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Ricky Jean Francois had one wish for Matt Patricia after Patricia got his first win as Detroit Lions coach Sunday night at Ford Field.
“I will pray he gets some sleep tonight,” Jean Francois said after the game. “Now that we won the game, now he can go to sleep.”
Jean Francois said Patricia’s notorious work ethic kicks into overdrive after losses, when “that man is up 21 hours a day in” the Lions’ Allen Park practice facility.
Patricia declined Monday to say how many hours of sleep he got after the game, insisting, “It doesn’t matter.”
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Told that it does for his health, Patricia joked, “Yeah, well, this is a picture of health up here.”
However much rest he got, Patricia and the Lions were back to their usual routine Monday, breaking down film of their 26-10 win over the New England Patriots before moving on to this week’s opponent the Dallas Cowboys.
Because the Lions played a late game Sunday night, Patricia said his staff started preparing for the Cowboys last week.
“Obviously pretty charged up after the game, so it takes a little while to unwind from that but you’ve got to just keep pushing forward and get back in the mode,” Patricia said. “Monday comes, Monday doesn’t change. It doesn’t matter what time you play on Sunday, you’ve got to get the same things done on Monday regardless. The schedule is what it is.”
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After three straight non-traditional starts — the Lions opened against the Jets on Monday night and played a west coast game (4:05 p.m. start) in Week 2 before hosting the Patriots on Sunday night — the Lions play 11 of their final 13 games at 1 p.m.
The only exceptions are a Week 14 trip to Arizona to face the Cardinals (4:25 p.m. kickoff) and their usual 12:30 p.m. start on Thanksgiving.
“I think we’re all trying to just basically get on a schedule that is the same week in and week out,” Patricia said. “We can kind of get in a rhythm from that standpoint. We still have to travel, we still have to deal with some of those things. But it would be good to just kind of be consistent here as we push forward.”
Detroit Lions coach Matt Patricia speaks to the media on Monday, Sept. 24, 2018, in Allen Park.
Dave Birkett, Detroit Free Press
Kick decision
Patricia was booed early in Sunday’s game when he chose to send Matt Prater out for a 38-yard field goal rather than try and convert a fourth-and-inches at the Patriots’ 21-yard line.
He said after the game that was “a really tough call,” but that he wanted his team to be rewarded for its first drive.
“I know the crowd favorite would have been to go for it, but I think in that point of the game being so early, you need points,” Patricia said. “You need to make sure you maximize every single drive. So at that point if it’s inches or 1 or 2, it doesn’t really matter. You just have to get the points and hope that you’re in a position to play good defense. What you don’t want to do is have something bad happen in that situation and then give them momentum. A game like this is definitely about momentum. And scoring points gives you momentum and that’s what we needed to do.”
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Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford said he had no problem with his coach’s decision.
“I’ll leave that up to those guys,” Stafford said. “There’s some guys upstairs with some charts to figure that stuff out. But any points against a team like that is going to be a good thing, and we had a positive drive. You would have hated to have seen it end with no points, so it was good to get some points. Obviously anytime we get in the red zone we want to score a touchdown, but I think we did a nice job controlling the game.”
Contact Dave Birkett: dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett. Download our Lions Xtra app for free on Apple and Android!
