The Detroit Lions are now interim for their interim head coach as Darrell Bevell will not be able to coach Saturday’s game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers due to COVID-19 protocols, sources told ESPN on Thursday.
Sources said the Lions will transfer great receiver coach Robert Prince to the role of head coach and transfer video game assignments to quarterbacks coach Sean Ryan, who has never been a player at all levels of his career.
Prince, who has never been head coach, was the offensive coordinator at Fort Lewis College (1994-95), the Japanese X League (1996-97), Portland State (1999-2000) and Boise State (2012-) 13 ). He was the passing game coordinator in Colorado in 2010.
He has been with the Lions since 2014, led by former coach Jim Caldwell.
The Lions still have major issues to solve defensively. Coordinator Cory Undlin and the three primary coaches – defensive line coach Bo Davis, defensive end coach Ty McKenzie and defensive back coach Steve Gregory – were removed from the facility. Wednesday as close contact due to COVID-19.
“Obviously, that had to be planned,” Bevell said Wednesday. “So there are contingency plans, and every time something happens, we’re making adjustments to it. I still think we’re gathering more information.”
On Monday, rider Anthony Pittman and a coach tested positive for COVID-19. The NFL and Lions went into their contact tracking procedures and wiped out most of the defensive personnel.
Bevell said Wednesday that he believed some of this was due to traveling to the team’s last game in Tennessee (Nashville has one of the highest rates of new COVID-19 cases in the country), but on the other hand he is not sure how his player and coach contracted the virus.
On Wednesday, Bevell would not “confirm or deny” a Detroit Free Press report that one defensive assistant did not carry the contact tracker at all times and another had a meeting inside his office.
“We’re not going to go into details of all of this. It goes back to contact tracking,” Bevell said. “When you end up having a positive test, probably what happened to us is that it was probably the perfect storm in terms of when you have a game away from home and you have someone positive on Monday, which goes back 48 hours.
“In a travel situation, you have the plane, you have the hotel, you have the buses, you have the smaller locker rooms in remote places. So there’s a lot to examine and a lot of information about it. I’m still working on all of that.” .
ESPN’s Adam Schefter contributed to this report.