Matt Patricia Explains the Fine Line Between Winning and Losing

Matt Patricia explained how the Lions can turn the corner and win more games next season

Matt Patricia attempted to explain the challenges the 2019 squad had winning games during his end-of-season press conference held in Allen Park on Monday. 

He described what winning teams are able to accomplish weekly and what losing teams struggle with.

Here is a portion of Patricia's opening statement that discussed the fine line between winning and losing:

"It’s hard to win any game in this league. That’s the truth. There’s a fine line between winning and losing. I think unfortunately we saw a lot of those fine lines this year, but the teams that win, they do it with consistency."

"They do it with improving as the season goes on. They do it with smart football, and they have that edge in certain situations where they find a way to win no matter what. I would say the teams that don’t win in this league don’t have that consistency. They beat themselves, and certain situations where just things come up where they can’t find a way to win."

"I think that’s really what our season was. I think that’s what our season – just kind of each game has been the same from that aspect of it. That’s why the season looked that way and that it’s been that inconsistency between good football and bad football. We’ve seen definitely good football on the field, but the bad football through the course of each game outweighed it." 

"I think that as we go back through and evaluate everything from the season, we’ll look for ways to improve in all those areas. Certainly, there are some areas that we already know that we have to go back and do a better job of improving on, things that affect the game immediately, like turnovers, making sure that we take care of the ball in all aspects of it and making sure that we turn the ball over when we have that opportunity to do that. Eliminating the penalties – those are things that got us throughout the course of the season. I think playing through adversity and being able to finish, regardless of the situation in all three phases of just going out and playing strong all the way through the game for 60 minutes."

"I definitely think there are details that we have to clean up overall. Some things that we put a point of emphasis on week by week. We may get them fixed for a couple of weeks, but they show back up a couple of weeks later, and we can’t have that. Those are things that once we improve, once we fix them, they have to stay fixed in order to continually get better. I would say one of the things that this team is that we had a lot of young guys playing for us at certain points that we have to learn and get better at is that don’t make any one moment bigger than what it is."

"I think we got it to the point where it was definitely some games and some plays and some situations where we can’t press, we just have to play that play. We have to stay within that moment, not make it bigger than what it is and just execute. Execute that one play, and then get to the next play and execute that next play. That’s something that comes with experience. It comes with confidence and those are things that we need to build upon from that standpoint. We have to find ways to get everybody on the field, and we have to keep them on the field. When that doesn’t happen – it’s why it’s so important for us to continue to grow and develop the younger players or the new players on our team. When those situations come up, which they will, we have to step in and have that next person up ready to go. Certainly, having that consistency on the field week in (and) week out helps from that standpoint."

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