Leave him alone, you witch. He already got his balls fondled so you could get your coke money. What more do you want from him?I kinda wanted to save this for the half way point in the season because my scientist friends tell me that would be symmetrical, but fuck those geeks, we’re doing it now. This is because it’s a bye week which means I don’t have a game preview to do. But, I still want to bring the content because I said I would and I am a stubborn son of a bitch. Next week will likely see a variety of desperate attempts to write something interesting, which will mean you’ll get the second half of this thing, focusing on the defense, the Dick Stockton annihilation that I’ve been promising, and maybe an extra Willie Young thing stuck in there. Oh, I’ll also be doing something for Ty for his Barry Week, which should be fun and so look for that over at The Lions in Winter sometime next week.
Anyway, before I get started, I just wanted to remind everyone that you can follow me on twitter. The twitter handle or whatever the fuck it’s called is armchairlb. And you can e-mail me at neilabfree@gmail.com if you want to hit me with some knowledge, yell at me or just say hey. I may be a lunatic, but I am an accessible lunatic. Also, we’re always looking for more contributors who have something to say about their teams, and if you feel like you can fit in with our gang of heathens, don’t be shy. Just let me know and we’ll get that shit set up.
Okay, with all that dumb bullshit out of the way, let’s just get to this, shall we?
QUARTERBACKS
It’s hard to say what the situation is right now, because really it just feels a lot like it did going into the season, doesn’t it? Only maybe a little worse because of the injuries to Stafford and Hill? Yeah. We’ve barely seen Matthew Stafford play after Jeff Backus waved at Julius Peppers and offered him a lollipop and a smile while Julius ran right by him and murdered Stafford. This led to weeks of Stafford standing on the sidelines in a baseball cap and a horrible shirt that looks like it was designed by the methed out bastard child of Ed Hardy and whoever the fuck it was who made those Zubaz pants back in the day. It’s been a sad indignity to have to watch, and is just a reminder that the NFL can be a horrible and degrading place. I bet they even make him wear NFL Brand Condoms every night or else he’ll get fined. They come in sizes from Shiancoe to Favre and each one features the face of its namesake right on the head. This also makes them fun as balloons for children’s parties. The NFL has got you covered.
As horrible as all that nonsense has been for Stafford, it’s been even tougher on the fans, who have to sit there and watch their golden boy, their franchise, sit inactive yet again while dudes like Sam Bradford and Mark Sanchez are showered with praise. For as well as Shaun Hill played at times, there was always that sense that no matter what happened, our future, and with it our salvation, was being delayed.
But the bye week is upon us, and for the Lions and for Matthew Stafford and for all of us fans, it couldn’t have come at a better time. Because Shaun Hill’s arm was eaten by Nazi monkeys and that leaves Drew Stanton, and Drew Stanton reduces everyone to wild grunts about grit and pluck and I will not support a man who turns us all into dumb animals.
But thankfully, Matthew Stafford should be ready to play on Halloween day, when it will become the moral duty of Lions fans everywhere to scalp any Redskins they see. (Hey, I’m not being racist, that’s what the NFL decrees that they be called, and as we all know, the NFL is the supreme law in this great land.) And really, isn’t that Halloween is all about? Mass genocide and the destruction of a once proud indigenous people? We can all get together for a nice turkey dinner a few weeks later, but on that day, October 31, we will all dress up as mutant cowboys and space astronauts and talking penises and Jersey Shore characters and we will go door to door with steel buckets shaped like pumpkins and we will drag anyone out of their homes who is a suspected Redskin and we will beat them with those pumpkins and we will take their scalps and then we will hunt their buffalo to extinction and maybe shoot a wolf or two because they corrupted Kevin Costner and made him look like a jackass. And really, there is nothing more American than the sight of DJ Pauly D or The Situation scalping a helpless Redskin on the streets at dusk while the carnivalesque funhouse sounds of witches cackling and ghosts howling ring through the cold and terrible night.
Jesus. What the fuck was I talking about? Oh yeah, Matthew Stafford coming back. Anyway, it is good that we will have Matthew Stafford back on our side for that fateful day, because no one can wield a machete like he can. Someone stop me, quick, before I start gibbering on about Custer and smallpox blankets and I get beaten in a lonely alley by a representative from the Bureau of Indian Affairs or a pissed off and drunk Val Kilmer in character from Thunderheart. (By the way, I like to imagine that Val Kilmer walks around in character at all times, depending on the situation. Sometimes he’s Ice Man from Top Gun, which is just sad because no one wants to hang out with a 350 pound ex-fighter pilot who exudes homoerotic tendencies, and sometimes he’s Madmartigan from Willow, and trust me, it’s scary as hell to watch a 350 pound drunk freaking out with a sword and cursing random midgets, although it is amusing to see a midget look on in blank confusion because a drunk fat man won’t stop calling him Peck. Yes, I just hit you with a Willow joke for no good reason in 2010. Like I often say, these are strange and terrible times and these things happen.)
All weirdness aside, it will be good to finally get Stafford back, if only because then it will finally feel like we can get this wagon train heading west again as we embrace our manifest destiny. (Of course, we have to be careful. That is Indian country, after all . . .) And it will finally feel like our offense – which has been fairly impressive even without Stafford or a functional running game – can really take off.
We have to be careful, though. As exciting as it will be to get Stafford back, the dude is still one of the youngest quarterbacks in the league, he’s still played less than a season’s worth of games and as talented as he is, he still threw a disgusting amount of interceptions last season. He’s going to make mistakes and there will be growing pains. What we need to remember is that it is good that he’s on the field to actually be allowed to make those growing pains. After all, we’ve been playing a dangerous game for a while now. We have begun to idealize Stafford – or rather, what he represents, which is freedom from this terrible hell we’ve been trapped in for decades and decades – and in our minds he has come to be something that is completely ridiculous. There will be people who are disappointed if on the first play of the game he doesn’t throw an 85 yard bomb and then takes off running underneath it and catches it himself for a touchdown that will cause the spirit of Sitting Bull to hang himself.
Progress is awesome. Progress is also slow, and often painful. But it’s the only way we’re ever gonna get anywhere. I can already hear the grumbling, the stupid gibbering and dumb noise that will crescendo and melt talk radio with its stupidity and which will spill over onto blogs and message boards when Stafford isn’t the perfect superhuman specimen the fans imagine him to be. It will be awful and it will make me hate everybody, and I will begin to wish that Geronimo would show up with his Spirit Horse and whisk me away to Valhalla or hell or the casino or wherever the hell those whacky little guys go when the great drum beats for them in the sky. (Too offensive? Come on, I haven’t even made an alcoholism joke yet. Besides, let me remind you, this all started because there is a team out there, in 2010, that gets away with calling itself THE REDSKINS. I mean, shiiiiiiiiiit.)
But all of that is a long way off and for today, we can just take a deep breath and thank God or Buddha or Willie Young that Matthew Stafford is back and that our journey towards salvation can once again commence.
RUNNING BACKS
Jahvid Best has been a weird story this season. On the one hand, his talent is obvious. And it has forced teams to respect the Lions running game. I have talked about this many times already and so I will just keep it brief: whenever Best is in the game, his ability to break a big play at any time forces the defense to account for him, which then opens the field up for the rest of the offense to do work.
But, the thing is, is that Best hasn’t actually been all that productive this season, at least on a down by down basis. Sure, he’s broken a few big plays, and he had one really big game, against the Eagles, but here are his numbers so far this season: 79 carries for 249 yards and 4 touchdowns, with an average gain of only 3.2 yards per carry, which is absolutely horrible. For the season, that projects to 211 carries for 664 yards and 11 touchdowns. I like the touchdowns but damn, that is some ineffective running. Honestly, though, I blame this on three things: one, the Lions run blocking just hasn’t been very good; two, opposing defenses have been keying on Best in order to take away his big play ability, especially after that Eagles game; and three, Best is the sort of back who needs carries to be effective. This seems counterintuitive, because normally that is said about the big grinding backs, the Eddie George’s of the world, but it’s true, because the more carries a back like Best gets, the more opportunities he will get to break one, sort of like another back we used to know and love around these parts who went by the name of Barry Sanders.
But I actually applaud how the Lions have been using Best. I think it would be a mistake to just run failed run play after failed run play all in the name of waiting for Best to break one. That’s not an offense, that’s a prayer. Instead, the Lions have been smart and have used the threat that Best provides by virtue of his big play ability to free up some room in the passing game, which has helped Shaun Hill considerably. As long as Best is on the field, it almost doesn’t matter what his numbers are. His value – at least right now – is not in his production so much as it is in his presence.
Of course, it’s not like Best has been useless. He’s already caught 31 passes, which is second on the team, for 285 yards and a touchdown. Project that over the whole season and you get 82 catches for 760 yards and 3 touchdowns. Those 82 catches are Marshall Faulk kind of numbers and added all together, if those numbers held through the season, they would give Best around 1420 total yards as a rookie on about 290 touches, which averages out to about 4.9 yards per touch. When you consider that a lot of those receptions have been quick passes that the Lions have used in place of the running game, you start to realize that Jahvid Best has actually been much more effective running the ball than his initial numbers show. He just hasn’t been traditionally effective.
And now that Matthew Stafford is back, defenses should, at least in theory, have to respect the pass much more than they have so far this season. This should in turn open up room for Best to run the ball just like he opened up room for Hill to throw the ball early in the season. This is the promise of the Lions offense and the danger for opposing defenses: they have to essentially pick their poison. They can either get beat by the arm of Stafford or the legs of Best, and both are only going to get better and better and better. Checkmate.
Behind Best, the Lions have gone to Kevin Smith a little bit and he has looked like . . . Kevin Smith. It’s clear that Best is the guy now, and Smith will just be brought in to spell him. I have my doubts about whether Smith will ever be able to be anything more than what he is after having his knee eaten by wolves last season. For a running back, that is a tough, tough thing to come back from and when you hear those dudes say they are 100%, that is a relative term. It just means that there is no structural damage and that everything looks fine. But they are never going to be 100% ever again. The backs who are hit the worst by this are the ones without top end speed to begin with. Fast backs are usually okay, because these types of injuries don’t rob you of your straight line speed. What they do take away is some of that wiggle, the cutting, the ability to make a dude miss. For a back like Smith, that’s how he makes his living. If his cutting ability is compromised, and he’s forced to rely just on his vision and his straight line speed, well . . . I’m afraid that’s probably a starting running back in the UFL.
Jerome Felton has also gotten some carries this season, and while he struggled a bit last week, dropping a couple of passes against the Giants, he’s generally pretty solid and when the Lions give him the ball, he usually manages to rip off five or six yards before the defense can drag him down. For a changeup back, that’s about all you can ask.
But make no mistake, this is Jahvid Best’s position. He’s an incredibly important part of this offense. Without him, it’s all gray and stodgy and there’s no room and oh God, I think I’m suffocating. With him, it’s a Technicolor world full of wide open spaces and fresh mountain air and all we have to do is believe and we can run forever.
RECEIVER
It’s been a tumultuous season so far for Calvin Johnson. I stripped him of his sainthood and he was kicked out of heaven as I and the council of elders who decide such things pondered whether or not he was suffering from the dreaded Lions Disease. It was a terrible moment for me. I love Calvin Johnson and it felt like heresy to suggest that maybe some of his struggles were his own damn fault. But, it was something that I felt like needed to be said and no one else was willing to say it.
In the weeks since, I have had at least some of my faith in Calvin restored, enough so that this past week, I once again dubbed him St. Calvin, thus hopefully leaving those dark days of fear and doubt behind us. I’m writing all this in the wake of Calvin’s stellar performance against the Giants, which he did with a bum shoulder and a third string grit merchant throwing the ball to him, and so it is probably more optimistic than it would have been a week or two ago. But hell, that is the nature of fandom, is it not? We deify our heroes one week and we banish them to hell the next all for their ability – or inability - to catch a ball. You are what we see when we close our eyes, and what we see when we close our eyes is often the last thing we saw you do, and the last thing we saw St. Calvin do was snatch a ball out of the air from in between two defenders and then lope like a gazelle towards the end zone while tens of thousands of Jersey degenerates fell into an uncomfortable silence.
For the season, St. Calvin’s numbers aren’t great but they’re not bad either. He has 29 catches for 437 yards and 5 touchdowns. For the season that projects to 77 catches for 1165 yards and 13 touchdowns. Okay, fine, those are pretty damn good. But it is a testament to Calvin’s unreal ability and to our own massive expectations that we can look at those numbers and say that they are slightly disappointing. Basically, most Lions fans won’t be truly happy with Calvin until he puts up something like 100 – 1500 – 15. Is that fair? Probably not, but the man is a saint and that is the burden of sainthood.
The truth is, however, is that the Lions offense probably precludes Calvin from putting up those sorts of numbers. It is an offense that relies more upon the short pass than the shot downfield. Like Best, Calvin’s value comes as much from his presence as it does from his production. He is the Lions downfield threat, and anytime he can take off down the field and get two, or hell, sometimes even three defenders to run with him, it means that the underneath stuff, the short passes the team loves to throw, will be open.
I would still love to see the team try to hit Calvin more on fade routes, on plays where he can use his body to either out-jump the defender and snatch the ball out of the air or draw a pass interference penalty. It’s there pretty much whenever the Lions want it. But, I am more at peace with St. Calvin’s role in the offense than I have been since the day that Jim Schwartz and company took over and that’s because, finally, at some point this season – I think it was during the Packers game – I realized fully what they were trying to do on offense, and I finally saw how Calvin Johnson fit into all that. It took a while, and I think part of the problem was that they didn’t have the pieces last season to make it work, which just made it look dysfunctional and ugly. So it was tough for me to really see what it was they were trying to do. But now they do have those pieces. They have Jahvid Best and perhaps just as importantly, they have Brandon Pettigrew and Nate Burleson and Tony Scheffler.
Pettigrew leads the team in receptions, with 33 and it wouldn’t surprise me if he caught 90 passes this season. That is a tad on the optimistic side, but that’s how vital he’s been in the passing game this season. Not just an outlet, he’s been targeted as a way for the Lions offense to move the ball both safely and effectively.
Meanwhile, I don’t think anybody realized just how critical an acquisition Tony Scheffler was before the season. His addition is what really has allowed this offense to take off. Best is the threat that the defense has to account for on the ground, which opens up the passing game. St. Calvin is the threat that drags the defenders deep, which opens up the underneath passing game. And Pettigrew and Scheffler are the guys who make the whole thing work in the end. They are the guys who put the final touch on the play, the guys who actually catch the ball and move the team down the field. If you look at it like an assembly line, they are the dudes who get the product when it is just about finished. All they have to do is put a coat of paint on it and seal it with the company logo. Pettigrew by himself last year showed flashes of being able to do this, but Scheffler has allowed the team to spread the ball around enough to make this a viable and potentially lethal offensive strategy. This is the Lions bread and butter, the heart of their offense and when the season is done, don’t be surprised if both Pettigrew and Scheffler have north of 70 catches each.
Burleson, on the other hand, is there to keep defenses honest. He can hopefully draw a defender away from St. Calvin so that the Lions can hit him deep when they want to. But, if a defense chooses to ignore Burleson in favor of St. Calvin, or if they try to take away the underneath stuff, then Burleson can burn them and make a play on his own, which we’ve seen the last two weeks after Burleson returned from injury. Again, it just makes the defenders choose who they are going to let beat them. It’s such an effective offensive strategy that when it started to finally click, it made Shaun Hill look like a robot, and it even allowed Ol’ Plucky to put up better than average numbers against the Giants. With Matthew Stafford pulling the trigger, it’s an offense that could be absolutely unreal. I’m getting exciting just writing about it.
Bryant Johnson is useless, Derrick Williams is a bust and Tim Toone is busy chugging milk and knocking on doors spreading the good word, so not everything is perfect here. The depth at receiver is shockingly thin behind St. Calvin and Burleson and an injury, especially to St. Calvin, could cripple the offense. Then again, this is true of any team. If their star player gets hurt, then they are probably fucked, so this is not really a failing unique to the Lions. But St. Calvin’s particularly singular talents combined with the appalling lack of depth means that the consequences of an injury are a bit more severe. But, the Lions lack of depth at wide receiver is minimized a bit by the presence of Pettigrew and Scheffler. They are the de facto slot receivers in this offense, which means that Bryant Johnson and Williams are closer to 5th and 6th receivers than 3rd or 4th.
OFFENSIVE LINE
And finally, we come to the offensive line, which I’m sure fills most of you with revulsion. Yes, it’s true. Our response to the words “offensive” and “line”, when put together, is damn near Pavlovian. We begin frothing at the mouth, we start barking and then we piss and shit all over the floor. And this response is well earned, the result of many years of brutal conditioning, years that have forced us to witness atrocities and war crimes that would make Idi Amin weep. (You know, Idi Amin was a pretty good sized dude and we know that he was mean as hell. It’s a shame he died or else he might have made a fine lineman. Of course, he was a genocidal maniac, and would likely draw a lot of protesters but we are desperate here and besides, as long as the protesters bought tickets, the Lions could sell out more games, which would mean fewer blackouts. Please, just try to consider the positives.)
So, naturally, it’s tough to give this collection of assholes and fuck ups any credit at all. When we think of the offensive line, this is what we think of: Jeff Backus flailing away uselessly and then watching in horror while his quarterback gets murdered, Dominic Raiola flipping off the fans, Gosder Cherilus backpedaling away from an enraged Jared Allen, and Stephen Peterman taking another fifteen yard penalty for being a fat idiot. These are all well earned, and it is tough to argue in favor of any of these dudes when just the thought of them makes your brow furrow and bile rise in your throat. Really, fuck these guys. (Note: I am leaving Rob Sims out of this because he is new and he hasn’t done anything to horrify or enrage us. At least not yet. There is still time. Sigh.)
But honestly, these dudes haven’t been that bad this year. (Note: I originally ended this sentence with a question mark instead of a period. This was completely unintentional and I chalk it up to a Freudian slip of sorts. Also, I just misspelled Freudian three different times even though I know how to spell the word. I’m not sure if that was a Freudian slip of some sort or what and oh my god, I need to stop talking or else we will all disappear down a really fucked up rabbit hole of madness and I even though that is basically where I live at all times, I don’t want to have to drag you down there with me.) There was the unfortunate murder of Matthew Stafford, but really, these dudes have done a pretty good job in pass protection this season. (And yes, I realize that is a lot like asking “So how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?”) On the surface it’s discouraging to see both your starting quarterback and backup quarterback get hurt directly because of how they were thrown into the turf by a defense. But the truth is, is that all quarterbacks get hit, no matter how good the line, and all it takes is one play for that freak injury to occur. This is not a David Carr situation, where the QB’s are just getting their brains beaten in play after play and an injury is inevitable. No, for the most part, the line has kept the quarterback upright and really, you can’t ask for much more than that.
A caveat: even though the quarterbacks haven’t been sacked that much (11 in 6 games is not horrible. Just ask any Bears fan.) part of that is probably directly related to the offense itself, which favors quick short passes, passes that allow the quarterback to get rid of the ball before the defense can pound him into the turf. But, that said, even when the Lions have had to pass, when teams have known what was coming and just pinned their ears back and rushed the hell out of the quarterback, the Lions still haven’t eaten a lot of sacks, which speaks well of the play of the offensive line. Still, given all of that, when you ask a Lions fan to think of the offensive line this season, the first thing that will pop into their mind will be Stafford getting destroyed by Peppers while Backus looked on helplessly. It’s unfortunate, but it’s just the way it is.
On the flipside of the Lions surprisingly decent play in pass protection, the line has failed to open any real holes in the running game. Like I mentioned earlier, about a million words ago, Jahvid Best is averaging only 3.2 yards per carry. That’s not good. The other backs haven’t carried the ball enough to get a good enough sample size to be able to tell whether this is indicative of something that Best is doing or just because the line sucks at run blocking. Smith and Felton are averaging about 4.5 yards per carry combined, but they have only had 17 carries between them. Meanwhile, Maurice Morris has 10 carries, but he’s only averaging 0.9 yards per carry. 0.9! So, clearly, we can’t take anything away from the play of the other running backs.
All in all, the line is what it is. It’s a collection of dudes who aren’t quite good enough. None of them are horrible, but none of them are anything more than a C+ player. It’s fine to have a couple of guys like that because their linemates can pick up the slack. But when all five players are that player, well . . . average is about the best you’re going to get.
If I had to pick one player’s ass to verbally kick here, it would probably be Peterman. He’s a thoroughly average player who has to get by on hard work and smarts and whatever grit he could afford to buy from Drew Stanton. The only problem is that Peterman has played like a damned fool this season, drawing stupid personal fouls and fucking up at the worst possible time. He’s been a liability this season. He should try to get his money back from Stanton, although knowing Stanton, he probably spent it all on cheap keg beer and condoms featuring Brett Favre’s face. Hell, just be happy I didn’t make yet another horrible Indian joke. (I’m sorry, I meant Redskins joke. I have to remember to be more sensitive.)
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