade's worth of failures clinging to him, is still the face of the franchise's futility—and, to Patricia, he is inevitably the lone reason the Lions are not transforming very literally into the 2016 Patriots.

But Patricia cannot pin the Lions' failures on Stafford without providing an alternative. That's where Jordan Love comes in.

Love is bootleg-brand Patrick Mahomes: talented enough to make fans eager to see what he can do but raw enough to not be perceived as an immediate threat to Stafford. And his long development curve could buy Patricia two or three seasons, if he plays it right. Perhaps by then, his veterans will have transformed the team culture through their pure Patriots-ness. Assuming a few of them have not retired by then.

If the Lions don't select Love, some team will by this point in the draft. And if Patricia does pursue a quarterback of the future, it probably won't be for nefarious reasons. These mock draft segments are meant to be in good fun. NFL head coaches don't really consciously think in terms of making excuses for their failures instead of trying to build toward success.

But if they did, some of their decisions would make much more sense.