Jim Schwartz wasn't in a very happy mood this week simply because his team lost out on practice time when the NFL took away two of the Lions' OTAs. Schwartz was unhappy with the decision and let it be known that he disagreed with the NFL's ruling.
Schwartz was even more upset on Friday after his team's minicamp came to an early end because a pair of fights broke out during the two-minute drill. Players on the sideline apparently got involved, and Schwartz gathered the team in the middle of the field to chew them out for about 10 minutes to express his displeasure with what happened.
"Yeah, that was too intense," Schwartz said. "We had situation come up before in OTAs and we sort of laughed about that you can’t fine the players. But guess what. There’s going to be a lot of fines from today. It’s not acceptable what happened. We weren’t able to finish a period.
"It’s going to get hot, you’re going to get at the end of practice, you’re going to have things that come up, but when you can’t finish practice and when you have guys entering fights that aren’t involved in it, it’s unacceptable. And they’re going to get taxed pretty heavy for this."
The situation in OTAs Schwartz referred to was a "fight" that happened last month toward the end of a practice. The fight itself was more of a wrestling match than a serious incident, and players joked about it afterward. Even Schwartz had a laugh or two about it, but there was no joking around after what went down on Friday.