Even as a 10-year vet, this is new for Michael Brockers. This is a start unlike any he's seen. The longest he waited for the first win of the season in his nine years with the Rams ... was two games. He's winless in Week 7 in year one with the Lions.
Brockers is a leader in Detroit's locker room. That's why Brad Holmes brought him here from LA, on top of the damage he can do on the defensive line. He knows the price of winning in the NFL, from September to January. As the Lions approach November looking for their first win of the season, Brockers wants an inexperienced roster to start asking more of itself.
"For me, us being one of the younger teams in the league, we just need a lot more accountability," Brockers said Monday, a day after the Lions were pasted at home by the Bengals. "And that’s from everybody, the coaches, the players, everyone making sure that if your number’s called, you have to be there. It's no excuses for why you weren’t there or anything like that. We have to be there. I think that’s the most important thing, accountability from the top down moving forward and just play it out."
Asked if a lack of accountability has been an issue through six games, Brockers said, "I don’t want to say it’s been an issue. I just know we have a young team and we don’t want to get on them. We just want to make sure they’re doing the right things. Moving forward, we gotta talk to them and just let them know, 'Hey man, it’s a must-win situation every play and every game.' And if we come with that attitude every day, we’ll improve. We’ll improve.
"We have a young team, as I said before, but we’re all football players, we’re all guys who’ve played this game for a long time. So we understand what we have to do, we just have to put more emphasis on it."
Brockers might start by pointing at himself. He leads Detroit's defensive linemen in snaps, but ranks outside the top 100 players at his position, per Pro Football Focus. He's been bad against the run and not much better against the pass. If Detroit needs its young players to grow up, it also needs its vets to cover the gap. Again, that's why Brockers is here.
Dan Campbell said Monday the Lions are considering some changes to the roster "to shake things up a little bit." He said the players "are being told and they realize" when they make mistakes on Sundays. Missed assignments on both sides of the ball were a particular problem against the Bengals. They're also a natural symptom of inexperience. The Lions played five rookies on defense in Week 6, four of whom logged at least 30 snaps, and two more on offense.
"They know when they mess up and they’re being held accountable as far as that’s concerned, but I also do believe that we (the coaches) have a hand in it," said Campbell, who also bore the brunt of the blame after Sunday's loss. "We have a huge hand in this."
To eliminate some of the missed assignments, Campbell said "we can do a better job of coaching the details of it and helping them." He said that might entail further cropping the terminology of the playbook, after the Lions scaled things back the past couple weeks. Whatever it takes to clean up the product on Sundays.
"If that’s what we have to do and we have to crop it even more, we’ll crop it even more," Campbell said. "Everybody’s got a hand in it and they need to be held accountable, but so do we. At the end of the day, these are our guys and we have to help them have success.”