Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Marinelli's Defining Moment Yet To Come

For some NFL coaches, defining moments are Vince Lombardi being carried off the field by Jerry Kramer and his Packers teammates after winning the first Super Bowl; Hank Stram prowling the sidelines with his rolled-up program, giving NFL Films one great sound bite after another; Bill Parcells being the first recipient of the Gatorade shower; Dick Vermeil tearfully (fill in the blank), but always about a positive thing.

In Detroit, the men who have held the title of head football coach have no such defining moments. Around here the moments are defining, but what they define can be found in a dictionary authored by Dr. Seuss.

There was Harry Gilmer, who fled his last game at Tiger Stadium as he was being pelted by snowballs. He gave that defining moment a postscript when he said, "At least they [the snowballs] didn't have rocks in them."

There was Joe Schmidt, whose defining moment was quitting the Lions when a power play he tried failed. But he was here long enough to coin the term "The Ziggy" -- that distinctively Detroit word for a coach getting fired.

There was Rick Forzano, who was the coach in 1975 when he lost both of his quarterbacks -- Bill Munson and Greg Landry -- to injury in the same game at Houston. That's one way to end a QB controversy.

There was Monte Clark, whose defining moment was standing in front of the football pallbearers in Los Angeles after a loss and saying sardonically, "See you at the cemetery."

There was Darryl Rogers, pigeon counter extraordinaire who will live here in infamy for, "What does a guy have to do to get fired around here?"

Bobby Ross said "I don't coach that stuff!" Marty Mornhinweg told us "The bar is high." Gary Moeller called his veterans "upper classmen" and his younger players "freshmen and sophomores."

Steve Mariucci's moment was the day he was introduced as head coach and looked around him at the ridiculously high-faluten press conference/made-for-TV theatre event and said, simply, "Wow." It was all downhill from there.

So now it's 2006 and we have Rod Marinelli, who says things like:

"I'm supposed to sit in a meeting? I do it. Am I looking forward to going to Detroit? Yes, I am."

And:

"I'm going through this friggin' tunnel, and I'm not looking anywhere else. I've got these little bumps off to the side that I've got to take? I'll do that. But my tunnel is where I want to go."

And, for you Wing Nuts:

"I'm not here to go to hockey games. You didn't bring me here to do that. I'm here to go that way."

"That way", by the way, is to go forward.

We don't know what Marinelli's defining moment will be in Detroit. But he already is on a straighter path than some of the snake oil salesmen posing as football coaches who'd have us believe their malarkey.

Marinelli is, according to pass rushing monster Simeon Rice, who was coached by Marinelli in Tampa Bay, "The best coach in the NFL. I don't mean defensive line coach. I don't mean position coach. I mean he's the best coach, period."

Maybe that's Rod Marinelli's defining moment until they start playing the games, for nothing remotely that glowing has been uttered about any man about to take the helm in Detroit when it comes to football.

Marinelli, according to a story in today's Detroit Free Press, is too wrapped up in his new job to look for a house or go to Red Wings games or to care much about a group photo he was in that was taken at the league meetings in Orlando. The photograph was of all the current NFL head coaches. It is appropriate that they were captured in a snapshot, because there are a lot of new ones, and who knows how long many of them will survive?

"I just put it over here. I don't pay it more attention than it needs," Marinelli said about the group shot.

Maybe Rod Marinelli's defining moment as Lions head coach will be to win a Super Bowl. Or a conference championship. Or a playoff game, period.

Or maybe the moment will be to have a winning record in a single season. At this point, that might qualify.

But there are no games to play yet. There hasn't even been a draft to pick apart -- no player selections that will be the next potential qualifier for Marinelli's defining moment. There have been no mini-camps. Certainly no training camp, either. Supposedly that will be boot camp compared to what Mariucci served up in July. We'll see.

It's all still pretty much unknown about Rod Marinelli. For now there is only no-nonsense talk and a coach-engineered divorce with QB Joey Harrington. That is enough, of course, to keep the denizens around town talking about football. Imagine how much we'd talk about it if the Lions had a season in which their wins outnumbered their losses, for starters.

Football in March, when the coach is new, means you take what you can get.

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