Jesus after playing for the Lions against the Packers in Green BaySunday's game against the Packers is going to be terrible. It's going to be so terrible that it will likely be uncomfortable, like Passion of the Christ uncomfortable. There will be flayed flesh and blood spattered crucifixes, old ladies wailing, dogs howling, and even a Roman soldier or two will show up to kick Shaun Hill in the balls. I'm not sure who will be announcing the game, but by the time the fourth quarter gets there, I'm guessing that he will be completely desensitized and nothing will surprise him. It will sound something like this:
"Well, it looks like a Roman Centurion has rushed the field. We understand his name is Lucius Septimius and he's charging Shaun Hill. Hill avoids the initial rush but he's taken down via a broadsword to the abdomen. I don't think he's getting back up, folks. Stay tuned for after the game when Frank Caliendo is crucified by Pontius Pilate . . ."
Lambeau Field will be a mass graveyard and by this time next week, we'll all be discussing the stunning story that Clay Matthews and Aaron Rodgers have been brought up on war crimes. There will be CSI teams and grave diggers going through the turf for months, finding little bits and pieces of our dignity and pride. It will awful, just horrible.
This is the sort of thing a man pictures when his team hasn't won in Green Bay since 1991. I was 11 years old the last time the Lions managed to not shit the bed against the Packers. Brett Favre was only 37. William Howard Taft was President and Jack Paar enthralled a nation on the Tonight Show with a myriad of jokes about Taft's weight and his moustache, which Paar affectionately labeled "Taft's cum-catcher". I was too young to understand what that meant, but I would sit next to the giant radio in the living room and laugh and laugh and then at the one room schoolhouse the next day, I would retell the joke and then the old schoolmarm would get mad at me and I would tell her to relax because she had a cum-catcher of her own and then I spent the next five years at a Military Academy for Boys in Georgia until the Civil War broke out and I was called home to help milk cows and run illicit booze into Atlantic City with my father.
So yeah, it's been a long, long time. So long in fact that I don't really have any memory of the Lions beating the Packers in Green Bay. I mean, yeah, I'm aware that it happened, much like I'm aware that Ben Franklin died after catching pneumonia after crawling out of some whore's bedroom naked after her husband came home or that Bigfoot was caught in Martha Washington's bedroom sniffing her panties. I know it happened but I don't remember watching it unfold live, you know?
All I have are a sea of painful memories, of Brett Favre mercilessly savaging the Lions like some 14 foot tall giant, gnawing on our bones, drinking our blood and then staggering naked and horrible back to his cave in Mississippi, a despicable modern day Grendel who we've never been able to stop. Even our fiercest warriors have died in the attempt to slay him. Who can ever forget Barry Sanders freezing to death, his corpse picked at by starving dogs while a horde of degenerate Wisconsin heathens, their faces painted with the blood of their enemies, their heads adorned with human bones crudely shaped into the mold of a cheese shaped crown, screamed in their idiot gibberish and we all cried tears of great pain? Who can forget that in the Year of Unnumbered Tears that it was those same heathen degenerates who laughed at our pain and then drove the final spear into our sides even while we swayed listlessly on our knees, bleeding to death, our eyes seeing nothing but the forever of eternity?
Indeed. It has been a horror house (not to be confused with a whore house, although I'm sure there are plenty of those in Green Bay too, all filled with fat women who stink of cheese and ugly drunken pimps with fat faces and Taftian moustaches) and even thinking about playing the Packers in Green Bay is enough to start giving Lions fans the shakes like they just spent a month and a half partying with Iggy Pop and are now trying to get clean in some dank Sanitarium where all the doctors have faces like mutant sea snakes and all the nurses screech like rabid hyenas on meth. There is no peace, just a constant string of pain and terror, occasionally interrupted by a fucked up fever dream or a bout of intense vomiting.
This is our history when it comes to playing the Packers in Green Bay. This is our baseline, our starting point whenever we must discuss these things. That is an ordinary trip across Lake Michigan. This year, we get to do that without our starting quarterback, our savior, and we get to face a team that is favored by many to get to the Super Bowl and that is pissed off after blowing a game against the Bears on Monday night. Well, if you'll excuse me, I am going to go curl up inside of the oven. I just have to wait for it to finish preheating.
Good Lord! This game has driven me to new heights (or lows, I suppose). I am out of my head, lost in the fucked up playground that is my brain. This is a dangerous place to be. No one has ever survived here and it is highly possible that I will be eaten by Bigfoot before I can escape back to reality.
Where am I? What in the hell am I talking about? Get a grip, you shithead, it's only a football game. Okay, okay, okay. Take a deep breath. The Packers.
The good news - if there is any - is that ever since Ryan Grant was sacrificed to the Beer and Cheese Gods (By the way, this is done by submerging the victim in a giant tankard of grain alchohol. If he survives that, he is then injected with melted cheese until he begins crying tears of cheddar. If he survives that, he is then crowned King of Wisconsin and is awarded a harem of buxom dairy cows. But this is supposed to be about football, not the customs of the primitive Wisconsin people. I may be a noted cultural anthropologist on par with the Leakeys or The Situation, but there is a time and a place for everything and this isn't it. I can discuss this at our annual meeting while The Situation does body shots off of the reanimated corpse of Mary Leakey. It's just science. Don't judge us.) the Packers have struggled to run the ball. Perhaps this opens a window for the Lions to compete, but . . . well, yeah, probably not.
The Lions are dead last in the league against the run. This is mostly because Adrian Peterson shed his human skin and terrorized us as a fire demon from hell. So the numbers are a little skewed. Oh wait, I forgot about LeSean McCoy looking like Jim Brown against us. What the fuck is going on? With Ndamukong Suh and Kyle Vanden Bosch up front, this shouldn't be happening.
The good news is that I think the McCoy thing was more of an isolated incident than the start of a trend. Playing against Michael Vick can throw off even the most disciplined of game plans. Discipline breaks down and running lanes open up. That is just the way that shit works. The Peterson game was different in that the Lions appeared to do a good job of getting penetration (insert a Buttheadesque huh huh huh here) and getting tacklers to Peterson quickly. It's just that Peterson is Peterson and can break tackles probably better than any other running back in football. Both performances seem to be atypical in that they were against unique circumstances that aren't likely to be replicable by the average team. Hey, listen to me, I sound like a damn scientist! Yee-haw!
Of course, there is an undercurrent of desperation to that whole last paragraph. The simple and undeniable fact is that those things did happen and that the Lions are last in the league in rush defense. I can try to explain it away all I want and the more I do, the more it sounds like I am just rationalizing in an attempt to mask a horrible reality that I can't face. I'm sure that is true to an extent. But I also think that I'm right and that the Lions run defense should be much better against teams with normal circumstances.
So. What I'm saying is that I think the Lions defense can shut down the run against the Packers, particularly because the Packers can't run the ball without Ryan Grant. The only problem is that this won't matter.
Indeed. The Packers are led by Aaron Rodgers who, since taking over for Brett Favre, has thrown for roughly eleventy billion yards and 6467 touchdowns. He has Greg Jennings, Donald Driver and Jermichael Finley among others as his weapons. Meanwhile, the Lions secondary looks like it is made up of Somalian refugees, a couple of Special Olympians, a Can of Soup and C.C. Brown. They aren't stopping anyone. Well, maybe if we get some food in the Somalian refugees, they can surprise us. And those Special Olympians are hard workers and just because they can't read or process human emotions doesn't mean they can't be great athletes. I mean, just look at Mike Tyson or Dexter Manley. And the Can of Soup can at least get in someone's way for a second or two. C.C. Brown, though, is hopeless.
You get the picture. Aaron Rodgers should be able to throw down the field all damn day and the running game will just be an annoying sideshow for the Packers, pointless and easily ignored. It won't hamper them at all and we'll be left, as always, gibbering and arguing with our dogs about the vagaries of fate. I mean, you're not a Lions fan until you sit in the darkness and plead with your dog and question him about the meaning of life and the existence of a just and loving God while he alternates between licking his own balls and staring at you in wide eyed confusion. The dog, I mean, not God.
Meanwhile, Matthew Stafford is still out thanks to whatever weird gypsy curse was put on him when he was at Georgia and that means that Shaun Hill will be starting yet again for the Lions. It's a lot like last year, when Stafford was out and the Lions trudged into Green Bay with Daunte Culpepper as the starter and then lost 26-0, which . . . Oh God, I don't know if I can go on. I'm just going to sit in the dark and listen to The End over and over again until Col. Kurtz shows up and cuts my throat with a machete.
Ugh.
Jahvid Best is set to start, which is surprising after his toe was frozen in Carbonite. So, uh, that's good news I guess.
Look, I have lost the will to continue here. I was just forced to remember Culpepper and losing 26-0 last year and somehow this time feels like it will be even worse and . . . AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
FIVE NO DOUBT TERRIBLE PREDICTIONS
1. Best will play, but will be less than 100%. He'll manage to run for 65 yards on 14 carries and he'll catch 5 passes for 55 yards.
2. Shaun Hill will complete 20 of 38 passes for 196 yards and a touchdown to go with 2 interceptions. Clay Matthews will skin him alive and spend all of next week wearing his flesh like a suit.
3. Calvin Johnson will be double teamed into oblivion and will catch 4 passes for 46 yards and we will all weep before settling into a nice, placid ennui.
4. Aaron Rodgers will complete 35 of 45 passes for 375 yards and 4 touchdowns. After the fourth touchdown, I will disappear from this plane of existence and I will exist only in a parallel universe where Willie Young and I are wacky roommates with our own sitcom on FOX and whenever you see a rainbow you should think of me. If you want to contact me, find the end of the rainbow and search for a hidden door. Officially, I will be comatose in a mental institution but this is where my spirit will be.
5. *sobs*
PREDICTED FINAL SCORE: PACKERS 38, LIONS 17
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