Like most of us, Lions general manager Bob Quinn had developed a new routine over the last month or so, working from home amid the coronavirus lockdown.
"I got used to waking up, getting some coffee, walking down to my home office and just going to work on the draft," Quinn said Saturday night, after wrapping up a three-day NFL event that was a bit surreal and, at times, sublime, putting a human face on a league that usually hides it behind a shield.
But now?
"Now, it's going to be like, OK, I'm going to wake up and get some coffee, I'm going to come in here," Quinn said on a Zoom video conference call from his makeshift "war room" at home, "and it's going to be, 'All right, what's next?'"
And that's a question for which no one in the NFL has a good answer, at the moment.
"There's film to watch, but I'm not going to be watching a lot of film next week," Quinn said, smiling wearily. "I'm just going to be truthful with you guys: I need a little break from the film for a few days. But I think evaluating what the next steps are, and how we stay ahead of this from a football perspective is important."
So they'll have more phone calls and video conferences to try to do just that. And beginning this week, the Lions' players will, too, reconnecting with head coach Matt Patricia and his reconfigured staff from homes scattered across the country. Four days a week, the veterans will meet for 2-hour online classroom sessions around midday. The rookies will take part in some sort of introductory minicamp online as well in early May, though the details on that � "I've gotten so many memos from the NFL in the last two weeks, you couldn't even imagine," Quinn sighed � aren't yet finalized.
Earlier this month, the NFL and the players' union agreed on a plan for a virtual start to the league's offseason program, one that allowed for three weeks of instruction and workouts held remotely. (Teams also are allowed to send players up to $1,500 of workout equipment since most gyms are closed.) But in order to maintain competitive balance, there won't be any on-field work until the facilities for all 32 teams are allowed to open by state and local officials.
So for the Lions' decision-makers, while the work never ends, the adjustments won't, either. Not anytime soon, anyway.
"What would I normally be doing on Monday to get ready for the next phase of the offseason?" Quinn said. "For me, it would be planning rookie mini-camp. We would bring in a bunch of tryout players, probably 30-40 guys every year. But, obviously, we can't do that."
