Dave Fipp gives an epic answer about Detroit’s kicking mess

It’s been hard to keep up with all the kicking changes for the Detroit Lions over the last couple of seasons. The ever-changing cast has quickly become the football version of being a drummer in Spinal Tap.

The man in charge of the Lions special teams, coordinator Dave Fipp, was asked about the revolving door of kickers — six different ones since the start of 2021 — in his Week 7 press briefing this week. Fipp gave one of the longest answers in Detroit Lions press conference history.

Here’s Fipp’s answer in full, as transcribed by the Lions media department:

“Yeah, I would say – no, I would say there’s a lot of things to the question. But I would say ultimately like, we knew – when I got here, we had let – I mean (former Lions K Matt) Prater wasn’t under contract or whatever, and we didn’t re-sign him, however you say that. So, ultimately, we lost a good player there, so then the goal was to find the next guy, and I think that we knew that in doing that, it was going to take some time. So, we went about that process. We brought (Titans K) Randy Bullock in, who we thought did a nice job for us, but we were also looking for maybe better, younger, a bunch of different things, and didn’t think he was a long-term answer. So then at that point, we had an opportunity to claim (former Lions K Austin) Seibert, and we claimed Seibert, and we felt really good about that. He started for us a year ago. He played well, and then he got injured, which is out there unfortunately. And it’s happened – it seems like it’s happened more frequently around the League, I think. You guys have seen that. So, anyways, Seibert got injured, and then we went with (former Lions K Ryan) Santoso, and he struggled in that game, and so then we moved on from him, and we ended up getting (Jaguars K) Riley Patterson in here, and Riley came in and did a good job. I think a year ago, our numbers or the output for that position, or that production we got out of that position was better than average. It wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t necessarily what we were looking for, but it wasn’t terrible. So then we go into training camp, we have two players we think highly of in Patterson and Seibert. Seibert was obviously coming off an injury, and then he was playing great for us. He had a great camp, he had a better camp than Riley had for us. He was feeling great. Everything was going great, so we were excited. We thought we kind of had the answer to the question, and…