The Lions' biggest problem is definitely their offensive line, and moon hit the nail on the head as far as how that situation developed. The Lions have been bad to mediocre for pretty much a decade now, and as a result have changed coaching staffs and therefore philosophies way too frequently.
Add to that some terrible drafting and an even worse development program, and you have all the parts that sum up to this season of perfection.
Look at their first round draft record in the 2000s:
2000 - Stockar McDougle - OL - 20th overall - nothing special here, but he wasn't a high pick
2001 - Jeff Backus - OL - 18th overall - still on the team, not a bad player
2002 - Joey Harrington - QB - 3rd overall - complete dud, but the organization deserves blame for poor development.
2003 - Charles Rogers - WR - 2nd overall - great talent, poorly utilized, injured a lot. Didn't like using a top 5 pick for a WR.
2004 - Roy Williams - WR - 7th overall - a really good player. This was probably their best pick. Can't believe he did so poorly in Dallas.
2004 - Kevin Jones - RB - 30th overall - smallish RB that got hurt a lot. In Chicago now, doing nothing.
2005 - Mike Williams - WR - 10th overall - awful awful pick, especially with Williams and Rogers already in the stable
2006 - Ernie Sims - LB - 9th overall - good pick, showed good promise but really regressed this year. Struggles with his tackling at times.
2007 - Calvin Johnson - WR - 2nd overall - another good player, but you can still question whether they needed another WR when the rest of the team was obviously weak
2008 - Gosder Cherilus - OL - 17th overall - this guy flat-out sucked in his rookie year. They had the right idea picking a lineman, but Cherilus disappointed big time.
As a Lions fan, I'd say getting rid of Marinelli and Millen is a good start as far as housecleaning goes. I don't know much about the guys they promoted, so I will reserve judgment on that. I agree with moon that the optics would be better if they waited a bit.
But the whole thing doesn't bother me. The Lions have been so bad that it's almost inevitability coming to fruition that they went 0-16 this year. That was a whole lot less painful than the 6-2 start last year followed by the complete and utter collapse.
You kinda like to see the whole thing blow up like this so they can start over from the ground level. After last year, there seemed to be the feeling that they were on their way back to respectability and only needed to tweak some things. Clearly that wasn't the case!
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