I mentioned this in another column, but I think it deserves its own post.
In MLive Lions beat writer Kyle Meinke’s column on the Quinn press conference, he makes the point that the Fords retained Quinn and Patricia to give them another year to realize their plan. But neither Quinn nor Patricia provide any confidence that they know what’s wrong, or have a plan.
Meinke makes this point about Graham Glasgow:
Patricia, the Fords and now Quinn have talked for weeks about the foundation of the team. They point to how few home-grown players they have on second contracts, and how tough it is to build a team that way. But then they turn around and show no appetite whatsoever to re-sign Graham Glasgow, a home-grown foundational piece who has done literally every single thing this team wants in a player.
He’s good, he’s tough, he’s versatile, he’s durable. And he does it on the offensive line, which Quinn has spent almost a half-decade trying to rebuild. Glasgow just might be his best success story there, and done it exactly how the team asks – and now he can barely get the Lions on the phone about an extension?
“It’s been a long year,” Glasgow said after the season ended, “and I would like to feel like I’m wanted.”
From a player who doesn’t usually say a whole lot, that says a whole lot about how little Detroit cares where Glasgow plays next season.
Listen, you can’t sign everybody, and the Lions have a million holes to fill. They need linebackers and they need defensive linemen, and those don’t come cheaply. They probably need a corner. They are probably going to extend Kenny Golladay, which certainly won’t be cheap. And they have to figure out what they’re doing at offensive tackle, where Taylor Decker is heading into a contract year and Rick Wagner continues to underwhelm.
So maybe the Lions are calculating they can’t afford Glasgow. But if that is their calculation, they will lose one of their most consistent offensive players, a backbone of the offensive line – a foundational piece – in the process, creating yet another hole elsewhere. And that just doesn’t square with what they’re saying they’re trying to do.
We’ve noted many times here that Quinn has devoted a ton of draft and free-agency capital into the O-line, and the O-line still isn’t one of the better ones in the league. But Graham Glasgow is solid. Even a lay person can see it week in and week out.
Yet all they’ve done this season is mess with Glasgow. Put him in a rotation with Kenny Wiggins, who is clearly inferior to him. And now this contract stonewalling.
Between Quinn saying he watched more tape on Teez Tabor than any other player he’d ever evaluated, and the way he apparently thinks Glasgow is a disposable bum, I don’t see how anybody can have confidence that Quinn knows what he is doing at this point.