Random Nonsense

Fellas, please, let love open the door to your hearts.

FEEL THE HATE FLOW THROUGH YOU. YEEEEEEESSSSSSSS.

Everyone has players that they love to hate. Hell, hating on Brett Favre has practically become a national pastime. Growing up, I was a fan of the Bad Boys Pistons who everyone in the world hated except for their own fans. Bill Laimbeer might be one of the top 5 hated basketball players of all time. And then there is Isiah Lord Thomas III who was blackballed from the first Dream Team because everyone hated him so much. And let's not forget Rick Mahorn and Dennis Rodman, and . . . okay, you get the point.

The thing is, is that there has never been a Lions player - not in my lifetime anyway - who has received that kind of disdain from the general public. Part of this is because in order to be hated you have to actually be, you know, relevant. That's hard to do when your team is going 6-10 every year. On the rare occasion where a Lion has been good enough to break through into the public consciousness - think Barry Sanders - everyone just sort of pities the poor fool for being involved with this Hindenburg of a franchise. People are already doing it with Calvin Johnson.

So, I'm actually kind of happy that we seem to have a player who I think everyone is destined to hate. And that man's name is Matthew Stafford. Think about it. The dude has all the ingredients of a hateable player: he's cocky as hell, he's talented, he's tough and he's got the media singing his praises for that toughness. No one likes to watch the quarterback for the other team throw a touchdown, then run down the field with his tongue hanging out, a cocky grin on his face while the announcers blather on about his toughness and about how he once killed a Nazi by throwing a football straight through the fiend even though he had two separated shoulders and was temporarily blind.

Stafford is 21 years old, he still throws way too many interceptions, is maddeningly inconsistent, and is the quarterback for a team that is 2-9. Still, despite all that, following the game against the Browns, he can't be on camera without some fool in the booth gushing over his toughness and throwing out 168 clichés per minute. Hell, I was watching some college football over the weekend, and during the Georgia/Georgia Tech game, they showed Stafford standing on the sideline, and one of the announcers, who for the sake of my own sanity shall remain nameless, began falling all over himself about what a tough guy Stafford was. It was ridiculous. As soon as the Lions start winning(yeah, shut up), everyone is going to hate this dude. Haaaaaaaaaate him. And I love it.

THAT'LL DO, DAUNTE. THAT'LL DO.

One of the more ridiculous images from Thanksgiving was Daunte Culpepper stomping around like a pissed off third grader when he was told that he wasn't going to be starting. Yeah, Daunte, you're not the starter and you should be happy that someone is willing to keep your 300 pound corpse propped up on the sideline for another year. You haven't been relevant except for as a punch line to a bad joke in the last five years and every time you are on the field the whole experience just feels miserable and utterly without hope. But thanks for being ready, I guess.

All that may be a little harsh, but fuck it, I am sick of the past and nothing screams the past more than Daunte Culpepper with his retarded little dance. The best thing to happen to this franchise this season is Matthew Stafford cementing himself as the starter in everyone's mind. It wasn't that long ago that there was a sizeable portion of the fanbase hollering for Culpepper to start over Stafford. I am happy that those days seem to be done, but every time they show Culpepper on the sideline, I get a terrible chill that runs up my spine, the same sort of chill that I get just before I have to wrestle a methed up werewolf or bare knuckle box an escaped vampire ape. Okay, okay, those things have never happened . . . OR HAVE THEY???

Anyway, just stand there and hold your clipboard Daunte, and maybe you can get through the rest of the season without your knee falling off and maybe you can con some other desperate team into giving you their starting job next year, and then you can have a whole new fan base hate you. Okay, I'm sorry, I don't really hate Daunte, it's just that I hate what he represents, which is the past, which is failure, which is explosions and piles of bones and bleach drinking parties and the screams of the dying and rivers of blood and tears of acid and 0-16 and oh God I'm hyperventilating someone get me a paper bag I don't want to think about this anymore and . . . breeeeeeaaaaaathe.

OKAY WHO HAS THE VOODOO DOLL?

The Lions just put Brandon Pettigrew on injured reserve after his knee told him to fuck off and that it wasn't thankful for jack shit on Thanksgiving. Poor guy. Poor us. Pettigrew seemed like he was starting to really put it together at tight end and he and Stafford had developed an excellent rapport. Oh well, at least we'll always have the Cleveland game, Brandon.

The ridiculous thing about this is that about a quarter of the team is on injured reserve now, and besides those dudes, it seems like just about everyone else on the Lions has been hurt at some point this season. By my count, at least 14 starters have had injury issues this season, ranging from blown out knees to fucking root canals. It's kind of hard to win when your sideline looks like the tent following a Civil War battle. I bet the Fords never thought they would be shelling out cash for a bone saw. Right about now, I imagine the medical staff is running out of morphine or ether and is making dudes bite down on a rag or a stick to keep from screaming out in pain. It's fucking ridiculous. In a couple of months we'll see Pettigrew come out on crutches with a huge bandage around his knee and the bottom half of his leg missing. Does Stan Kwan have a brother running around in the training staff or something?

WELL . . . OKAY

Speaking of ol' Kwan, I suppose I should cut him slack. After all, the kick coverage units were noticeably better against Green Bay. They got to the return men quickly, they tackled well and they even managed to force the turnover which led to the Lions early touchdown, which was the catalyst in the Lions upset victory against the . . . wait, what? They kept playing after that? Well, shit, never mind.

In any event, I was actually encouraged by the play of the gunners on special teams. Perhaps they have finally tightened things up there, or maybe this is all Zach Follett transforming himself into 11 dudes using whatever heathen magic they cook up over there in Berkeley. I don't know. Who really cares? I'm just happy they finally don't look like a bunch of retarded ground sloths every time they run down to tackle the kick returner.

Of course, the kick return game is still a huge joke, but what the hell, we'll take what we can get, I suppose. The worst possible thing to come out of this new found semi-competence, however, would be for Stan Kwan to somehow leverage it into sticking around for another year. That would be horrible. Hopefully, everything works out, the coverage units continue to play better, and Jim Schwartz orders a team of highly trained brutes from Singapore to string Kwan up by his hands from a shower head in the locker room and cane the shit out of him. Harsh? Of course, but these are terrible times and these things happen.