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

When a decade's worth of rebuilding efforts culminate into an 0-16 season, there's a good chance the coaching staff is going to become the "former coaching staff."

Just ask the Detroit Lions.

The NFL answer to something going so wrong on a grand scale? Blow it up. Start over. Like a bad round of Lemmings, click the mushroom cloud button and start again from square one.

Cleaning house like the Detroit Lions have done this offseason isn't fun for anyone. People lose their jobs, people have to move their families. Some members of the freshly anointed 0-16 team will likely never see NFL action again (I'm looking at you, Paris Lenon).

Still, sometimes it has to be done. This is one of those times, and unprecedentedly so.

Indeed, roughly half of the Lions roster has turned over from last season, and the number seems to increase by the day. Depending on how training camp battles turn out, the defense could see as many as nine new starters.

What you don't hear much about, however, is the coaching staff.

Everybody has heard about rookie head coach Jim Schwartz, super-veteran defensive coordinator and F-bomb enthusiast Gunther Cunningham, and the latest genius offensive coordinator/failed St. Louis Rams head coach to become the Lions' offensive coordinator (the second in three years), Scott Linehan.

But what about the rest of the coaching staff? The assistants, positional coaches, and quality control guys? Schwartz is certainly the most high-profile rookie on the Lions' coaching staff this year, but that doesn't make him the only one taking a big career step.

To put it into numbers, the Lions list 15 coaches between the offense and defense, including the head coach. Twelve of them are heading into their first year with the Lions, six have less than five years of NFL coaching experience, and most of them are coming off major promotions.

Not including special teams and strength and conditioning, both of which are fully intact from last season, the only holdovers from the previous regime are running backs coach Sam Gash, wide receivers coach Shawn Jefferson, and defensive assistant Don Clemons, who has been with the Lions since 1985.

New linebackers coach Matt Burke followed Schwartz from Tennessee after five years as a defensive assistant/quality control coach. This season will be his first as a positional coach in the NFL, though he was an assistant secondary coach at Harvard and was responsible for some on-field work with the linebackers at Tennessee.

Burke will have his hands full with the Lions' linebackers, but not in the way he might have three months ago.

The additions of Pro Bowler Julian Peterson, Steelers cap casualty Larry Foote, and third-round draftee DeAndre Levy have combined with existing playmaker Ernie Sims and changed Burke's question from "how are we going to compensate for a lack of talent" to "how are we going to use all this talent?"

Because of the talent at his disposal this year (far more across the board than any other Lions positional coach) and the impact the linebackers could have on Detroit's defense next year, Burke will have more of a microscope on him than many of his colleagues.

It will be primarily his job to see that Sims plays better with his instincts outside the Tampa Two, Foote makes a successful transition to the 4-3 defense, Levy makes solid progression as a rookie, and Peterson keeps doing his thing.

Secondary coach Tim Walton is another first-year guy, but not quite in the same way.

This will be Walton's first season in the NFL, but he is not at all new to the defensive secondary; he has been a secondary coach in the college ranks since 1999.

After three years as the running backs coach with Bowling Green, he was moved to defensive backs coach for the 1999 season. Over the next nine seasons, he coached secondary for Memphis, Syracuse, LSU, and Miami (Florida).

Though Walton's tendency to switch jobs every couple of years may be a turn-off, his results are hard to argue with. He won a national title with LSU in 2003, and his pass defense with Miami was ranked first in the nation in 2005, leading him to be promoted to defensive coordinator in 2007.

This season, Walton will get the chance to show his stuff in the pro game, and with a completely rebuilt cornerback corps and hard hitting second-round safety Louis Delmas in his arsenal, he will have a high-profile job his first year in the pros.

New tight ends coach Tim Lappano would normally not be noticed by much of anybody outside the Lions' Allen Park training facility. Tight end, while important, is not a position that usually faces intense criticism.

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.