Reviewing the Drafts: 2001: (Insert Lame Pun or Play on the movie 2001, perhaps A Shit Odyssey - I don't know, make up your own)

Well, here we are, in that fateful year known as 2001. A lot of stuff, uh, happened in 2001, but for our purposes we will stick to that singular disaster that ended up leaving so many of us in tears, angry and afraid at the same time, confused and left with doubts and questions about who we were and what we represented. It was a savage time, an era fraught with bellicose ramblings and neighbors brawling in the streets with one another, a dark age when we cast aside our morals and our long held beliefs with the aim of hunting down one terrible man who had wrought so much carnage and destruction. Those were evil days and they all began on that fateful day in 2001. Of course, I am talking about the day, that infamous, horrible day, when the Fords hired Matt Millen.

Last year, Millen was finally dragged from his cave or office or wherever, and thrown onto the streets(or behind a desk on NBC, same thing really), and although there was no Mission Accomplished banner hanging on an aircraft carrier while Lions fans celebrated wildly, it was perhaps the only good day in The Year of Unnumbered Tears. Unfortunately, it took over seven years to get to that point, and - deep breath here - right now we're going back to the beginning, a prospect so frightening as to leave me gibbering in front of my computer, having to restrain myself from crying out in horrified anguish while I leap up and run amok, waking the neighbors with unearthly grunts and mournful howling. It's 2001, and here we go.

With their first pick in the 2001 NFL Draft, the 18th overall - yes, once again, the Lions were the upper crust of the decidedly mediocre at that point, and oh how times would change - the Detroit Lions selected Jeff Backus, an offensive tackle out of Michigan. Now, I watched a lot of Jeff Backus in college. He was a good player on a very, very good line. He wasn't the best player - that honor belonged to Steve Hutchinson - but he was good enough to be considered a low ceiling/high floor kind of guy, meaning that whoever drafted him would get a guy who would be almost a sure starter, a guy who would be a solid contributor for years to come, but would probably never be a Pro Bowl type player. It was a safe first pick by Matt Millen and company, and it turned out mostly how people expected it to.

Backus has started every game of his Detroit Lions career, 128 in all, and for the most part he's been someone the Lions didn't need to worry about - at least not as much as just about every other position on the field. He's never been great, or really all that good for that matter, and in a perfect world, the Lions would have been set everywhere else and could have tried to replace him earlier, but this is not a perfect world - sweet Jesus is it not - and the Lions have had to put up with him steadily declining for most of his tenure with the team. Backus is a little small for an elite tackle, not quite athletic enough and most fans think he should be run out of town on a rail. Scouts apparently see something that most fans don't though, and so Backus has stuck at left tackle since he showed up. There is some thought that he should be moved to guard, but this is something that has been talked about since he was drafted and nothing has ever come of it. I'm leery if it ever will and more than likely, another year of Backus - at least - awaits us at left tackle. We just have to hope that his tendency to seemingly give up a sack a game can somehow reverse itself. The probability of this ranks somewhere on the same level as me being pinned with a Medal of Freedom and riding naked on a unicorn in a ticker tape parade flanked by Elvis and Bigfoot. So, yeah, there's about a 98% chance that doesn't happen. The other 2% is because I will continue to hold on to hope that all of the above will in fact happen one day.

The Lions had two second round picks in 2001, and with the first one, the 50th overall, they once again addressed the offensive line, which had indeed been offensive for a number of seasons. Ahem, anyway, shitty puns aside, the Lions drafted Dominic Raiola, who, like Backus(by the way, I almost typed Hutchinson and oh how I wish that was who was in a Lions uniform all these years), has been a perennial starter for the woeful Lions. After one season serving as an understudy at center to Eric Beverly - and Jesus, that 2-14 season in 2001 is starting to make some sense - Raiola took over the starting job and hasn't relinquished it since, only missing time last season due to injury. On the bright side, Raiola has probably been the Lions best offensive lineman since being inserted into the lineup in 2002. Unfortunately, that's not really saying much. Raiola is an athletic center who can hold his own against a good chunk of the league. Unfortunately, he's too small, and when lined up across from a top defensive tackle, or especially against some space eating superhog, Raiola will struggle. Still, he's been a starter for years now, so you have to say this wasn't a bad pick. Of course, it did end up resulting in Raiola flipping off his own fans and then becoming terrified that they would come to his home with guns, but in the world of the Detroit Lions, that unfortunately still qualifies as a successful draft pick. Jesus, I feel nauseas.

With their second pick of the second round, the 61st overall, the Lions decided to bolster the other side of the line by selecting Shaun Rogers, a defensive tackle out of Texas. Rogers was a first round talent with a nineteenth round brain, lazy, unmotivated, but capable of wrestling a grizzly bear to the ground. He should have been a top ten pick on talent alone, but because he is who he is, and because of a litany of injuries which kept him from ever being truly dominant at the college level, Rogers fell all the way to the Lions near the bottom of the second round.

I have killed Rod Marinelli over and over again on this blog for the decision to get rid of Shaun Rogers. That has probably skewed how I actually feel about Big Shaun, as he became sort of a symbol to me of all the bullshit that I have repeatedly slammed Marinelli and company for. The truth however, is that, leaving Marinelli aside, Shaun Rogers was a maddening player who one day would look like Superman(who can forget the unreal ass kicking he gave Denver in 2007?), and the next day he would look like he would rather be at home, sleeping one off, or at the zoo chilling with some seals, or dead in a ditch, or cleaning sewers, or . . . well, you get the point. There were times when Rogers looked like he didn't give the slightest of shits about football and it caused the Lions defense to fall part more than once.

By the time Rogers was traded, he was pretty much reviled by most Lions fans as a lazy, shiftless bag of shit who was just going to drag the team down the more disenchanted with Marinelli he became. I thought that at the very least he could still give the Lions a few games where he could make the difference, but I am an optimist at heart(shut up), and perhaps he would have sunk to new lows, ballooned up to 400 pounds and spent every week holed up in his favorite strip club rather than practice. Whatever. There are no winners in that whole mess and he is done and he is gone and all we're left with is the question of what might have been with Shaun. It's both a tantalizing and a cruel question to ask. If he was everything he could have been, the Lions may have indeed gotten over the hump at some point. But he wasn't, and for a fanbase of an 0-16 team, the what could have beens are almost too terrible to contemplate. It happened, concocting scenarios in which it didn't happen are just an exercise in foolish masochism, and so all we can do is wave goodbye to Big Shaun and wash our hands of the whole terrible thing.

Oddly enough, the 2001 Draft, Millen's first, was also his most successful, as the Lions landed three quality starters - at least by Lions standards - with their first three picks, including two stalwarts on the offensive line and a defensive tackle who was a two time Pro Bowler while with the Lions. You can't get too worked up over that, and there were no real bombs or busts in this class, but the devil always comes with a smile and a handshake, and if we would have known what the future held in Detroit with that buffoon Millen in charge we would have ignored the seemingly competent first draft and began loading up on the torches and pitchforks then and there. 2001. It was a wild year, terrible and strange, and it was just the beginning.