ALLEN PARK, MI – AUGUST 01: Detroit Lions President Tom Lewand and head coach Jim Schwartz watch the action during the days practice session at the Lions training facility on August 1, 2011 in Allen Park, Michigan. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)
August 23, 2012 at 10:57 am
Jim Schwartz: Lions starters’ time Saturday not set in stone
By Josh Katzenstein
The Detroit News
Allen Park — Many NFL teams will treat their third exhibition game like a dress rehearsal for the regular season and keep starters in past halftime.
Lions head coach Jim Schwartz has no such plans and said all the exhibition games are, to an extent, dress rehearsals, and he has no set plans for how long the starters will play against the Raiders on Saturday night in Oakland.
“We’ll have a plan for playing, and it’s not going to be an exact number of snaps or a half or more than a half. We’ll just sort of take it as it comes,” Schwartz said after practice Wednesday. “We want to play well; we want to win the game. Those are the No. 1 and No. 2 objectives.”
Typically, teams increase the role of their starters in each of the first three weeks of the exhibition seasons before scaling back in the fourth game as they make decisions on final cuts. Most Lions starters played more in the second exhibition than the first, but the only hint Schwartz gave for Saturday’s plan is that the starters won’t play the entire game.
“We’ll be somewhere less than that, but there’s a lot of things that you can accomplish and not all of them have to do with playing time,” Schwartz said. “There are situations you want to work on with guys, you want to put them in certain spots and see how they do.”
Read more at The Detroit News.
August 24, 2012
NFL