The New Detroit Lions Coaches You Should Know, but Don't

Then again, it's not every day an 0-16 team with enough holes to make a sieve obsolete drafts a tight end with the 20th overall pick.

Because of the questionable first-round selection of Oklahoma State tight end Brandon Pettigrew, there will be additional scrutiny if he does not tap into his seemingly limitless potential.If anything, Pettigrew will need to exceed expectations to justify the selection and that responsibility will fall on Lappano's shoulders.

Lappano brings a good deal of coaching experience, but like Walton, most of it is in college. He has coached running backs, wide receivers, and quarterbacks in his career, which dates back to 1982.

He has held a number of offensive coordinator positions as well, but he has never been a tight ends or offensive line coach. He does, however, bring some NFL experience, as he was the running backs coach for the Seattle Seahawks in 1998 and the San Francisco 49ers in 2003 and 2004.

Though it always sets off alarm bells when a coach is placed in charge of a position he's never coached, it is reasonable to assume that after 27 years of coaching various offensive positions, Lappano has picked up a couple of things about tight ends.

Pettigrew's performance this season will show how much that assumption is worth.

Though there is no coaching position without at least some pressure, the man with the biggest task this season outside the big three of Schwartz, Cunningham, and Linehan will be quarterbacks coach Jeff Horton.

Horton has only three years of NFL coaching experience, all of them as a special assistant to Linehan in St. Louis, but his college coaching career stretches back to 1984.

Seven of those years were spent as the quarterbacks coach at Wisconsin, and even though the highest profile quarterback on his coaching resume is Brooks Bollinger, his work at Wisconsin was sufficient to get him pulled to the NFL.

The quarterbacks Horton coached at Wisconsin currently rank second (John Stocco), third (Bollinger), sixth (Jim Sorgi), and 10th (Tyler Donovan) on Wisconsin's career passing totals list.

Now, in his first year as a quarterbacks coach in the NFL, he has what can only be described as a ragtag group to work with.

Daunte Culpepper is a former great, but a current reclamation project.

Drew Stanton has had as many quarterbacks coaches as he has had NFL seasons, and has had his mechanics tweaked so many times, those coaches may as well have been Xzibit.

Matthew Stafford is an outstanding talent, but he is also the most unpopular first overall draft pick since Mario Williams.

Horton will ultimately be remembered in Detroit for Stafford's development. If Stafford becomes a franchise quarterback, Horton will start entertaining NFL offensive coordinator offers. If Stafford flops, he'll be back to an offensive assistant somewhere, or perhaps back to the college game.

In other words, where Horton's career goes from here depends on where Stafford's career goes from here.

Of course, something similar can be said of most positional coaches, though I'm not sure it's on the same level as the quarterbacks coach. What I am sure of is that these coaches, and all of the Lions coaches this year, have an unprecedented task ahead of them.

Lions fans are going to ask the team to, quite literally, make something out of nothing in the win column. That process starts with good coaching.

The Lions' coaching staff is full of guys getting first, second and last chances, and all of them have something to prove, but will the Lions actually get solid coaching from this group?

Ask me again in December.

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