Jim Caldwell: 'A little bit above average is not good enough' for the Lions

Being slightly above average is actually incredibly out of character for the Lions

The Detroit Lions are 8-7 and officially out of the playoff race. They've outscored their opponents by 10 points this season, making them the closest team in the NFL to having an exactly even point differential. 

They are, in other words, an ever-so-slightly above-average football team. And this comes a year after the team finished 9-7 with a point differential of minus-12, which made them either a slightly above of slightly below-average football team a year ago as well. 

Being slightly above average, according to Lions coach Jim Caldwell, just won't do. "We're just a little bit above average, and a little bit above average is not good enough," Caldwell said Tuesday, per MLive.com. "There's no bowl games in this league and so we got to get better, we got to get better in every area. It's a team sport and there's not anything that we just absolutely excelled at I think all across the board."

The Lions are looking at missing the playoffs for the second time in Caldwell's four seasons at the helm. They went 11-5 in his first year and 7-9 in his second year, meaning they're 35-28 overall. That 0.556 winning percentage translates to an average of about 8.6 wins per season, which again is slightly above-average. 

While that may not be good enough to make the playoffs more than 50 percent of the time, it's actually quite good for a coach of the Lions. The last non-interim Lions coach with a better winning percentage than Caldwell was Buddy Parker, who coached the team from 1951 through 1956. 

Coach	Years	Games	Wins	Losses	Ties	Win %
George Clark	1931–1936	74	48	20	6	0.689
Earl "Dutch" Clark	1937–1938	22	14	8	0	0.636
Gus Henderson	1939	11	6	5	0	0.545
George Clark	1940	11	5	5	1	0.500
Bill Edwards	1941–1942	14	4	9	1	0.321
John Karcis	1942	8	0	8	0	0.000
Gus Dorais	1943–1947	53	20	31	2	0.396
Bo McMillin	1948–1950	36	12	24	0	0.333
Buddy Parker	1951–1956	72	47	23	2	0.667
George Wilson	1957–1964	104	53	45	6	0.538
Harry Gilmer	1965–1966	28	10	16	2	0.393
Joe Schmidt	1967–1972	84	43	34	7	0.554
Don McCafferty	1973	14	6	7	1	0.464
Rick Forzano	1974–1976	32	15	17	0	0.469
Tommy Hudspeth	1976–1977	24	11	13	0	0.458
Monte Clark	1978–1984	105	43	61	1	0.414
Darryl Rogers	1985–1988	58	18	40	0	0.310
Wayne Fontes	1988–1996	133	66	67	0	0.496
Bobby Ross	1997–2000	57	27	30	0	0.474
Gary Moeller	2000	7	4	3	0	0.571
Marty Mornhinweg	2001–2002	32	5	27	0	0.156
Steve Mariucci	2003–2005	43	15	28	0	0.349
Dick Jauron	2005	5	1	4	0	0.200
Rod Marinelli	2006–2008	48	10	38	0	0.208
Jim Schwartz	2009–2013	80	29	51	0	0.363
Jim Caldwell	2014–2017	63	35	28	0	0.556

That's a pretty damn incredible stat, and shows just how long the Lions' franchise futility has lasted. Detroit needs to get more consistent and to be better defensively in order to progress past this stage where they are a slightly above-average football team, but this is still a longer period of sustained playoff contention than they've had in a long time.