Oh, The Horror!

A portrait of me painted by my son Cesar in 1614 in Paris.

If there is one thing we learned from my predictions for Week 1 it is that I should never, ever make predictions again. I think I wrote exactly the same thing at this time last season, but these ones were so apocalyptically bad that it feels like the trickster known as Hope was playing a practical joke on me when he inspired me to make them. A couple are mildly accurate and the rest, well . . . the rest are ammunition for anyone saying that I should never write anything about football ever again.

Anyway, let's just see how I did and then we can weep together and then I will ritually mutilate my fingers so I can never type and invite you to bite off my tongue so that I can never speak any of this gibberish either. I suppose I could do sign language, so you could cut off my hands but damn it all, I need my hands for, uh . . . well, I guess I need my tongue too, and probably my fingers, but this is quickly spinning in a terrible, terrible direction that none of you want to have to deal with and I apologize. It's bad enough that you all had to experience the horrors of Sunday afternoon, you don't need to be dragged down that sleazy road to hell I had you on there for a moment.

Jesus, let's just get on with it before you come to your senses and get the fuck out of here.

PREDICTION THE FIRST: Delmas will play. Levy will not. This is much better than if that was flipped around.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED: Delmas played and Levy didn't so I got that part right. The other half of the prediction is probably open for interpretation. On the one had, the defense played better than expected - holding the Lions in the game even as the offense was playing like a gang of retarded ground sloths - but on the other hand, the defense gave up roughly a billion yards (463 is basically equivalent to a billion, right?)

Further more, the bulk of the Chicago yardage came through the air - 362 yards to be precise - which would lead one to believe that not only did the defense not perform well but that the secondary, of which Delmas is the unquestioned leader, were the biggest goats. The problem with that is that it ignores what actually happened. Did the secondary play well? No, not really. But much of Chicago's yardage came on underneath routes, in front of or just behind the linebackers. The biggest play came on that little screen to Matt Forte that went for 89 yards that the linebackers failed to contain.

So, what does all that mean relative to "This is much better than if that was flipped around?" which is what I said in the prediction. Well, I think that it was kind of a pick your poison kind of thing. Without Delmas, the passes probably would have been deeper over the middle of the field and we would have given up more big plays. With him and with a weakened linebacking corps, the Bears were content to just pick apart the middle of the Lions defense.

Still, the Lions played bend but don't break football on defense. Oh, they bent alright. They bent like [insert horrible and depraved simile that would bring great shame on me and my family] but they didn't really break, with the exception of the Forte touchdown and the Bears final touchdown of the game. (I won't say that it was the final touchdown of the game, because, well, you know . . .) That was what happened without Levy. Flip that, put Levy in the game and take Delmas out and I think the defense would have given up less in the underneath passing game but would have given up more big plays than just the Forte play. In other words, there would have been a little less bending but a lot more breakage.

Bend but don't break is the phrase that we have to remember this season. The defense is not good enough yet to completely stop teams. It just isn't gonna happen. What happened against the Bears is almost the best case scenario. (I know that's horrifying since the team gave up 463 total yards of offense, but they did only give up 19 points and only 14 until very late in the game against a pass happy team that played to all the Lions weaknesses on defense, so . . . yeah.) Delmas is absolutely vital if that strategy has any chance of working. Levy . . . not so much. Do we need DeAndre Levy. Yes, of course. With him, we probably don't bend as much. But without Delmas? Well, we all identify with the city of Detroit in some way, so . . . yeah, just imagine Detroit, and not the nicer parts down by the river, but the desolate parts that are patrolled these days by coyotes and the Grim Reaper. It'd be a lot like that.

PREDICTION THE SECOND: Stafford will go 23-31 for 317 yards and 3 touchdowns with 1 interception. His progress will be plainly evident.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED: HAHAHAHAHA!

Ahem. I only laugh to keep from crying. Anyway, this was hilariously, disgustingly wrong. Stafford's final numbers before his shoulder was abducted by aliens who looked like Julius Peppers were: 11-15 for 83 yards, 0 TDs and 0 INT. His progress was, uh, not so evident. In fact, before he went out with that despicable injury he was frustratingly mediocre, looking like a quarterback who wasn't confident enough to just pull the trigger and throw the damn ball down the field.

This was pretty much the complete opposite of what I was expecting. I was expecting The Swagger King, the fighter pilot of my dreams who would smirk and bomb that fucker deep to St. Calvin. I was expecting the quarterback of the Browns game from last season. I wasn't expecting Joey Harrington.

Oh Jesus, the shudder that just went through me was otherworldly. And I bet you all just felt the same thing at the mention of that wretched name in conjunction with Stafford's. But shit, The Swagger King looked an awful lot like Captain Checkdown before he was taken away by a cackling Failure Demon, didn't he? Whether that was because of excess caution on Stafford's part or the game plan of Scott Linehan is something that I'll probably talk a bit more about later, but for now, whatever the reason, I'm disturbed. Never did I think that I would be seeing the ghost of Joey hovering around Stafford's being. Shit, maybe he was possessed. If Staff starts smiling and playing the piano then someone call Bill Murray because we've got some Ghostbusting to do.

Anyway, I'll bitch some more about this later, but for now, let it be known that this prediction was hilariously awful. Would Stafford have hit those numbers if he played the whole game? Maybe, but he would have had to throw the shit out of the ball in the second half. I guess we can tack on Shaun Hill's numbers to get a hazy picture of what things looked like for the whole game. All combined, Lions quarterbacks did this: 20-34 for 171 yards, 1 touchdown and 1 interception. (Note that according to the NFL statisticians, Lions quarterbacks officially threw 0 touchdowns, but, well, fuck that, you know?) That's fucking wretched. 171 yards on 20 completions? On 34 attempts? Even worse, is that after sacks, the actual yardage total is only 148. 148! That's 4.3 yards per pass play! Jesus! Look, I watched a lot of Michigan football (as I'm sure some of you did too) in 2008 when Nick Sheridan and Steven Threet were shitting their pants and pretending to be quarterbacks. Even those dudes managed to gain more than 5 yards per pass play. That's right, Lions quarterbacks on Sunday against the Bears were even worse than Michigan's quarterbacks in 2008. And Nick Sheridan and company are basically my baseline for wretched QB play. To be worse than that? Fuck. Excuse me while I go powerbomb a gopher and then lay in the road for a while, at least until a nice big semi-truck rolls by.

PREDICTION THE THIRD: Jay Cutler will throw the ball 45 times, and will complete 31 of those passes for 396 yards and 2 touchdowns. He'll also throw 3 critical interceptions. The Lions pass defense will bend horrifically but it won't quite break.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED: Cutler completed 23 of 35 passes for 372 yards and 2 touchdowns to go with 1 interception. Look, I feel like I kind of nailed this one. The numbers are a little off, particularly the number of interceptions but isn't what I said basically what happened? Cutler threw the ball a bunch of times for a bunch of yards and a couple of scores and the Bears turned the ball over four times. The Lions pass defense bent horrifically but didn't really break. Fuck it, I'm calling this one a win for me. Where the hell is my parade? You give one to Neil Armstrong for walking on the moon but not to me? All that dude had to do was walk. Alright, fine, so he has a cool name. I'll give him that.

PREDICTION THE FOURTH: Jahvid Best will run the ball 21 times for 117 yards and a touchdown.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED: Sigh. Best ran the ball 14 times for 20 yards. He did score 2 touchdowns though.

Even if you accept the explanation that the Lions were trying to establish the run and that's why Stafford never really got going, such a strategy would actually require establishing the fucking run. Jesus, what a debacle. The Lions offense couldn't do anything on Sunday. The Bears linebackers just owned the shit out of the Lions offensive line. Whenever Best got the ball, Urlacher or Briggs or Singletary or Butkus or a gorilla with a machete would be waiting for him in the backfield. It was ridiculous. Again, this will all come in for some more bitching later on and in an effort to keep this from spilling to a billion words, I'll just cut this off by saying that I was hilariously and tragically wrong yet again. I guess you can cancel that parade. Still, fuck Neil Armstrong.

PREDICTION THE FIFTH: Calvin Johnson will be unstoppable, catching 9 passes for 152 yards and 2 touchdowns.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED: *Hangs self*

Oh, you want more than that, you savages? Fine. Calvin caught 5 passes for 76 yards and a touchdown. He did. I don't give a fuck that the official stats say that he only caught 4 passes for 45 yards and 0 touchdowns. They are liars, just like Neil Armstrong.

Shit. I should be making more ambiguous predictions, like:

"Beasts ferocious with hunger will cross the rivers,
The greater part of the battlefield will be against Hister.
Into a cage of iron will the great one be drawn,
When the child of Germany observes nothing."

Nostradamus understood how these things work. Now that's a prediction open to interpretation. I might have gotten away with this shit if I said something like:

Beasts ferocious with hunger will cross the line of scrimmage,
The greater part of the battlefield will be against Stillford.
Into a sling of generic fabric will the great one be drawn,
When the child of Georgia observes no pass rush.

I could have made that work no matter what happened. But no, I had to go and be Mr. Specific. I blame Neil Armstrong.

PREDICTION THE, UH, SPECIAL BONUSETH: After the game, Rod Marinelli will gibber like a buffoon about playing the game the right way and then he will be mauled by an actual bear that was brought to the game as a special mascot. The bear will then run wild until The Great Willie Young wrestles it to the ground. The two will then become inseparable and Willie Young and his Pet Bear will replace Ernie Sims and his monkey in all of our hearts.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED: I'm sure this happened. It did. We just couldn't see it through all the tears and the bile and the vomitous rage. But the sad fact is that The Great Willie Young never wrestled that bear or did anything at all because he was on the Inactive List. Aha! Now we can finally pinpoint where everything went wrong for the Lions. I can only assume that Willie was off fighting demons in the Bayou again or saving whole villages in Africa from Nigerian Dick Thieves. (What? They have that shit over there.) He is a busy man and we cannot begrudge him his responsibilities. Did Lois Lane call Superman a dickhead because he was out saving a busload of orphans from going over a cliff when the bus driver suffered a fatal heart attack? Hell no, she just sighed, laid back on the couch and fired up the ol' vibrator one more time. Let that be a lesson to all of us. (Yeah, you heard me.)

SPECIAL COMMENTATOR PREDICTION FROM THE MYSTERIOUS "ANONYMOUS": The Blood of Jay Cutler will transform The House of Spears into La Magra, and he will reign in blood, becoming the man to finally end the playing career of the Corpse of Brett Favre

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED: Well, our mysterious anonymous commenter made sure to stop by after the game to let us know. Here's what he said: "The Blood of Cutler was spilled by the House of Spears. The prophecy was fulfilled."

Well then, there you have it. Ndamukong Suh is apparently now a super vampire or something. Now, he is ready to reign in blood. Hopefully, the Corpse of Brett Favre knows what's coming and makes his peace with God.