Richard the First, aka Richard the Lionheart. Get it, because there is a Lion in the name? Okay, fine, to hell with you too. There? How do you like it? Wait, who am I talking to? What's going on?Coming into the season, the game against the Bengals this week was one that every Lions fan pointed at and said "We should win that one." Actually, "pointed at" might not be the proper phrase there. Actually, it was more like "clung to" or "dug in with claws" or "kidnapped and locked in the basement" or "for the love of God we might be bad, but at least we probably won't be as shitty as the Bengals" or "if we don't win that one I'm going to jump on a bicycle and pedal furiously off the pier into Lake Michigan in December. When they find my frozen body, have them send it to Ford Field with a note saying 'I hope you're happy'." So, yeah, everyone was kinda looking forward to this one. And then the Bengals started winning, and then won some more and kept on winning until we find ourselves at this sad little moment where everyone is looking at this game as just one more that the Lions will surely lose.
This isn't a surprise. Even though things are a little better and we seem to finally be moving forward a bit, there are still very few teams that I would feel confident playing. Hell, improvement for us means 2-9. That is how apocalyptic our sad little world had become last season. Digging out of it is a slow and painful process and even though we are almost 3/4 of the way through this season, I would only feel confident playing the Browns, the Buccaneers, the Rams(yeah, yeah, I know), and maybe the Chiefs and the Raiders. I think the Redskins would win if that game was played again today and really, I wouldn't even be that confident going into games against those other teams. Hell, we already lost to the Rams, we barely beat the Browns and who the fuck knows what would happen against those other turds. The simple and undeniable truth is that we are firmly entrenched within that terrible group. It is ugly and it is awful, but better as things are, they are still bad enough that our improvement is still akin to other teams' utter misery and degradation.
There is little point in expecting - or really even hoping for - victory against any team not lost in that terrible maelstrom of failure. And, this season, at 8-3, the Bengals certainly aren't in that group. Of course, that doesn't mean that the retarded optimist buried within me won't be cheering like a simple jackass, hoping against hope that the Lions will miraculously pull their asses out of the fire, but let's face facts here: the Lions are going to lose again, and that's that.
The Bengals are terrific at two things this season: running the ball and stopping the run. The Lions haven't been able to run the ball much all season but they have seemed at least semi-functional against the run. The latter is probably more a function of teams realizing that they can throw for a million yards for a million years on the Lions than it is of the Lions run defense actually being okay, but what the hell, we must cling to any shred of hope we can find, no matter how delusional. After all, the reality is that the numbers aren't at all good - they're still pretty damn bad actually. The Lions are 19th in the league against the run, which is below average, but fuck it, below average is world's better than whatever soul destroying horrors we witnessed a year ago.
Still, the Bengals like to run the ball, and are pretty damn good at it. They have jumped on the back of Cedric Benson and let him carry them to the seventh best rushing attack in the NFL. Even after Benson went down with an injury, the Bengals didn't miss a beat, as the corpse of Larry Johnson and some dude named Bernard Scott both ran for over 100 yards in his absence. In fact, last week against the Browns, both players nearly ran for 100 yards. Johnson had 107 and Scott had 87 and both ran for almost 5 yards every time they touched the ball. This week, Benson will be back, and well, that is not a good sign. The Bengals have a stable of running backs who can all run the ball effectively, meaning that if they decide to play it safe and keep it on the ground then the Lions will probably find themselves run over.
Yeah, the thing about that is that the Bengals probably won't play it all that safe, and really, why should they? After all, the Lions pass defense remains apocalyptic, like the secondary is stuck in some weird time flux where it's still 2008 and a nation waits with greedy and cruel eyes to see if the Lions can go 0-16. Seriously, these dudes are just ass ugly, and I'm pretty sure that the dude who played Corky back in the day could wander onto the field and throw for 300 yards and a couple of touchdowns against them. He would be celebrating, acting the fool, carried out on the shoulders of his teammates while Philip Buchanan, Will James and the gang would be lying in the middle of the field in a pool of their own piss and tears, trying desperately not to shit themselves too. It would be an awful scene, just terrible and while it may be a heartwarming scene for everyone else to see Corky enjoy his day in the sun, for Lions fans it would be terrible and utterly without joy. That is what it has come to here, weird envy of retarded dudes based on absurd scenarios that never happened and never will happen. Damn that Corky, I will see him in hell.
Okay, clearly this thing has fried my brain, but to hell with all that, there is still football nerdery to be explored and explore it we shall. Carson Palmer hasn't thrown for 300 yards in almost two years - a testament to both the collapse suffered by the Bengals last season and the efficiency of their run game in this redemptive season - and he hasn't had a massively explosive season or anything this year, with 2300 yards and 15 touchdowns so far, but hell, just re-read the previous ridiculous paragraph. Palmer will be able to throw all over the Lions all day long and then after the bodies of the dead and dying are dragged out of the Lions secondary by a team of Priests he'll be able to throw some more. The Lions are dead last in the NFL against the pass, giving up over 280 yards a game and opposing QB's have a collective rating of 111.8 and have completed 70.5 percent of their passes. That is just abominable. Palmer has shown in the past that he is capable of lighting the scoreboard up, and when you combine all of these terrible elements into a stew, well, it is one that should make you vomit. Repeatedly.
So, the Lions probably won't be able to stop Cincinnati's offense. I guess that means they will have to score a lot on their own if they're going to have a chance. Unfortunately, Matthew Stafford and Calvin Johnson are still both banged up and while they will both play, neither will be as effective as they would normally be. That means that Kevin Smith will need to come through. Yeah, the problem with that is - as I briefly mentioned earlier - the Bengals are really good at stopping the run. In fact, their entire defense is pretty damn good and has improved as the season has gone on. It's hard to envision a banged up Stafford taking over the game and managing to keep pace with the Bengals offense. I mean, let's not get carried away here. For as much as we are all extolling Stafford's many virtues, he is still a rookie and he has still thrown 18 interceptions. To expect him to carry the Lions to victory against one of the top defenses in the NFL is ludicrous.
The Bengals are third in the league against the run, meaning that Smith - who has been banged up in his own right and hasn't exactly impressed this season - likely won't be able to do a whole lot. Add in the fact that the Bengals should be able to score plenty of points of their own and you have a recipe for a game in which, unfortunately, the ball has to be in Stafford's hands a lot. He'll have to throw and throw some more and when his whole body is sore and he's already thrown three interceptions, he'll have to keep on throwing. The only glimmer of hope here is that the Bengals are kind of middle of the road against the pass - they're only 16th in the league - but this is probably a function of teams not being able to run at all on them more than anything else. A closer look at the numbers show that the Bengals are thrown on the 8th most of any team in the NFL, meaning that you would expect them to be more like 24th or so than 16th against the pass. The fact that they are still better than 8 other teams who have had the ball thrown on them less than the Bengals kind of shows that Cincinnati might actually be pretty good defending the pass. That is kind of confusing, I suppose, but you know, I'm not usually the dude who breaks down the stats like this but I am feeling extra nerdish so please forgive me both for the nerdery and any confusion that results. To put things into even sharper focus, the Bengals are actually 9th in the NFL when it comes to opponent's completion percentage, meaning that teams like to throw the ball against the Bengals but aren't terribly successful when they do. The upshot of all this statistical gibberish? The Bengals defense is good - damn good - and there's probably little the Lions can do to move the ball consistently and effectively.
Okay, so statistical digressions aside, the Lions do have a secret weapon in Calvin Johnson. Ah, St. Calvin. He's the one dude who can make everything else irrelevant if he decides to play like the beast he is. Unfortunately, he's also a little banged up and has Leon Hall, one of the better cornerbacks in the league, covering him this week. Still, Johnson has an athletic advantage over, well, over anybody. If he can get things going with Stafford then maybe, just maybe, he can make things interesting. Still, I wouldn't get my hopes up.
Okay, so I have pretty much annihilated the Lions in this post and talked up the Bengals like they are having my child, but that would just be weird and I will go no further with that little bit of disturbing imagery. I guess the reason to watch this week would be to see the little glimpses of the future that we have managed to see in virtually every game this season - the impossible throws by Stafford, St. Calvin loping away from the defense, DeAndre Levy or Jordan Dizon or Louis Delmas smacking someone in the mouth - and because this is our team, and even when they are bad, they are still ours and fuck those other dudes in the other uniform. We may lose - we probably will lose - but we have been through worse, and there will be better days ahead. This is threatening to devolve into schizophrenic gibberish again, and so, yeah . . . on with the predictions.
FIVE PREDICTIONS
1. Matthew Stafford will start and will be forced to throw the ball a lot. He'll end up airing it out 50 times, completing 27 of them for 310 yards, two touchdowns . . . and three interceptions. After the game, Daunte Culpepper will throw a fit in the locker room. It will later be determined that this is due to diaper rash.
2. The Lions will try to run the ball with Kevin Smith early on, but a combination of his being largely ineffective against the Bengals run defense and the Bengals offense forcing the Lions offense to have to throw to keep pace will render Smith largely irrelevant. He'll end up with around 15 carries for 40 yards or so.
3. Calvin Johnson will struggle a little bit thanks to his nagging injuries. He'll still catch 6 passes for 90 or so yards and a touchdown, but he won't be quite the difference maker that the Lions need to stay in the game.
4. Carson Palmer will throw for 300 yards and 3 touchdowns and Cedric Benson will run for 100 yards and a touchdown. After the game, Gunther Cunningham will throw his hands up in disgust and then, in a fit of anger, will challenge Ernie Sims' monkey to a duel. Hopefully, cooler heads will prevail, but you don't wanna fuck with that monkey. He'll cut you.
5. And because I have nowhere else to put this, I would just like to mention that I was channel surfing the other night and saw some Monster Hunter bullshit thing on the History Channel where they were looking for Chimpanzees who were rumored to be living in the Florida Everglades. It was all vaguely ridiculous, with people interviewed about sightings and such like they were after fucking Bigfoot, but my favorite part was the matter of fact newspaper story they discussed where cops pulled over a Chimp who was driving a car. It was treated with complete seriousness, like yeah, why the fuck not? It was hilarious and I knew I had to mention it here somewhere. Rather than look for a way to turn it into some stupid joke, I wanted to discuss it in full even if it has nothing to do with the Lions. I didn't stay tuned to watch the rest of it, so I don't know if they found any Chimps in the wild or anything - I mean, there were fucking cartographers trying to prove that the environments of Florida and Mali were comparable enough for it to be possible - but I'd like to believe that it's true and I'd also like to believe that a gang of super-intelligent Chimps are hanging out on the side of the Florida highway, carjacking lonely motorists. My prediction - in order to keep this in line with the fact that this is supposed to be a prediction and is technically supposed to be about the Lions - is that soon we will see breaking news of a high speed chase in Florida involving a coked up Chimp at the wheel of a stolen car and that it will only end when he crashes into a tree and is then eaten by a lion. Why there would be a lion on the loose is beyond me, and why it would somehow find itself at the scene is even more unfathomable, but fuck it, this is my prediction. It is a strange world, and perhaps only I find this humorous and amazing, but to hell with it, sometimes I am a strange man and these are the things that please me.
PREDICTED FINAL SCORE: Oh, uh, shit, BENGALS 31, LIONS 10
NUMBER OF TIMES I THINK ABOUT CHIMPS TO MAKE ME FORGET THAT THE LIONS ARE LOSING: 12
No comments:
Post a Comment