The thorn is pulled from the Lions' paw

I had the afternoon off yesterday, so it was while I was driving home that I heard on the radio what was going on in the Lions' front office. It was a bloodbath of Neesonian proportions. GM Martin Mayhew was gone, President of Operations Tom Lewand was gone, and the quote I heard was "the bosses are walking the halls, looking for people to fire". Holy crap. That sounds like a scene straight out of Wolfenstein 3D.

This is an exciting time for Lions fans. To understand why, you have to go back to the Millen era. The owner at the time was William Clay Ford, current owner Martha Ford's husband. Millen sucked. He continued to suck. He made it sound good at times, but everything he did sucked. His reign over the team was a gigantic, 8-year long face palm. There were rumblings from the fan base much earlier, but the formal beginning of the FIRE MILLEN movement was probably the so-called "Millen Man March", held on 12/18/05 prior to the game that day against the Bengals. Despite enormous fan outcry, Matt Millen managed to cling to his job for nearly 3 more years, until Ford's son spoke out to the media during the 0-16 season, pressuring the owner to finally take action.

The mechanism from the Millen years somehow remained in place, however. Lewand and Mayhew were formerly Millen's underlings, and there was a lot of concern that some of his bad calls were also their bad calls. There was also a lot of concern that the issue with the team was the Ford ownership. The Lions had been a successful team in the '50s (3 championships & 1 runner-up), but they've only made the playoffs 11 times and won only 1 playoff game since Ford bought the team in 1963. Fans breathed a guilty sigh of relief when WCF Sr. died last spring, but many wondered whether the new ownership would be any different. Millen was fired in 2008, but his stink continued to swirl around the team as his replacements made many of the same types of mistakes that he did. Yesterday we saw the difference between Martha Ford and her late husband: Martha. Don't. Play.

None of the coaching staff were fired (because, why bother?), but it sounds like the Fords are going to utterly clean house as soon as this season is over. It sounds to me like the interim GM Sheldon White might actually be a decent GM, which is unfortunate because Martha Ford cannot afford to keep any holdovers from the previous administration. That was her husband's mistake. So, ruling him out, there have been a number of other names I've heard floated out there for the new GM position. The ones I liked best?

• Mike Lombardi (no relation to the Lions' former OC), a former scout and GM and current assistant to Belichek's coaching staff in NE
• Nick Caserio, another New England guy, currently the Director of Player Personnel
• Trent Kirchener, Seattle's Co-Director of Player Personnel

Lombardi is the only one of these names who has a retread-y feel, although I think he was hosed during his previous stints as a GM - first by Al Davis calling shots in Oakland, second by getting axed in Cleveland before he had a chance to do anything. The other two guys are player personnel guys on teams with a history of great personnel moves.

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A big question, maybe THE big question, is with a new GM, wherefore art thou, Matt Stafford? Once it became clear this year that a) the Lions were going to end up with a high draft pick, and b) Matt Stafford was never going to be a good QB, I started to advocate drafting a QB in the first round of this draft. New GMs like to put their stamp on the team (as Mayhew did with Stafford), and Stafford's contract gets increasingly expensive but also non-guaranteed following this season.

Stafford has always had the talent to be one of the greats, but apparently he never put in the work. Former Lions DE Lawrence Jackson said as much this past spring, and Stafford's play this year has born that out. Stafford has all the physical tools, but he hasn't put in the mental work. This may have cost Joe Lombardi his job. I'm not one to defend Lombardi - his play-calling was atrocious, and the offensive scheme he tried to implement did NOT fit the players here - but a big reason why his offense didn't work was because Stafford wasn't able to comprehend the intricacies of it, and Lombardi couldn't dumb it down enough for Stafford to understand. This was coming from Lombardi, so take it with a grain of salt, but it fits what I see on the field.

Stafford sucks at reading a defense and finding an open receiver when the blitz is on. He doesn't make the players around him better, and he rarely shows the type of fire you want from the guy supposedly leading your offense. His stats look impressive, but as Jackson said, they're counterfeit. If the new GM sees the same thing I do, Stafford could potentially get cut outright, traded, or we might keep him on and eat that huge salary increase while developing his replacement.

Getting back to Lawrence Jackson, one of my favorite tweets from yesterday was LoJack's "I might go buy a Ford today to celebrate".