I really appreciate what the Lions are doing. People are often very bad intuitively with strategy, they want to lose by the least rather than maximize their chances to win. If the situation suggests that following a normal game script will almost certainly result in a loss (because the other team is better than you), why not throw out an unusual game script? Raise the variance, try to make the unusual happen, because making the usual happen does not favor you.
The reason coaches refuse to do this relates to my post in last week’s thread about the diffusion of blame and avoiding criticism. It’s not exactly the same situation, but it’s the same principle. If a coach had a choice between winning 5% of the time but trying to keep it relatively close and having a “respectable” loss that wouldn’t draw much criticism, or a a chance to win 20% of the time, but when you lose you suffer an embarasingly large loss with lots of unusual decisions that leave you open for criticism, NFL coaches would take the former almost every time even though the latter increases their chance to win by 4x. Both because their goal is to avoid blame, and because people are really very intuitively bad at strategy and mistake less painful losses as being the best strategy for trying to win when it is often not.