There’s so much to untangle about the bombshell revelation of a 1996 sexual-assault indictment against new Lions head coach Matt Patricia.
The Lions, Patricia, the NFL and the Patriots (his former, long-time employer) only entangled it more in the first 24 hours after the Detroit News’ Wednesday night report.
But start with this, and just try to disprove it: If 2018 head-coaching prospect Matt Patricia were 2018 draft prospect Matt Patricia, his name would be yanked off the draft boards of multiple teams. They’d hear, they’d dig around, they’d know, they’d debate, but a bunch of franchises would decide they want no part of him.
Yet Patricia is, in fact, a head coach, will remain the head coach, and if there are any consequences at all they won't be to his employment or the trust of his employer.
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This is a league that reacted to a 30-second Twitter video of Laremy Tunsil smoking weed minutes before the start of the 2016 draft by passing on him over and over until he’d plunged out of the top 10.
That was for something teams found out about at the last second. The four-month lead-up to the draft is always filled with the kind of scrutiny prospective FBI agents would envy. The justification for the excessive intrusions — including the questions about sexual preference and about whether their mothers are prostitutes — is the incredible investment teams are making in these picks, from No. 1 overall (Baker Mayfield reportedly was followed by a team-hired private investigator) to the undrafted free agents.
But Matt Patricia made it through 14 years with the league’s tentpole franchise, the one with the hottest possible spotlight on it on and off the field, including as a coordinator for a team that went to the Super Bowl three of the past four years without anybody anywhere seeming to know he and a friend and teammate had been indicted by a Texas grand jury on suspicion of assaulting a woman while in college.
This is where a grand insight about the NFL, its priorities and its double standards would normally go. But who even knows if that applies here?
No, it defies every thread of logic that a league — and a franchise, to be sure — that functions as it does would miss something this big, no matter how it was resolved. On the other hand, knowing the recent history of the Patriots and the NFL, it’s no less logical than anything else.
Consider this, too, from the News' story, which quoted veteran defense attorney and former federal prosecutor Keith Corbett about the impact of charges like this:
“(On) a personal level, it’s a brand that stays with you forever. There’s no way to get around it. (They) never had a chance to defend against it, and there was no finding of guilt but from a public-perception standpoint; this is a thing that may follow them for the rest of their lives.”
For Patricia, though, it did not. He got around it for 22 years. Explain that.
The NFL is all about investigating lately, too. The question that has haunted that league for most of the past decade is who knew what, when, how and why. Deflategate, Spygate, Bountygate, Ray Rice, Greg Hardy, Adrian Peterson — just to name a few, and just to remind all that a couple involved allegations of violence against women. Still others involved the Patriots of Patricia, and Bob Quinn, the Lions general manager who hired him and who paid his dues under Bill Belichick in New England.
Teams, owners, executives and commissioners make decisions all the time about what they’ll accept, reject, overlook and deny. They do it constantly with players. Again, the Patriots are an example: When Aaron Hernandez slid down the board in the 2011 draft because of well-known behavioral red flags in college, the Patriots caught him in the fourth round.
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The assumption always was that every team puts every important employee through the same scrutiny. Patricia came in as a low-level offensive assistant in 2004. He was promoted along the way. He had been on the head-coaching radar since 2015. The Giants were ready to hire him this year had he not picked the Lions.
On Thursday, Patricia said the indictment “never came up, it was never asked, it was never an issue” and has “never been part of any process I’ve been involved with before,” including with the Lions. The team, from the owner down, said it never came up, in their background checks or their interview, from them or from him. Belichick released a statement echoing the same about his Patriots tenure.
Never came up. A felony indictment. In which, to be crystal clear, the charges were dropped. This is not about his guilt or innocence — at least not right now.
But understand, this was a grand jury indictment of a man who subsequently coached at a high school, three universities and the defining dynasty of this era in the NFL. And who had moved up the ladder from outside the sport’s normal job pipelines — as an engineer at an air and filtration company, which would seemingly demand an extra level of check into who this guy was and where he came from.
That entire 20-plus-year journey to the pinnacle of his profession, without anyone finding out about an indictment. Not a complaint, a probe, an arrest, a detainment, an arraignment — an indictment.
This, in a league where an anonymous smear video clip can alter the course of a player’s career in an instant, just because that’s what teams can do.
No, it does not make sense.
Except in all the ways it makes perfect sense. It’s the least-plausible and most-plausible thing imaginable. It’s the NFL in 2018 in a nutshell.
