Rod Wood: Lions 'Not Gonna Have' Bad Luck with Injuries Again

The Detroit Lions had quite the run-in with the injury bug a season ago.

Detroit, in fact, ended up with a league-high number of players on injured reserve, including a multitude of players on the defensive side of the ball (Derrick Barnes, Aidan Hutchinson, Alim McNeill, etc.).

Simply, the Lions couldn't catch a break on the injury front, and it certainly played a role in their 45-31 divisional-round playoff defeat at the hands of the Washington Commanders.

Detroit team president Rod Wood shares the sentiment that the Lions dealt with a serious degree of bad luck injury-wise last season.

“With the year before, we didn’t have as many injuries,” Wood told reporters at the annual league meetings Wednesday. “I was talking to Dan Campbell about this the other day, and I don’t know if you saw ‘The World According to Garp.’ …There’s a scene where Robin Williams and Glenn Close are shopping for a house. They’ve gone through it. They’re out on the sidewalk looking at it, and a plane crashes into the house. And Robin Williams says, ‘We’ll take it. That will never happen again.’

“I hope that’s what our injury year was. We had the plane crash, and we’re not gonna have that problem again.” 

Instead of just hoping that the Lions will do better staying healthy this upcoming season, Wood is also trying to be proactive. He is looking into different means to help Detroit avoid suffering as many injuries, including getting the organization a bye later in the season than a year ago.

The Lions had their bye last season in Week 5, the very first week that teams could have byes in 2024.

As Wood expressed, “We’re looking at all that stuff. The training staff. Do we need to dial back practices at different times later in the season? I’m really pushing (vice president of NFL broadcast planning & scheduling) Mike North to give us a mid-season bye this year, so that we don’t have to play 14 games in a row without a break. So, there’s all those kind of things that we’re looking at.”

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