Lions teammates unsure of Ndamukong Suh's future

Safety Glover Quin stood in the Detroit Lions locker room, shot a quick glance across the room at the empty lockers of Ndamukong Suh and the defensive line.

Quin smiled like a kid with a secret.

"They'll be back," he said."

Reporters asked "he" or "they?"

"They," Quin said. "They'll be back."

Including Suh, who wears No. 90?

"If I was talking about 90," Quin said, "I'd have said, 'he.' I said 'they.' "

Then Quin had a little more fun with reporters, when someone asked Quin if he had spent time this season recruiting Suh, this year's most-coveted free agent in the NFL, to stay with the Lions.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Quin answered, affecting the fast-pace parlance of a crooked college recruiter. "I've been recruiting him back since all year. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I went and talked to him and told him, you know what I'm saying, that we could work some things out. You know what I'm saying? As long as he just makes up on the back end we'll be all good."

The truth is no one really knows what the future holds for Suh — and that might include Suh and the Lions — and the team's vaunted defensive line, which has six players scheduled to become unrestricted free agents.

"I mean, I don't know," Quin said quietly. "That's not my decision. I would love for them to be back. I hope they'll be back. But I have no control over that, so we'll see what happens."

As if Suh weren't already an enigmatic and fascinating figure already, he went out with bang — and a whimper — when he cried on the podium after the Lions' wild-card playoff loss Sunday at Dallas. It was the sob heard around the NFL, launching countless theories from armchair psychologists.

"I just know what kind of work he put in throughout the whole season, off-season," defensive tackle Nick Fairley said. "And I know how he feels. You bust your butt each and every day when you come in here and the results are not the results that you want, of course you're going to feel emotional. I did, too. It felt like a ton of rocks just hit you when you don't get the results you want."

The most common question about Suh's crying was what moved him to finally show emotion for the first time in five seasons in front of reporters? He had lost a playoff game before. He had talked to reporters after being ejected and had not cried.

Suh's tearful address certainly looked and felt like a soulful valediction.

But Fairley, the man who has played by Suh's side for the past four seasons and learned to anticipate the rhythms and tendencies of a man few people seem to know well, said it did not feel like Suh was necessarily saying good-bye.

"I would say no because I would think he got emotional because — this is just my opinion — you know, like, basically growing up you knew everything that was going to happen up until now," Fairley said. "Like, you don't know what's going to happen next year.

"When you was in high school, you knew you was going to college. You knew what college you was going to go to because you chose the college. After college, you know you was going to the NFL because you got into the draft. You didn't know where you was going, but you knew you was going to the NFL.

"Now, you don't know what team's going to be with you, what city it's going to be in. So it's kind of like, 'Wow, I don't know what's going to happen.' So I think that's where it's coming from."

So, no one knows anything, other than this: It will cost one team a lot of money to have Suh where its jersey next year. Whether it's a franchise tag and a $36-million cap charge for the Lions or a $100-million contract with another team, it will cost a lot.

Fairley doesn't want to see Suh leave. But he also wants Suh to get every penny he's worth, whether it comes from the Lions or whether it comes while he's feted during a whirlwind free-agency tour around the NFL.

"I'll tell you, Ndamukong deserves everything that he gets," Fairley said. "For the four years that I've been with him, I've never seen him complain, I've never seen him fuss or just get down. During the games like he'd just come to the sidelines picking guys up. He's a great leader. I want to see him do great and he deserves everything he gets."

Contact Carlos Monarrez: cmonarrez@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @cmonarrez.