The Detroit Lions are now on the interim to their interim head coach, as Darrell Bevell will not coach Saturday’s game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers due to COVID-19 protocols, the team announced Thursday.
The Lions will move wide receivers coach Robert Prince into the head-coaching role and turn playcalling duties over to quarterbacks coach Sean Ryan, who has never been a playcaller at any level in his career.
On defense, coordinator Cory Undlin and all three primary position coaches — defensive line coach Bo Davis, linebackers coach Ty McKenzie and defensive backs coach Steve Gregory — also will not coach Saturday due to COVID-19 protocols.
Assistant head coach Evan Rothstein will serve as the defensive playcaller against the Buccaneers, while Ty Warren, David Corrao and Tony Carter will handle the defensive line, linebackers and defensive backs, respectively.
Prince, who has never been a head coach, was an offensive coordinator at Fort Lewis College (1994-95), in the Japanese X League (1996-97), at Portland State (1999-2000) and at Boise State (2012-13). He was the passing game coordinator at Colorado in 2010.
He has been with the Lions since 2014, brought in by former coach Jim Caldwell.
Bevell will get credit for Saturday’s game, which won’t go on Prince’s head-coaching ledger, according to ESPN Stats & Information and the Elias Sports Bureau.
The only other time a team had three head coaches in one season was the 1978 New England Patriots. Chuck Fairbanks was suspended one game for a contract breach, so Hank Bullough and Ron Erhardt were co-head coaches in Week 16 before Fairbanks returned for the playoffs.
On Monday, practice squad linebacker Anthony Pittman and a coach both tested positive for COVID-19. The NFL and the Lions then went into their close contact tracing procedures and wiped out most of the defensive staff.
Bevell said Wednesday that he believed some of this occurred due to travel to the team’s most recent game, at Tennessee — Nashville has one of the highest new-case rates of COVID-19 in the country — but he is otherwise unsure how his player and coach contracted the virus.
On Wednesday, Bevell would not “confirm or deny” a report from the Detroit Free Press that one defensive assistant was not wearing his contact tracing tracker at all times and another held a meeting inside his office.
“We’re not going to get into specifics of all this thing. It does go back to contact tracing,” Bevell said. “When you end up having a positive test, probably what happened to us is it was probably the perfect storm, in terms of when you have an away game and you have somebody test positive on Monday, they go 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 away places. So there’s a lot of things to sift through and a lot of information on that. We’re still working through all that.”