Lions' Wood on post-Dallas talks with NFL, new practice facility and ticket price hikes

Orlando, Fla. — When the Detroit Lions lost to the Dallas Cowboys in controversial fashion late in the 2023 season, coach Dan Campbell revealed president Rod Wood would be handling the team's communication with the league.

On Monday, three months after the fiasco, where the wrong Lions offensive lineman was declared an eligible receiver — negating a potential game-winning two-point conversion — Wood offered some insight into the process of dealing with the league.

First and foremost, there's a cooldown process. The league doesn't allow for formal communication until 9 a.m. the following day, but Wood sent a text to NFL vice president of football operations Troy Vincent that night, letting him know to expect a call in the morning.

When Wood reached out at 9 a.m. on Sunday, Vincent was at church. When they connected an hour later, a frustrated Wood offered up a sarcastic quip.

"I asked if he prayed for better officiating," Wood said.

Ultimately, the process didn't yield meaningful results. It rarely does. Wood talked with both Vincent and head of officiating Walt Anderson. They disagreed on their overall assessment of the situation. The team's formal complaint was logged and there was a promise, as there often is in these situations, to do better next time.

"There's really nothing you can do to change it," Wood said.

Later that week, Anderson shared a video with teams about how to properly report as eligible. It suggested the league was doubling down on how the situation was handled by official Brad Allen. And there's been no effort to make changes to the reporting process this offseason. Even the Lions, who proposed a number of changes to the league's rule book and bylaws, didn't include anything related to the Dallas loss.

"We didn't really bring it up, because we think we did it correctly," Wood said. "I don't know that there's anything we could have done differently that would have caused the ref to recognize 68 (Taylor Decker) versus 70 (Dan Skipper)."

Here are a few other items discussed by Wood in a media session with local media who traveled to Orlando to cover the league meetings.

▶ There hasn't been much movement on the Lions building a new practice facility. Rumors have swirled about possible locations near Willow Run Airport, in Ann Arbor or downtown Detroit, but Wood said they're not that far along in the process.

He did acknowledge there is appeal to consolidating operations downtown, related to the city's I-375 project, which is scheduled to begin construction in 2025.

"I know there are a lot of rumors out there, and every time I talk about it, it leads to more people reaching out to me with ideas where we should be," Wood said. "..We've got a real estate consultant who's working on all those things, but very, very early stages of any announcements on a practice facility."

Wood estimated any potential move remained three or four years away. In the meantime, the team is doubling the size of its training room at its current facility in Allen Park.

"You do have a 20-plus-year-old building that needs to be modernized, and you don't want to continue to put a bunch of bad money into it if you're going to relocate, but given where we are in the discussion about relocation, doing this doesn't really change the decision," Wood said. "It just makes the players hopefully more healthy, and we have more room for them so that more of them are on the field next year on Sundays. And that's something we need to do now, not wait three or four years."

▶ Wood commented publicly on the team's sharp rise in ticket prices for the first time, defending the adjustments as being in line with demand and league-average costs.

"I understand the ticket increase was substantial for certainly lower-bowl seats near the 50-yard line, but I think if people went back and looked at what they could have paid for those seats on the secondary market, and what our playoff games were going for, it’s really where the market is," he explained. "We’ve had 96% renewal rate (on season tickets), so nobody’s really abandoned their tickets. I think it’s approaching 20,000 people on a waitlist.

"And we’ve been very cautious over the years recently in not increasing the prices, and have really fallen quite a bit behind the league average," he continued. "This barely catches us up to kinda just below league average."

▶ On the recently announced partnership between Ford Field and Calvin Johnson's Primitiv Group, Wood emphasized it's only for non-NFL events. He said the partnership grew from the team's mended relationship with the Hall of Famer and wasn't part of the reason for that mending.

"I would say Calvin is completely in the fold now," Wood said. "He was at a lot of our games, as I’m sure you saw, and he was at the playoff games. He was as excited and into it as anyone else watching the games. So I’m glad it worked out the way it has. Time has a way of fixing things. We’ve had a number of very good conversations. Mike Disner’s worked really close to him and his team to bring him back. Primitiv is just an outgrowth of that as opposed to a part of it."

jdrogers@detroitnews.com

@Justin_Rogers