Matt Patricia was asked about a former player telling the Free Press the Lions head coach is regularly late to meetings.
"I don’t really address or worry about what’s said by somebody that’s not in the building," he said. He talked for two minutes and 48 seconds about the topic.
Full quote from Patricia:
“I think it’s probably hard from an outside perspective. I would say I don’t really focus on too much of what’s said outside of the building or somebody that’s not here. We have a lot of really good dialect. I think I’ve said this before, inside the building and what happens behind closed doors for our team as an organization, there’s a lot of feedback from the players and the staff and the coaches and everyone is held accountable. And the great thing about it is we’re all in a situation where we’re all trying to get better in all those areas and we’re all trying to improve and make sure that we’re operating efficiently. We have a very tight schedule. We run a very structured schedule and in those situations, it’s constantly being evaluated and there’s constant feedback that comes back to try to improve it from that situation. And I think the big point of that would be there’s going to situations that come up where, and I’ve said this before, one of the hardest things or most difficult things, I’ve also used this as the advice that I’ve got is that when there’s a situation where somebody comes to you with a problem, I try to address that problem as the most important thing for me at that time, which I do, and spend the time to make sure that I clear that up, whatever it is, in whatever facet of the organization and sometimes when that happens, you might be a couple seconds late to something here or there. It’s at a standpoint where it’s—with that sort of schedule, you have to be able to adapt and some things might not always go off exactly when the clock ticks in a certain direction. But, it’s not a, I’ll just make sure the response right here, it’s not a situation where we’re talking 20, 30—it may be a minute, or something causes a delay, but that’s standard. That’s kind of like a pretty understood thing when people are working in a tight schedule and we adapt to those things and the players are great, too, because we have to move some things around. We might have a meeting that goes a little bit longer because there’s a point that needs to be made or a practice drill that goes a little bit longer and the good part about it is, that’s just kind of how we operate. That’s the world we work in and it’s kind of similar to how the game works. There’s going to be things in the game that we have to adapt to and just respond to and handle. The better you can do that, then the better you can make those adjustments, too. So, it’s just a situation where again, I don’t really address or worry about what’s said by somebody that’s not in the building. We handle everything behind closed doors and I know it’s real difficult for probably your perspective really, to be honest with you, because you don’t really get a chance to see kind of what goes on behind the doors and that’s hard. That’s hard to kind of get an understanding with that, but I would say that we continually change schedules because of the different weeks that we have and it’s a necessity to do that. So, from that standpoint, I really—what we do and how we operate with the schedule and the tightness and the structure of it with everybody in the building, from the video department to the staff to the coaches to the players, it’s kind of just a situation where you just adapt, and you move on. I don’t really think it’s anything other than that.”
