Detroit Lions: At Lowest Point, Jim Schwartz Can Show He's Coach of the Year

The Lions fell pretty far on Sunday.

Though they had lost two games, they had been in both until the very end. Not so on Sunday.

Though they had been branded as a “dirty team,” they had channeled that productively. Not so on Sunday.

And so, after starting 5-0 and looking like the surest playoff lock this side of the Green Bay Packers, the Lions sit at 6-3 and on a precipice.

This cannot define their season.

It has been a pattern with the Detroit Lions, through all their years of adversity. They turn lemons into lemon juice right in the eye. Red-eyed and teary, they’d complain of bad calls, bad breaks and bad luck—everything but bad play on their part.

Those Detroit Lions showed up on Sunday. And Jim Schwartz needs to slap them out of it.

It’s something that none of the merry-go-round of coaches that have come in and out of Detroit in the past decade have accomplished: destroying the Lions’ attitude problem.

When the Lions have hit their stumbling block each year, they have consistently followed that up with a series of poor performances sapping whatever confidence they had. This, more than anything else, has been at the core of their problems. It’s the proverbial cloud that hangs over this franchise.

The 2011 incarnation of these Lions has hit that stumbling block. Their favorable playoff fortunes now look iffy at best. They face a difficult schedule the rest of the way and could very easily wind up at 8-8 or worse now. If this was a team coached by someone other than Jim Schwartz, it’d be easy to even expect that.

Now? It’s time for him to revive those "Never Say Die" Lions. The team that took flat starts and turned them into incredible comebacks for the ages. The team that revived hope in Detroit’s football culture for the first time since Barry Sanders.

If he can do it, he’ll have done the impossible and turned the Detroit Lions from whiners into winners. They have the talent and ability. They need the mindset and inspiration to turn disaster into a turning point.

That’s Schwartz’s job, starting now. Break the loser’s mindset that reared its ugly head at the end of the game on Sunday.

It’ll require every ounce of the intensity he has shown to shatter the defeatism that has defined the Detroit Lions for the better part of their history. The Lions don’t typically recover from being beaten down, after all.

This year, they've already done so twice. Now it’s not a game that they need to rebound in, but their entire season. If Schwartz can find the voice and game plan that turned the Lions around in those games against Minnesota and Dallas, then he can surely escape that black hole of Detroit football history.

Doing that would make him one of the best coaches the Lions have ever seen. As well as the best coach in the NFL this season.