Playing Hard-To-Get Pays Off For Martz

Back in the late 1960's, the Pistons were coached by Donnis Butcher, who was only a season removed from being a player himself. To assist him, the team hired Paul Seymour, a crewcut-haired, ex-military guy who had been a head coach for several seasons elsewhere in the NBA. There were whispers that the hiring of Seymour would somehow either undermine Butcher, or make the rookie coach nervous, having an experienced head coach sitting beside him. A ready-to-hire replacement, in other words, if the team stumbled. And Seymour himself didn't help matters when he spoke to the press after his hiring.

"What can I tell you? I guess you could say I am more or less the Pistons' ace in the hole," Seymour said. Somewhere, Donnis Butcher must have felt like passing a basketball -- through his colon.

The Pistons did their predicted stumbling, and Butcher was fired, replaced by the more experienced Seymour. But when that season ended, in 1969, Seymour had already had his fill of the Detroit Pistons and returned to his liquor business out east, presumably to consume some of the inventory.

Fast forward to today, where the Lions have a similar situation, but in reverse (Rod Marinelli is the ex-military guy this time, not his assistant), if you listen to the doomsayers -- like talk radio hosts and Internet writers and other such riffraff, bloggers included.

The Lions have hired Mike Martz as their new offensive coordinator, for those living under a rock or who actually have lives and don't follow the goings on of a perennial loser during the tundra of February. Martz's hard-to-get act worked to perfection. The Lions chased him like a smitten schoolboy does the cute redheaded girl at recess and during lunchtime. They did it all, it seemed, except pick a bouquet of daisies and hand it to him with a box of chocolates and flush red faces. Fitting the hiring came around Valentine's Day.


Martz hopes to bring smiles to the faces of Lions' fans
with his vertical passing game


"Please be mine," the Lions told Mike Martz last week, the Super Bowl hype in full swing.

"Not yet," he told them, dropping his handkerchief on the ground and walking away, apparently over money.

Well, the Lions picked up the hanky, went back to their books, and maybe they 86'd the team banquet or shifted money from petty cash into their rainy day account, because despite professing to having a Plan B (B for bogus), they called on Martz again, this time with more money -- and the hanky, daisies and chocolate, of course.

"NOW will you be mine?," they asked the man everyone wants to call an "offensive guru."

"Oh, alright," Martz said. "I'll be yours."

Mike Martz is the Lions' employee today, but we don't know for how long or with how much success. The official introduction hasn't even occurred yet, and already there are whispers that Martz is merely using this gig as a springboard to another head coaching job -- which could come as early as 2007. That gives Martz one season to take the Lions' offense from the dregs of the league to somewhere near respectable.

Guru, indeed.

And, the naysayers proclaim, what about Martz and his strong personality? How will he coexist, in a coordinator's role, with head coach Marinelli? Actually, this argument has slight merit. Friction between a head coach and a coordinator has precedent. Perhaps most famous of these poor relationships was the venom that defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan spewed toward head coach Mike Ditka with the Bears. It was a nasty little maelstrom. But the 1985 Bears won the Super Bowl, didn't they?

And Buddy Ryan fled immediately to Philadelphia, to build his own football empire.

So if Rod Marinelli, who maintains he doesn't want "yes" men surrounding him, has his hands full with Martz, then so be it. Martz, after all, didn't come looking for the Lions. We'll just hope that professionalism will win out and all this drivel about coexistence difficulties is much ado about nothing.

It would be folly to think that Mike Martz would not like to, once again someday, be a head coach in the NFL. And the Detroit Lions, for all of their warts, couldn't possibly be dismissing the possibility that Martz could crack his contract in half and run the show in some other NFL city. But it is a chance they obviously are willing to take, and I am with them. When you have an opportunity to hire someone with Martz's resume and success to run your moribund offense, you do it. Frankly, it's unlikely Martz will leave after just one season anyway, though it's possible. Regardless, I have said since the middle of October that the Lions, once they bid adieu to Steve Mariucci and his popgun offense, should go looking for someone who will make the team fun to watch again. I had said that person should be the head coach, but this is the next best thing. Maybe it's even better, knowing that the Lions have a head coach who understands the critical state of his team's offense enough to go looking for someone of Mike Martz's stature.

The pursuit of Martz did make the Lions look a tad desperate and starstruck, but that will be long forgotten once training camp begins, or maybe even when the draft rolls around in April. What will matter most is what happens on the field, a field that Martz will most likely try to stretch with a vertical passing game, not the horizontal stuff the Lions have been adhering to under Mariucci's Just Toast offense.

So is Mike Martz the Lions' "ace in the hole"?

Well, the team always did have trouble getting 21.