They were two plays out of more than 2,500 in the season, but Detroit Lions general manager Bob Quinn shared fans' frustration with seeing his team trot out nine and 10 men on the field during key games late in the season.
"Were they disappointing? Obviously," Quinn said at his end-of-season news conference Monday. "That's something that you kind of shake your head at and you try to figure out."
The Lions had just 10 men on the field when they allowed a goal-line touchdown pass in the first quarter of a Thanksgiving loss to the Minnesota Vikings.
A week later, they had just nine defenders on the field for a key third-and-7 conversion in a 44-20 loss to the Baltimore Ravens. The Lions were down just seven points early in the fourth quarter at the time.
Both former Lions coach Jim Caldwell and defensive coordinator Teryl Austin said they were to blame for the personnel problems.
Caldwell was fired Monday as Lions coach, while Austin interviewed Tuesday for the job.
"When you come in on Monday, you watch the tape, talk to the coaches, see what really happened behind the scenes on those," Quinn said. "Listen, I'm not sitting up here making excuses. It's unacceptable, but it's something that we need to improve on, we need to learn from, it's partly on the players, partly on the coaches. It's something that will get straightened out."
More concerning than those individual plays, Quinn said, were the long stretches of games where they Lions were not competitive against good teams.
The Ravens scored 24 fourth-quarter points to win a rout, the Vikings raced to a 20-3 lead on Thanksgiving, and early in the season the Lions fell behind 45-10 in a blowout loss to the New Orleans Saints.
"I think that's a big part of why I'm standing here today," Quinn said. "I think there's games that we could have, would have and should have won and we didn't. And this is a results business. This is wins and losses. We can talk about all the individual plays, all the individual players, staff, we can talk about all that stuff. It comes down to winning football games and winning championships."
