Lions' New Head Coach Jim Schwartz: "Moneyball" Can't Save Detroit

In leading the 2008 Detroit Lions to a winless season, Rod Marinelli pulled a “reverse-Lou Brown.” You’ll remember Lou from Major League as the guy called on to manage the Cleveland Indians into the tank so that the owner could move the team to Florida. To inspire his team to victory, Lou had a cardboard cutout of Indians’ owner and former Las Vegas showgirl Rachel Phelps, and removed a piece of clothing every time the team won.

Considering the improbable nature of the Lions’ historic flop, I have to wonder if Marinelli threatened to take a piece of clothing off of a cutout of Lions owner William Clay Ford, Sr., every time the team won. I’m just spit-balling here, but maybe this was part of a larger plan to move the team to Los Angeles, far away from the urban decay and irreparably-screwed Detroit economy. Considering the rest of the economy collapsed as well, the Fords probably sensed it was time for Plan B.

When you go 0-16, anything you do to right the ship is necessarily an improvement.  Getting rid of Marinelli was a given. Detroit brought in former Titans defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz to coach the team, which is a confusing choice on many levels. Schwartz led the Titans’ defense from 2001-08, and consistency was not exactly the hallmark of Tennessee’s defense during that period. In Schwartz’s time with the team, they finished as high as fifth overall and as low as dead last. The only trend you could follow was during the last two years, when the Titans finished fifth and seventh. That doesn’t scream “riser” to me. Of course, Tennessee had salary cap issues during part of Schwartz’s tenure, but that’s not an excuse.

Schwartz was a hot name back in 2005, when he interviewed for head coaching jobs in Washington, Miami, and Atlanta, but he didn’t have any more interviews until he was hired by Detroit. In a league that’s always looking for a fresh face, Schwartz’s “sell by” date seems long past.

The weirdest knock on Schwartz is that he’s a “stats guy,” which in NFL-speak is akin to saying he throws like a girl. A New York Times article dubbed him the “Billy Bean of the NFL,” after the Oakland A’s general manager and Moneyball author, due to Schwartz’s fancy Georgetown economics degree and crazy, stats-based theories like “fumbles don’t matter.” At least Lions RB Kevin Smith will sleep easier at night knowing that his job won’t be on the line if he develops butter fingers.

To run the offense, the team brought in former Rams head coach Scott Linehan, who was basically run out of St. Louis by his own players. Linehan made a name for himself calling plays for the Vikings from 2002-04, when the team finished in the top five in total offense all three years.

After a brief and uneventful stop in Miami, he was hired as the head man in St. Louis. His offense came out of the gate roaring in 2006, finishing sixth overall, but the next two years saw the O fall off a cliff. While he’s reunited in Detroit with the quarterback that made those Vikings team click, Daunte Culpepper, the Lions haven’t totally committed to Pep. It will be interesting to see whether the team feels those two can recapture that Minnesota magic. If Detroit chooses to do so, they’ll have to do it without an offensive line, because the roster at those spots is about as deep as a haiku on existentialism penned by Jessica Simpson.

While the Lions can cross their fingers and hope Linehan gets his stroke back, their hire for defensive coordinator is laughable: former Chiefs defensive coordinator Gunther Cunningham. When was the last time this guy put together a quality defense? The answer is 1997, when he led the Chiefs to a top finish in points allowed.

The only record Cunningham can associate with since then is an unofficial one for most f-bombs in a 40-minute practice (118, according to Sports Illustrated.) While I’m all for cursing in German, all the cursing in the world isn’t going to help turn around a Lions team that finished 32nd in defense the last two seasons and flirted with the single-season points-allowed record in 2008. That they cut one of their better players, CB Leigh Bodden, won’t help matters.

Schwartz seems like a marriage of a once-hot name that faded and a job that nobody really wants. His ideas are interesting, but throwing out a bunch of counter-intuitive stats is not how you motivate men. Then again, he could be William Jennings Bryan, and he’d still be saddled with the worst team in the history of the league.

Mike Gilbert is a staff writer at RotoExperts.com and co-host of “Sports Smack” on Blog Talk Radio every Friday from 7-8 p.m. ET. You can reach Mike at [e-mail] or follow on Twitter: @Rotoboom.