The Mitten takes a couple of days off (sorry about that) and two-thirds of the football teams I cover hire defensive coordinators.

Today’s High Five:

• For the Lions it’s Gunther Cunningham, Kansas City’s defensive coordinator for the last several seasons and a former Chiefs head coach. Here’s the standard bio and here’s Tom Kowalski saying Cunningham is crazily intense, and then Jim Schwartz pretty much agreeing. After a highly successful run as Chiefs DC in the late 1990s, Cunningham was promoted to head coach. That only lasted a couple of seasons, and after Cunningham was fired, he left for Tennessee. But Kansas City’s defense declined under new head coach Dick Vermeil and his defensive coordinator, Greg Robinson. So Vermeil replaced Robinson with Cunningham, who remained as defensive coordinator when Herm Edwards took over for Vermeil.
• At Michigan, the new DC is the very same Greg Robinson, most recently the head coach at Syracuse. Though Robinson struggled at Syracuse and in Kansas City,  he has a strong track record as a defensive coordinator, including a season at Texas and two Super Bowl seasons with the NFL’s Denver Broncos.
• Good news for Tigers fans: new pitching coach Rick Knapp may already have made a breakthrough with Justin Verlander.
• The Pistons’ shooting guard dilemma is solved: Rip Hamilton will come off the bench. Hamilton is saying all the right things and Michael Curry promises that the Pistons’ starting lineup, which has changed frequently this year after several seasons of model consistency, is set for the rest of the season.
• For all this real news, though, the story of the day belongs to Drew Sharp’s piece about a Los Angeles drama company that’s taken up the Lions’ plight.

Today’s schedule:

• College basketball: Northwestern at Michigan State, 6:30pm (BTN)
• NBA: Toronto at Detroit, 7:30pm (Fox Sports Detroit)