The risers that typically rest below the podium in the Lions' media room were gone at the start of training camp Wednesday, and the reason was clear Thursday morning when Matt Patricia rolled in with his left leg elevated on a scooter.
Patricia said he recently had an operation to address a lower-leg issue. In good spirits prior to the first practice of camp, he smiled and deemed himself day to day.
"As far as the head coach is concerned and his current health status, there's very few times over the year where you have an opportunity to kind of go in and get things done. Just pretty much have been dealing with a little bit of a lower leg issue, tendon-muscle thing, bone thing for a while, so kind of had that cleaned up," he said. "Just tying to stay off it here for a couple days so that it heals properly.
"Day by day and we'll go from there."
Matt Patricia "day to day," he says, with a lower leg injury as #Lions open camp. "Had some shi— some stuff cleaned up back there." pic.twitter.com/FfUfAYnGoT
— Will Burchfield (@burchie_kid) July 25, 2019The 44-year-old Patricia, who prefers to be in the thick of the action during practice, said he'll err on the side of caution through the early stages of camp.
"Honestly, I'm really trying to be careful with it so that I don't have any setbacks from that standpoint. Maybe a little bit overcautious when I can be," he said.
For example, when the Lions held a couple informal practices at the start of the week, Patricia observed the activity from a safe distance. He said he'll lean on his veteran players to keep things organized until he's back to full health.
"For myself and my current situation, I'm a little bit, call it 10 or 15 yards further away from the action," he said. "I'm a coach that likes to be in the middle of it. I enjoy the teaching process of the game. It's one of my favorite parts of the games, being able to be hands-on.
"But just being able to step back a little bit through early training camp, obviously I'm excited for it today to have that familiarity with practice and to watch those guys, like they've done these last couple days, just run practice on their own. Really feel like I can just watch them move from drill to drill. They know where to go, they know where everything is, they know what to expect, they know how to get it lined up, and that's really the majority of it. You get out there and get it lined up so that you can go get the reps in and teach it and go from there."
Patricia wasn't the only big name to land on the injury report at the start of training camp. The Lions placed Darius Slay and Damon Harrison on the non-football injury list after the duo sat out OTAs and minicamp, and they placed Trey Flowers on the PUP list earlier this week.
