How Oceanside's Rob Lohman has survived and thrived in the NFL with the Detroit Lions

A lot has changed for the Detroit Lions since their miserable 0-16 season in 2008. A lot certainly had to.

They have gone through three different general managers and are on their fourth full-time head coach since then, and that doesn’t even include a handful of interims in each of those positions.

They’ve become perennial playoff contenders, too. They have redefined their culture and their expectations. Even though they are 1-1 having allowed a league-high 72 points and coming off a nationally-televised beatdown at the hands of the Bills last Thursday, they still come into Sunday’s game hosting the Jets boasting some of the most talented players in the NFL.

One thing that hasn’t changed in the nearly two decades since they went winless? Rob Lohman.

The Oceanside product who joined the scouting staff for the Lions in 2007 hasn’t just survived all that upheaval, he’s somehow managed to thrive in it. This offseason he was promoted to the team’s vice president of roster operations after spending the previous seven years as director of pro scouting. The roster that nearly every other team in the league is envious of which includes All-Pros Aidan Hutchinson, Jack Campbell, Amon-Ra St. Brown, Penei Sewell and Devin White – not to mention Pro Bowlers Jahmyr Gibbs and Jared Goff – has his Long Island accent all over it.

Despite all the recent personal and team success, though, mentioning those gory days of the 2008 season and the times immediately before and after it still sends shivers through Lohman.

“That was brutal, man,” he told Newsday. “That whole stretch was really rough. I got here in 2007 and we started 6-2. Then we went 1-7 the second half of that year. Went 0-16 the next year. And the following year we went 2-14. So, a lot of losses, a lot of tough times.”

Lohman was a college scout then so he was on the road a lot, but he was based in Detroit so it was impossible to escape the negativity. He recalls attending Thanksgiving dinners during that period and telling his girlfriend – now his wife Mari – he didn’t think he could stomach listening to people talk about the traditional Lions games earlier in the day. “It was really tough mentally to deal with that,” he said.

It taught him a lesson. Or perhaps reinforced it since it’s the same one he learned when he was an undersized player for coach Frank Luisi on the Oceanside team, an undergraduate recruiting manager at the University of South Carolina, an unpaid special teams and recruiting assistant at Hofstra, and a young scout in charge of grading long-snappers in Houston for an expansion Texans front office that didn’t even have a roster yet.

“You persevere,” he said. “You just control what you can control and make sure you do your job to the best of your ability. That's all you can do.”

So he kept at it.

“I was trying to find the best players I could to help us,” he said. “I knew my role wasn't immediate because I was scouting for the draft which is next year and maybe the year after that, so you have to really be able to compartmentalize and focus on your job and what you can do and doing it to the best of your ability.”

To paraphrase an adage: Going 0-16 didn’t kill his career, as it did for many others; it made him stronger.

Finding a role in Detroit

He maintained that core philosophy throughout all the regime changes in Detroit. He began there under Matt Millen and while new general managers Martin Mayhew and Bob Quinn came aboard and brought in their own people, Lohman still managed to make himself valuable. He had other opportunities. Twice the Jets offered him scouting jobs that would have brought him back home to the New York area, but he turned them down to stay in Detroit. And when Brad Holmes was hired as general manager in 2021, it was another period of uncertainty for him.

“You never know in those situations,” Lohman said. “I guess I did a good enough job to stick around.”

And then some. Now he is a vice president, part of the team’s executive management.

“Rob is such a vital part of our player personnel staff and there is a reason he’s had the long career that he has had,” Holmes told Newsday. “His attention to detail with our overall scouting process and his ability to work across different groups of people make him a trusted voice in our department … I’m grateful to have Rob leading our operation. Roster management is a year-round process for us, and Rob plays a major role in that.”

Lohman is one of just two employees in the personnel department whose Lions lineage goes back to 2008. Longtime scout Dave Uyrus is the other. Lohman still keeps in touch with some others who have moved on since, including Cardinals assistant general manager Dave Sears (a Hauppauge native) and Commanders assistant general manager Lance Newmark, who interviewed for the Jets general manager opening two years ago.

“Those are my guys,” Lohman said. “We're not proud we were a part of that, but it's certainly something that we bond together over … We often talk about those times a little more fondly now than we did when we went through them.”

Winning has helped alleviate the sting from those wounds. But they are still there.

Detroit is also where Lohman got to know Jets coach Aaron Glenn, who was the Lions’ defensive coordinator from 2021-24. They’d actually met previously, though. When Lohman was on the lowest rung of the front office in Houston, Glenn was one of the players the team selected in the expansion draft from the Jets. Lohman had nothing to do with that decision, but he was in charge of driving the shuttle bus for the players — including Glenn — in training camp.

Pursuit of a Super Bowl ring

Lohman and Mari have three children, Brenden, Katie and Brynn. Brenden, the oldest, was born in 2011 so he doesn’t have any memory of how bad things were. He only started to really get into football the last few years, a lucky Lions fan no doubt.

“As he got older we started to get competitive,” Lohman said. “We went on that playoff run in 2023 and he was like ‘This is awesome!’ And I’m like ‘Yeah, this is great. It's not always like this.’ ”

Now 50, Lohman still has aspirations, just like he did when he was in Oceanside and knew that despite his lack of size or athleticism – he jokes that the first player he ever scouted was himself and it wasn’t pretty – he wanted to find a career in football.

“When I was a young scout, obviously your aspiration is that you could be a general manager,” he said. “If the opportunity does present itself, that would be awesome. I would love to pursue that. But I certainly wouldn't feel like my career was a failure if that never happens. If ultimately this is the highest point I end up in my career, I'm fine with that because I get to watch football, I get to evaluate players, I get to give my opinions. I really love what I do. That's all I can ask for.”

Well, one other thing too.

“If I retire without a Super Bowl ring, that would be something that would hurt,” he said. “Winning Super Bowls gives you some validation of what you've done. I hope that happens here. And I hope I'm here when it happens. I hope I'm a part of it because this town, it's been through a lot.”

So has he.