Scottie Montgomery Is 'Invaluable' Coach for Lions

His role enables him to focus not only on his position group, but also the entire team.

“Coming in here, I probably had three hats. Now, I probably have like 25 hats,” Montgomery said. “A lot of them to cover up the hair that I’ve lost since learning some of the things that I’ve learned. It’s just a big picture. Like, you can get so involved when you’re in a room that you can’t see the building, right? What Dan is giving me the ability to do, since I got here, is to see the building not just from an offensive standpoint, but from a defensive standpoint and also an administrative standpoint.

"So that is one of the things I got to say thank you to him for giving me the opportunity, and not just giving me the title. There are two different things: there’s the title, and the opportunity that creates your ability to see it from the head coach’s position, and that’s what he's been able to do for me.”

The newest role for Montgomery is leading the receiver room.

While he knows quite a bit about receivers, seeing them across the practice facility for the last few seasons, the coach has a newfound respect and appreciation for the hard work that the receivers put in.

“You can be close to someone, but until you’re in the room with them, all of us that have brothers that have lived in a room with where you got two brothers in the room or you got a brother in this room and a brother in that room, you can be tight, but when you live together. It’s one of the reasons my little boys stay in the same room right now, all they have is each other,” Montgomery expressed. “So, we’re in the same room, and now we know that they’re depending on me, I’m depending on them. So, the level of accountability is there."

Montgomery has also been impressed by the attention to detail from the receiving group.

"What I didn’t understand about these guys is just how truly special they were, as it comes to detail and hard work," the first-year receivers coach admitted. "That’s driven by St. (Amon-Ra St. Brown), that is driven by Kalif (Raymond), that’s driven by Waymo (Jameson Williams). That’s something that even I didn’t know about them. I felt like the backs were as good as they can possibly be, and now you realize why our building is the way that it is. We got guys all over the building, the O-line, our linebackers, our secondary, our D-line, guys that are just so attentive to detail that they play hard, extremely hard.”