Awake, noble beast.Preseason games are almost always mostly worthless. I say that from the perspective of the fan. For the coaches and the players themselves, of course the games are valuable. They give the team a chance to see how certain guys perform in a game situation and allow the starters to knock off some rust. Still, guys get hurt - guys always get hurt - and you would think that the coaches and players would be overjoyed if they could shrink the preseason by a couple of games. I mean, really, the coaches get a pretty good sense of who they want on the team and who they want to have escorted out of the building by security just by watching them practice and scrimmage day after day. That's their job, you know? By the time the dudes who are truly fighting for roster spots get into the game, the other team usually has their third stringers out too and the whole thing becomes pretty pointless. I mean, who gives a fuck how your undrafted free agent safety does against the other team's third string quarterback and a receiver who won a contest to play for his favorite team for a day?
To the average fan, this shit is damn near intolerable. By the time the game ends, it's some sub-UFL bullshit, just a bunch of random dudes wandering around the field trying desperately to do anything to impress the middle aged man roaming the sidelines screaming at people, like street walkers auditioning for some savage pimp. And while there may be some train wreck entertainment potential to all that, for the most part it's boring as hell. No one gives a shit about the score (Remember, the Lions went 4-0 in the preseason once, which got everyone all excited for a surely glorious season, a season that turned out to be . . . 0-16. NEVER AGAIN.) Everyone just keeps looking at the clock wondering when the fucking thing will be over.
But, of course, we are not the average fan. We are superfans, idiots and nerds and obsessive compulsives who nitpick every little thing, tearing our hair and beating our breasts, gnashing our teeth and speaking in tongues when we argue about who the 53rd man on the roster should be or whether or not the retarded farmboy discovered by the coaches baling hay and wrestling cows deserves to be on the Practice Squad or not. We scream and we fight and we bitch and we moan about every tiny stupid thing and therefore we convince ourselves that the image of said retarded farmboy laying a monster hit on the ditch digger playing 5th string quarterback for a week before he gets cut and goes back to his real life is somehow meaningful. It's absurd.
Look, I don't mean to utterly demean the preseason. It is exciting - for the first few minutes anyway. Yes. The first quarter is worthwhile. The first quarter is that time when the starters mostly go up against the other starters. It's the only time during the preseason that actually seems like real, genuine football. We don't have to trick ourselves into caring. We don't have to tell ourselves things like "Well, I'm kinda interested in seeing how that retarded farm boy handles himself if he gets chop blocked by that homeless guy the other team signed to practice at right tackle." For a few minutes at least, it's our stars against your stars, and for the first time in months, we have football.
And that's where we were on Saturday night against the Steelers. Well, sorta anyway. You see, I actually missed the first few minutes of the game. Oh, I was there, watching, but instead of the game, I got five minutes of a MASH episode instead. Indeed. It would seem that the local nickel and dime station responsible for airing the Lions preseason games had some technical difficulties. Now, I was expecting some problems. After all, preseason game coverage is notoriously substandard, a ridiculous affair with production values that even the members of a junior high AV Club would scoff at and announcers who seem like they were pulled out of the line at a local soup kitchen before the game and told that if they just yammered on for a few hours they would get an extra bag of crackers and a bottle of Thunderbird and maybe even a cot for the night. But I wasn't expecting for them to be so shitty that they would be unable to even broadcast the start of the game.
I mean, shit, what was the problem? Were they really so inept that they didn't even know how a broadcast works? I mean, what the fuck was going on? Who was in the production truck? Ernie Sims' monkey? Was that scandalous little dude in the truck just mashing buttons and throwing his poop at people? Is that what happened? If it is, you can tell us. We'd understand. Hell, I'll be delighted if it turns out that the little fella is still around, part of the family. After all, everyone knows that Old Man Ford believes in loyalty. I could see him ordering Tom Lewand to give Monkey Sims a job with the organization.
Okay, okay, this is starting to spin out of control and I apologize. Anyway, the production was so bad that there wasn't even a delay when it came time to start the game. There was no black screen or anything. An episode of MASH just started up, almost like it was scheduled to, like they knew they were going to fuck up. They are so lousy and beaten that they are more prepared to fail properly than they are to succeed. They can't broadcast a game, but damn it all, they can get a fucking episode of MASH out with the best of them.
There is a joke to be made here about that being the appropriate production team for a franchise like the Lions, but I am above such nonsense and so I won't make that joke. Well, I suppose I sort of just did, so fuck that I guess. (Also, Goddamn, how was MASH ever a hit show? It was like watching a shitty sitcom without the laugh track. Just bizarre. I mean, you'd have guys making jokes and then pausing where the laugh track should go, only there was nothing. Just awkward silence. To be honest, I thought I remembered MASH having a laugh track, but . . . oh fuck this.)
Okay, I'm just starting to ramble now. (Starting!?) Anyway, the idiots in production finally managed to get the game moving across the airwaves and the first thing I saw was the Lions starting with the ball inside of their own five yard line. Well, that's just great. Apparently, there was a fumble or something or a Steeler shit his pants or a fan ran onto the field naked and began accosting the refs or Ben Roethlisberger managed to wriggle out of his Roger Goodell approved chastity belt and ran amok in the stands, wiggling his dick at anything with breasts, which unfortunately culminated with him in the upper deck, pantsless, masturbating in front of a fat longhaul trucker named Sal who was at least a B-Cup. Look, I didn't see what happened and so I am forced to use my imagination, which as you all know is a very, very dangerous thing. If you don't want me to make up wild scenarios that end with Big Ben attempting to fuck an old fat man then just show me the damn game, alright?
As for the game itself, once I was actually able to watch, I came away with an odd feeling for a Lions fan: hope. It's strange. Even in that season when the Lions went 4-0 in the preseason I didn't feel any hope at all. You can go back to my first posts on this blog and you will see that I was predicting utter disaster before the first game of that miserable season. And yet, coming off of two seasons where my favorite team's combined record is 2-30, I watch them play and I feel hope.
Perhaps I have been beaten and wrecked so badly, tortured by the Failure Demon so heinously, that I no longer have any grip on reality. This is a distinct possibility. I'm man enough to admit that. And yet, I don't know, in that first quarter against the Steelers I felt like I was watching something unfamiliar, something different than I've seen in the last decade of pain. I was watching a real live football team, my football team, and they actually looked . . . good?
Yes. Good. I said it. And I don't mean that in a relative way either. I don't mean that they looked good when compared to how shitty they normally look. Hell, the bronze medal winning football team from the Special Olympics would look good compared to the shitbirds who have called themselves the Detroit Lions over the last ten years. (Do they play football in the Special Olympics? Because if they do, then I would watch that shit. So would you. Don't lie. I know, it's horrible, but you know it's true. Look deep within yourselves and tell me that it's not.)
No, I mean they actually looked good when compared to other NFL teams. They did. Stop laughing and just listen to me, okay? It was amazing. It was a revelation to be honest with you. So this is what a good team looks like? That thought ran through my head during that first quarter.
And why not? After all, Matthew Stafford looked cool, calm and confident as he shredded the Steelers defense. Sure, he had one interception but that was one of those freak ones that should have been caught but was tipped by Jahvid Best right into the arms of a waiting defender. Other than that, he just dropped back and hit his receivers at will. It was a glimpse of true talent, a window into the dreams of our future.
Meanwhile, Jahvid Best looked like the real deal at running back. He showed the ability to get it to the outside and impressed me with his ability to bang in between the tackles. His most impressive run was almost, dare I say it? Yes, I will. Barry Sandersesque. Oh shit, I think the ground just rumbled below my feet. I apologize, but even though that may be an extraordinarily hyperbolic and possibly heretical thing to say, it's not far off from the truth. The dude was caught by two defenders five yards in the backfield and he made them look like dumb assholes, making a sweet little move, spinning out of it and then managing to turn a five yard loss into a five yard gain. By that point, I was becoming irrationally excited.
You see, it wasn't just that the offense was kicking the Steelers' defense's ass. It wasn't just that Matthew Stafford looked like the man, or that St. Calvin looked like, well, like St. Calvin, or that Jahvid Best was trying to resurrect the ghost of Barry or that the offensive line was absolutely handling the Steelers defense, giving Stafford a nice pocket to throw from on virtually every play. That was all great. That was what we hoped it would be. Our dreams looked like they had finally started to coalesce and come together, to stop being just dreams, amorphous and hazy in the back of our minds. They were becoming real. We were awake and this was all happening.
But it was something else that had me feeling giddy. It was the defense. The godforsaken defense. If we dreamed about the offense and smiled, we had nightmares about the defense and shivered. There was no pretense there, no outlandish hopes, just a realistic expectation of death. When we looked at the offense, at Matthew Stafford, at St. Calvin, at Best, we saw the sun start to rise, pale and distant on the horizon. It wasn't here yet, and it wasn't warm, but we could see it and we knew that soon enough it would be overhead and a new day would be here, a day filled with warmth and happiness and that sweet, sweet sunshine. But then we would look at the defense and there was no sun rising on the horizon. There was just cold darkness, vicious and unrelenting, and we would remember that this was our world, that this cruel and terrible wasteland was our reality.
No matter how much we looked to the offense and dreamed of the sun, the defense and its cold, bleak reality kept us tethered to our pain, to our many horrible failures, and hope was twisted into something cruel that almost mocked us. We could see it, but we knew that we could never touch it, could never have it. Hope was unattainable. It was just a dream and nothing more.
But then I watched the defense - particularly the defensive line - utterly destroy the Steelers first team offense and suddenly it wasn't just a dream anymore. Suddenly, I could see the first rays of the sun's light peak above the horizon when I looked at the defense and there it was. There was hope, attainable and real.
It was amazing - almost disorienting really - to watch the defensive line just crush the Steelers. The middle of the line, led by Ndamukong Suh, continually pushed back the middle of the Steelers offensive line. There was nowhere for the Steelers running backs to go. Meanwhile, Kyle Vandenbosch was absolutely destroying the Steelers offensive line, wrecking plays almost by himself. And then you had Cliff Avril flying across the line on the other side and sacking the quarterback. It was awesome. I was almost giddy watching it. This wasn't just one player having a good game. This was a single unit, working together and dominating. Yes, that's right. Dominating. Vandenbosch and Avril were so dominant on the outside that it funneled everything inside, where Suh and company, aided by the linebackers, cleaned up. Meanwhile, the defensive tackles were getting such good push that the Steelers were forced to double team Suh, which opened Vandenbosch and Avril up to make plays and get to the quarterback. It was symbiotic and beautiful, the way they all worked together.
Of course, you can say that they were only facing Byron Leftwich because Ben Roethlisberger was day to day (rape) and that it was only one quarter of football - and preseason football at that. But we are optimists in our hearts and so we won't travel down that awful road known as pessimism. We have lingered on that horrible road for far too long and we have seen many good men die alongside of it.
Look, I know that I want to believe so badly that it is probably causing me to go all crazy here, and I don't mean to, but, well, I am like a retarded boy with a strange and exciting new toy when it comes to this happiness stuff. I get it and I just start freaking out and making weird noises, hoots and grunts of happiness, and we can only hope that I don't get too excited and smash it against the wall or pet it until it don't breath no more, George. Yes, I just compared myself to Lennie Small. It is so unfamiliar that it is almost overwhelming. I do not know how to properly calibrate my dreams when it comes to the Lions. I do not know how to put it all into perspective. Joy - pure, real joy - is so unfamiliar to me as a fan that I will embrace it whenever I can, no matter how small. This is what we must do as Lions fans. When we can find joy and meaning and happiness and fulfillment in something - anything - no matter how small, we must embrace that shit to the fullest. It was one quarter of one preseason game. Meaningless and at the same time incredibly meaningful. You can laugh at me all you want, but I don't give a shit. I saw something that made me smile, that made me believe. It was something that made me feel like the future that only lived in my wildest hopes and dreams was real, and I'm not going to apologize for embracing that.
Of course, then the starters all left and things went to shit and the future receded into the far off distance once again and the reality of the present was laughing in our faces yet again. We have no depth. That much is obvious. But I'll take our problem of a lack of quality depth over our old problem of lacking quality anything. We can compete with other teams now - so long as everything goes right anyway and no one is ever injured and none of the starters ever get tired, and . . . you can see that the dream is not yet sustainable. There is life here, but it is fragile and it is young and it can all collapse in a hurry and then it's DEATH INC.
I will admit something here - I didn't watch much of the second half of the game. In fact, I barely saw any of the second half at all. I got what I came for. I saw hope and I saw that my dreams were going to come true one day and that was enough for me. I even had some pleasant surprises. I saw the defense look dominant - if only for a quarter - and I saw players like Ryan Phillips step up and give me hope that maybe the secondary wouldn't be a complete waste.
I didn't want to wallow in misery like we are so often forced to as Lions fans. I didn't want to stick around and have those good feelings, that hope, disappear underneath an avalanche of misery. I didn't want to watch CC Brown make me depressed and cynical about the defense again. It was bad enough to watch Dennis Dixon start to tear up the backups like he was still at Oregon playing against Michigan in '07 again. (Oh, the horror! The horror . . .) I didn't need to see anymore. And apparently God agreed, as he did his best to cancel the damn thing. The skies opened and the thunder and lightning came and I can only assume that God had also had enough. After all, his boy St. Calvin was done for the night and so He didn't need to watch anymore.
The first preseason game is over and I didn't mean to write quite this much about it, but it felt like a microcosm of everything we're going through as Lions fans - hope and beauty coexisting with fear and failure. There is still much misery ahead, terrible and painful, but the light isn't just on the horizon anymore. No, it's around us, fighting with the darkness for our souls and that's what this season is all about. The light is finally here and the glorious war with the darkness has finally arrived. The light might lose this season, but fuck it, in the end I believe that it will win. Is that unrealistic? A fool's hope? Maybe. Hell, probably. But so what? Hope is a good thing and we are all warriors of light in our hearts. Football is here. Let's do this thing.
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