Well, That Happened

I have been humbled. I apologize, oh noble Nostradamus. Please forgive me. I should have never spoke out of turn.

It is getting harder and harder to do these prediction posts, mainly because it is just so damn depressing to have to go back and take a look at what happened when all I want to do is run, run, run away from the insipid bullshit of yet another ugly, shameful loss. I guess the Thanksgiving loss wasn’t so shameful – at least on one level, a level which saw the Lions lead for the majority of the game and which saw them tied heading into the 4^th quarter against one of the best teams in the league. Then again, the Lions ended up losing by a billion points and after the game, we jumped into the time machine with The Great Willie Young and Doc Brown and found ourselves in the Lions locker room in . . . oh, hell, pick any year from about 2001 on, where the players bitched each other out and Ernie Sims’ monkey went berserk and began furiously jacking off and throwing poop at terrified reporters. Yes, it’s back to those halcyon days of yore, when I was forced to amuse myself with the made up antics of possibly apocryphal simians while the world of the Detroit Lions burned, burned, burned. Oh well. I suppose we should just get on with the rest of this terrible, terrible post. Okay? Okay.

PREDICTION THE FIRST: Shaun Hill will throw and throw and throw, completing 31 of 52 passes for 355 yards, with 3 touchdowns and 1 interception.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED: Hill completed 27 of 46 passes for 285 yards, 1 touchdown and 2 interceptions.

To be honest, although the final numbers do indeed indicate that Hill threw and threw and threw, it didn’t really feel that way. I think the numbers ended up where they were because the Lions were forced to throw during the garbage time of the 4^th quarter, when the game was already over and they had to throw if only to satisfy the requirement that teams vainly attempt to at least appear to still have hope that they can come back. Before then, the Lions actually ran the ball more than I thought that they would, which depressed Hill’s attempts slightly.

I thought that Hill played well in the first half. He played largely mistake free football and he managed to move the team down the field even though he has a water pistol for an arm. Seriously, his touchdown pass to St. Calvin looked like it was thrown by a nine year old. But St. Calvin caught the ball, and really, that’s Shaun Hill in a nutshell right there: shitty arm, wobbly balls (and I’m not talking about his passes . . . HIYOOOOOO!!! Just kidding, I actually am talking about his passes and not his testicles, which I’m sure are not excessively wobbly.), and yet, the dude makes plays.

I know, I know, that verges dangerously close to Grit Merchant territory, but fuck it, it’s true. It’s what we’ve come to expect from Hill and in the first half he delivered.

In the second half, though . . .

Yeah. The turning point in the game seemed to be the moment the ball left Shaun Hill’s hand while the Lions were driving early in the third quarter and landed in the hands of a Patriots defender. Only a few plays later, the Patriots scored to tie the game and from that moment on, it kinda felt like the Lions were fighting not only the Patriots but the weight of time and the immensity of their own tortured history. Sure, the Lions answered back, but it was clear that we were on a precipice and it would take only a subtle breeze to push us off and send us plummeting to our death far, far below. The Lions probably still could have survived that, but the problem they faced – the problem they always face – is that they just didn’t have anybody strong enough to hold them all up there on that cliff when that breeze started to blow.

I think Hill is a capable quarterback. He’s proven that much at least. But the biggest difference between him and Stafford, aside from the fact that one has an arm engineered by NASA while the other has an arm built by a retarded six year old using only construction paper and rubber cement, is that Stafford is capable of putting the team on his shoulders (well, his metaphorical shoulders anyway. His actual shoulders couldn’t handle the weight of a fruit fly right now.), and holding them steady when that breeze starts to blow. Hill simply doesn’t have that force of will or the talent necessary to keep everything from falling straight to hell.

And that’s fine. It really is. Hill is the backup quarterback and not the starter for a reason, and well, there you go. I think the Lions can win with Hill if everything else is going right. He’s not a liability. But the Lions aren’t good enough right now to win like that. They need their quarterback to be a legitimate asset. Simply not being a liability isn’t enough. There is too much fragility right now. The breeze is blowing and dudes are tumbling off that cliff faster and faster every day and Shaun Hill can do nothing but stand there and watch. None of this is his fault. He’s like a mediocre king, a caretaker, during a time when the kingdom is threatened by a billion different things from a billion different places. Only a great king can hold it together. (Note: I almost went on a tangent that compared Hill to James Buchanan and Stafford to Abraham Lincoln, but I figured that would be excessively nerdy and ridiculous even for me. Yes, really. It would have gotten way out of hand and you know it.)

PREDICTION THE SECOND: Jahvid Best will play, but he won’t be anywhere close to effective, running the ball only 8 times for 15 yards. Maurice Morris will receive the bulk of the carries, but he’ll still only run for 35 yards on 10 carries as the Lions will largely abandon the run game in favor of the pass.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED: I think I recall seeing Best line up at slot receiver early in the game, but maybe not. It’s possible – hell, exceedingly likely even – that I was just seeing things. As you know, my mind can, uh, see some things that aren’t there from time to time. Frankly, it’s amazing that I’ve never freaked out and claimed that Hitler rode across the field on a purple horse singing show tunes during a game. I mean, we all know that only happens at halftime or during timeouts.

Ahem. Anyway, whether or not Best actually played is kind of a technicality because stat wise he didn’t do a damn thing. Nope. Not one carry or one catch. And you know what? It was for the, uh, best. (Fucking puns. That wasn’t intentional, I swear. )

Indeed. Everyone talks about how good Jahvid Best is, how he’s a home run hitter and how he adds an extra dimension to our offense and all of that is true. When he’s healthy. The problem is, is that Best hasn’t been healthy since sometime in the Eagles game, which was way back in Week 2. Since then, his toes have become possessed by Failure Demons and we have been forced to watch him try to gut it out week after week, robbed of his home run hitting ability, which, uh, is kind of an important thing to lose considering that is the one reason why he is in the lineup each and every week.

So, really, it was about time the coaches yanked him off the field. It’s not his fault. I commend him for showing up every week and trying to make it work. It just wasn’t happening. It wasn’t doing anyone any good to watch him stutter step and then get dragged down for a one yard loss every time he touched the ball. Seriously, the dude is only one more lousy carry away from seeing his per carry average dip below 3.0. That’s absurdly awful for a number one running back.

Maurice Morris, meanwhile, was more effective than I thought he would be, as he picked up 55 yards on 9 carries and actually gave the Lions a real, live functional rushing attack for the first time all season. I was pleasantly surprised. And not by Morris, who I thought was the Lions best running back last season and who always shows up and surprises people when he gets his shot, but by the fact that the running attack was even a little effective. I had long given up on the Lions being able to run the ball against anyone for the rest of the year. This is mostly because I had utterly damned the offensive line to hell, especially after the fiasco against Buffalo, but maybe, just maybe, the Lions inability to run the ball was more of a product of Best’s ruined toes than we thought. I mean, sure, I think we all knew that his health was playing a big factor, but I think most of us also assumed that it was a secondary issue, and that the primary problem lay with the five clods who make up the offensive line. This is still probably true, but probably not to the extent that we thought it was, you know? Maybe before, the ratio would have been 80/20 shitty O-Line/Jahvid Best’s traitorous toes, but now it’s probably more like 60/40.

Oddly, even though Morris was effective running the ball, the bulk of the carries actually went to Aaron Brown, who carried the ball 13 times for 36 yards. Aaron Brown? Yeah. Remember him? The dude who did that awesome backflip after scoring in the preseason last year? Yeah. Him. Brown had a couple of decent runs, but for the most part he didn’t look as good as Morris. I’m not sure why the coaches seem so hesitant to use Morris, who, like I said, always looks better than people expect him to when he’s given a chance, but it seems clear that Linehan and Schwartz are looking for something else in the backfield. Brown getting more carries than anyone else tells me that they want a guy back there who is capable of hitting the home run on any play, even if it means that he won’t be the type who gets them 4 or 5 yards consistently, which is closer to what Morris offers. Brown is essentially a poor man’s Best. He’s fast, he’s electric, he can catch the ball out of the backfield, but he goes down if a defender breathes on him. It makes sense from a certain point of view that the coaches would just try to plug in a version of Best in his absence, but from another point of view, it seems mildly insane. After all, it’s not like Best had been tearing it up. Maybe the best thing would be to change it up a bit and rely on the guy who gives you 4 or 5 yards a carry rather than the home run dude. It makes sense to me. I mean, before his thumb told him to go fuck himself, Kevin Smith was running the ball more effectively than Best. Perhaps there is something stylistic going on here. Perhaps the plodders like Smith and Morris are capable of more success behind this particular line in this particular offense than home run hitters like Best and Brown. I don’t know. I’m just sort of rambling and thinking aloud here. It’s more of a throwaway thought than any sort of well thought out theory. For the season, Smith was averaging 3.9 yards per carry while Morris is averaging only 3.2. Meanwhile, Best is averaging 3.0 and Brown is averaging 3.4, which, uh . . . tells us nothing, really. Well, it does, but what it tells us is that really no one has been able to run the ball very effectively this season, which I guess brings us back to blaming the offensive line. Then again, sample size is an issue here. I mean, Morris has only gotten 30 carries, Brown’s gotten 17, and . . . ugh. Fuck it. Who knows? All I know is that Morris looked good against the Patriots, but it’s probably idiotic to take anything away from that. The situation is a mess. That is likely the only thing that we can say for sure and we won’t know more until Best returns fully healthy. Unfortunately, that might not happen until next year.

PREDICTION THE THIRD: St. Calvin will catch 7 passes for 105 yards and 2 touchdowns.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED: St. Calvin caught 4 passes for 81 yards and 1 touchdown, which . . . okay. I mean, what is there really to say here? We probably put way too much pressure on St. Calvin to have monster game after monster game, but hey, there’s a reason I have dubbed him St. Calvin, you know? And that’s because the dude is 8 feet tall with a 10 foot vertical leap and 74 inch hands and he runs the 40 in 2.6 seconds. Those are only slight exaggerations.

When you actually step back from it, though, you realize that St. Calvin has had an extraordinary season. Through 11 games, he has 59 catches for 806 yards and 11 touchdowns. For the season that projects to 86 catches for 1172 yards and 16 touchdowns, which are Pro Bowl caliber numbers. And he has done that even though he’s battled through some injuries and he has had to catch passes from dudes not named Matthew Stafford for most of the season. That last little factoid probably explains his 13.7 yards per catch, which is the lowest of his career. You could probably bump that up a couple of yards and add several more catches if Stafford was healthy and playing every week.

And really, that was kind of the story for St. Calvin in the game against the Patriots too. He did what he could playing with a limited quarterback and his numbers reflect that. Further, the one touchdown he caught happened because he made a terrific play on a shitty ball, showing the body control to break back and go down and scoop that shitball out of the dirt (well, artificial turf, but whatever). He’s a singularly talented player – as evidenced by the avalanche of touchdowns, almost all of which have been a direct result of him being amazing and just flat out better than the dudes attempting to cover him – playing with quarterbacks who are obviously limited. If anything, objectively speaking, we should be thrilled with what he’s done so far this season. Actually, fuck, he has been better than the numbers show. I mean, let’s not forget, the dude actually has 12 touchdowns because, well . . . you know. Fuck the Bears and fuck Mike Pereira. Never forget!

PREDICTION THE FOURTH: Tom Brady will complete 25 of 38 passes for 270 yards and 2 touchdowns.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED: Sigh. Brady completed 21 of 27 passes for 341 yards and 4 touchdowns to go with 0 interceptions.

Fuck.

That kinda sums it up, doesn’t it? The Lions secondary is obviously regressing and I’m not sure why. Poor Alphonso Smith has probably woken up every night since Thursday with night terrors and visions of Deion Branch or Wes Welker or Paul Revere or Sam Adams running away from him and then dancing in the endzone while he looks on helplessly and the nation laughs at him. Jesus. The Carlton feels like it was a million years ago, doesn’t it?

I’m guessing it’s a confidence issue more than anything else at this point. I mean, when the Lions secondary were making plays earlier in the season, it was obvious that they were playing with ridiculous amounts of swagger. Swagger, of course, is the older, cooler cousin of Pluck and Grit, the one who regularly gets laid and once beat the fuck out of the clerk at the 7-11 because the dude had the audacity to card him when he was trying to buy a 40 of King Cobra. Pluck and Grit worship him and they even once got a sip of beer from him that one time when they were hanging out while he was working on his Trans-Am and Grit even told Pluck that he saw Swagger fucking that waitress from the Waffle House, the one who was Homecoming Queen a decade ago, and Pluck told Grit that Swagger could blow smoke rings that look like a dragon and even though Pluck and Grit’s mom says that Swagger’s no good and that he’s a fuck up and that all he does is sit around all day collecting disability for a bullshit back injury, drinking, smoking, fighting and fucking, that shit all sounds pretty cool to Pluck and Grit and when they’re sitting at school, stuck with that lame-ass Drew Stanton, they just daydream and draw pictures of Swagger riding his dirtbike and fighting cobras while a bunch of hot chicks poledance in the background. Anyway, Swagger was driving Chris Houston and Alphonso Smith to greatness – or at least mediocrity – but it appears that Swagger must have knocked up the Waffle House waitress and had to blow town because that fucker’s gone.

PREDICTION THE FIFTH: No one Patriot will have a huge game. Instead, the Lions will be slowly picked apart by a variety of weapons, from Wes Welker to Danny Woodhead. The Lions will actually do an admirable job defending the Patriots attack, but Tom Brady will sniff out the weakest point of defense enough times to make the difference.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED: Well, the Patriots leading rusher was BenJarvus Green-Ellis, who rushed for 59 yards on 12 carries and scored 2 touchdowns. Meanwhile, Danny Woodhead ran for 32 yards on 8 carries. Deion Branch caught 3 passes for 113 yards and 2 touchdowns, Wes Welker caught 8 passes for 90 yards and 2 touchdowns, Rob Gronkowski caught 5 passes for 65 yards, and . . . well, hopefully, my point has been made. The Patriots and Brady spread the ball around and the Lions were indeed slowly picked apart until finally the portal to hell burst open in the 4^th quarter and Failure Demons swarmed Ford Field. More than any of the other predictions, I feel like I got this one right.

PREDICTED FINAL SCORE: PATRIOTS 27, LIONS 24

ACTUAL FINAL SCORE: PATRIOTS 45, LIONS 24. WELL, I WAS HALF RIGHT. *puts shotgun in mouth*

Back To The Future With Doc Brown And The Detroit Lions

I am haunted by this terrible face.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about for today. I had considered doing a Willie Young piece, but everything changed over the weekend. I had just finished watching Michigan get waxed by Ohio St. and was busy preparing a noose when I heard a loud crack of what sounded like thunder. I looked outside and noticed that the street was on fire and there was a silver DeLorean in my driveway. A moment later, a crazy old man with white hair jumped out, ran to my door and began screaming and pounding on it. I considered knifing him and then dumping his body in Lake Michigan so I could sell the DeLorean, but I opened the door when I hear him say “Marty! I just returned from a time where the Lions are 11-0!”

I peered closer at the old man, and said “Shit, Doc Brown, is that you?” He looked terrible, like Iggy Pop’s grandfather, a strung out old mess who smelled like old piss and failure. His teeth were damn near rotten and he had huge, heavy purple bags under his eyes. I invited him inside where he explained to me that he had developed a serious heroin addiction after traveling to late 19^th century China. I asked him what happened to his wife Clara, and he got all sad and wouldn’t speak for the next hour. I made him some tea, and finally he just sighed and asked if he could use my bathroom.

After about fifteen minutes, I began to grow concerned. I asked him if everything was alright and he said “Of course, Marty,” but he sounded strange. I could hear the hissing of what sounded like a crack torch and I decided that enough was enough. I tried to open the door, but it was locked. Finally, I had to kick it in, and I found Doc Brown smoking meth in my bathroom. He offered to share and I considered taking a hit, but I was too intrigued by his gibberish about the Lions being 11-0 and so I declined and then slapped him in the face.

“Jesus Christ, Marty!” he spat. “I’m 105 years old!”

“Get your shit together, old man,” I said. “I don’t care if you OD in a dumpster, but this is my bathroom and I don’t want to have to explain that shit to the pigs. Besides, you said something about the Lions being 11-0 and Goddammit, Doc, I need some good news in my life.”

Doc eyed me warily, and then spat on my floor. I slapped him again and he began weeping, which turned into sobbing - terrible, uncontrollable sobbing. “I’m sorry, Marty!” he managed in between deep, ugly sobs filled with snot and despair. I just shook my head in disgust and demanded that he take me to this place where the Lions were 11-0.

“When is it? 1957?”

Doc just kept on bawling, so I was forced to slap him again. He finally calmed down enough, but he was still hyperventilating, and so I agreed to let him do a line of coke just so he could get his shit together. Doc did his line, sighed deeply and then told me that he had rigged the DeLorean so that it not only was capable of time travel, but also of inter-dimensional travel. He told me he got the idea from watching Fringe and then spent the next ten minutes spewing coked out nonsense about the show. The highlight of this deranged rant was him calling Walter Bishop a cocksucker and a fraud. I was forced to slap him yet again, and this seemed to refocus him. He then proceeded to tell me that he had traveled to an alternate reality of this season, one in which the Lions were 11-0. I immediately began to sweat, and not just because Doc had tricked me into taking a meth hit. This was the answer that I had been searching for. A world, just like ours, only one in which the Lions were 11-0! Well, fuck this shitty ass world, I thought, and before I knew it, I was hustling Doc out to the DeLorean and demanding that he take me both back to this world and three months back into the past so I could watch it all unfold. I agreed to let Doc sleep on my couch once we arrived in this new world and I killed the other version of myself, and off we went.

We arrived on the Saturday night before the Lions season opener against the Bears and after [redacted on the advice of my attorneys] . . . which I don’t have to tell you was messy as hell and . . . [redacted on the advice of my attorneys]. When we awoke, it was almost time for the game to start. I kicked Doc awake and after he vomited, we sat down to watch the game. For brevity’s sake, here is a quick account of just how the Lions 11-0 dream season unfolded in that beautiful alternate reality:

Week 1: The Lions beat the Bears 21-19 after Calvin Johnson caught a last minute touchdown pass. The refs in this world were not complete imbeciles and so no one said anything about the validity of the catch. It stood and so the Lions were 1-0 to start the season. On a sad note, Matthew Stafford’s shoulder was still murdered in this dimension. When I asked Doc about it, he just shrugged and said “Marty, some things are just inevitable,” and then he mumbled something about fate and man’s inability to change his own destiny and then he began weeping before vomiting all over my couch.

Week 2: Against the Eagles, the Lions recovered an onside kick late in the fourth quarter and Shaun Hill led a last minute drive, which culminated in a touchdown pass to Brandon Pettigrew and a 39-35 Lions victory. The Lions were 2-0 but Doc was determined to bring me down, as he spent the whole game whining about how his wife, Clara, left him for a Chinese pimp named Wu Pei while he was wasting his time in an opium den in 19^th century Shanghai. I told him to shut the fuck up and let me enjoy the Lions success but he just said “Marty, what is the point of any of it all when my Clara is busy sucking off some old Chinaman in an alley in Shanghai for five cents a pop?” I was shocked by how little she was selling that ass for, and I recalled Doc’s wife was pretty fine for an older lady and I briefly considered making him take me back to 19^th century China. I figured that I could negotiate Wu Pei down to a cool penny since I knew his friend, The Great Willie Young, but the Lions were 2-0, damn it, and I just couldn’t walk away from that.

Week 3: The Lions went into Minnesota, and found the Vikings reeling from scandal and infighting. It would seem that Brett Favre had contracted dick rot after double teaming a prostitute with Brad Childress. Brett’s play suffered and Childress went on the run after the prostitute went missing and they found her bloody teeth inside of Childress’ windowless van. With no coach and an ailing QB, the Vikings started the season 0-2, and things unraveled only further when pictures of Brett’s junk showed up online and on the front pages on the New York Times, revealing him to be hung like a 9 year old midget. Brett hastily called a press conference to announce his retirement before moving to a shack in the woods of Mississippi. The Vikings immediately signed Daunte Culpepper to replace him and he threw six interceptions as the Lions cruised to a 45-7 victory and a 3-0 start. Doc went missing this week and I didn’t see him for almost a month. I assumed he had died in some dark alley somewhere, but fuck it, the Lions were 3-0 and I had a DeLorean.

Week 4: The Lions went into Green Bay, where Shaun Hill led a fourth quarter drive that ended with a Jason Hanson field goal to give the Lions a 29-28 lead. The Packers then failed on a last minute drive when an irate and drunken Raven Mack stormed the field and beat the shit out of Aaron Rodgers for what Rodgers did to Raven’s sister. The final score was 29-28 Lions and somehow, the Lions were sitting pretty at 4-0.

Week 5: A triumphant Lions team destroyed the Rams 44-6 and Alphonso Smith delighted a nation when he busted out The Carlton following an interception return for a touchdown. The Lions were now 5-0 and were fast becoming the darlings of the sports world.

Week 6: The Lions went into New York and found themselves staring down defeat against the Giants. Shaun Hill broke his arm and I groaned as Ol’ Plucky ran out onto the field to take his place. But just before he reached the huddle, Ol’ Plucky tripped on a pile of grit and broke his ankle. The Lions were forced to turn to emergency quarterback Matthew Stafford, who led a valiant comeback. After a touchdown and a two point conversion tied up the game at 28 late in the 4^th quarter, Stafford tossed a touchdown pass to Calvin Johnson in overtime and the Lions escaped from New York with a 34-28 victory and a glittering 6-0 record.

Bye Week: Doc Brown returned, naked and covered in mysterious bruises. His hair was an unkempt mess and both of his eyes were severely blackened and nearly swollen shut. I didn’t even ask where he had been and he just spent the week mumbling gibberish to himself and vomiting. He shit all over my bathroom floor and I was forced to rub his nose in it like a dog. I made him sleep in the shed for two nights before I reluctantly let him back into the house after he begged and promised me that he was just going through withdrawal and that the worst of it had already passed. I almost changed my mind when he offered to suck my dick but I felt so bad for him. He looked so pathetic with his big brown puppy dog eyes, and so I allowed him to sleep on my couch once again. He thanked me by stealing a bottle of Night Train from the liquor store, which he gave to me. We then stayed up all night getting shitfaced before he started to cry. I just sighed and asked him “Now what’s the matter?” He slurred that he loved me and that he had always loved me, ever since I rolled by his house on my skateboard in 1985. His exact words were “Marty, it’s always been you. I jus’ . . . I jus’ wanted to let you know that I love you, Marty. I can’t tell you, Marty, how many times I jacked off to that scene of you in your underwear in your mom’s room after you went back to 1955, and . . .” He then passed out, although he buried his face in my lap when he did so. I quietly slipped away back to my bedroom and the next morning neither one of us said anything. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I wasn’t Marty and he didn’t seem to remember our drunken conversation.

Week 8: The Lions roared out of the bye week with a healthy Matthew Stafford and dismantled the Redskins, winning 37-25. The highlight of the game was the Lions defensive line, which absolutely beat the shit out of Donovan McNabb, humiliating him to the point that Mike Shanahan pulled him in favor of Rex Grossman. Unbelievable! I explained to Doc, who knew staggeringly little about football, that Grossman’s nickname was the Sex Cannon, but I was forced to leave when Doc became visibly aroused. The next day, Doc told me that I was his little Sex Cannon and he spent the next week calling me Sex Cannon, which was okay because I was getting tired of him calling me Marty all the time.

Week 9: The New York Jets came to town to play the 7-0 Detroit Lions, and were humiliated 27-10 as the Lions now dominant defense completely shut down Mark Sanchez while Matthew Stafford played a brilliant game. Sadly, Stafford’s shoulder was again murdered, and Doc again began to mutter about man’s impossible fight against fate. I told him to shut the fuck up and he began to weep. I felt bad and cheered him up by pointing out that Clara was just a cheap whore and he was better off without her. He placed his hand on my thigh and I let him leave it there because it made him happy, and besides, I was in a good mood since the Lions were now 8-0 and Rex Ryan had suffered a massive heart attack at halftime and Joe Namath was caught finger banging Mark Sanchez’s girlfriend in the stands during the 4^th quarter.

Week 10: The Lions turned to Shaun Hill once again, whose arm had miraculously healed after a visit to a Hindu faith healer atop a mountain in the Hindu Kush. Doc claimed that it was just a matter of the mind tricking itself into believing that the arm was fixed, while I chose to believe in magic and faith and told him that I thought the arm was legitimately healed by the old Hindu. Doc and I got into a vicious argument that culminated in him screaming “Fuck you, Marty, you tease! Do you know how often I lie awake at night, just thinking of you? Oh, how I wish you would just leave your bedroom night after night and climb into the couch and just snuggle with me. That’s all I want, Marty. I just want to feel your body pressed up against mine. I want to feel your warmth, but no, Marty, all I feel from you is that you are a cold hearted bitch! Just like Clara!” He then stomped out of the house and I didn’t see him again for two days, but I didn’t mind. After all, the Lions destroyed the overmatched and hapless Bills 30-13 behind a healthy Hill and were sitting at 9-0. Yes sir, this world seemed okay to me.

Week 11: The Lions traveled to Dallas to face a Cowboys team in disarray. They had just fired their head coach, Wade Phillips, and Jerry Jones was arrested on charges that he was kidnapping virgins and sacrificing them to his new stadium’s scoreboard, which he had begun to worship like a god. Michael Irvin added more fuel to the fire when he laughed and said “I don’t think Mr. Jones is guilty. After all, everyone know there ain’t no virgins in Big D. Not after me and Big Nate and the boys finished with ‘em anyway.” The Lions destroyed a listless Cowboys team 42-10 in a game which was marred by an ugly fistfight between Roy Williams and Jon Kitna. Kitna, bleeding from his bald scalp, openly wept after the game and demanded a trade back to Detroit. The Cowboys, however, had no one to authorize such a trade with Jones locked up and besides, the Lions front office just laughed when they heard about Kitna’s demand. Two days later, the Dallas Cowboys were disbanded and Troy Aikman was arrested for getting shitfaced and viciously beating a naked Joe Buck with a belt in a seedy motel room just outside of Fort Worth. 10-0 baby!

Week 12: Thanksgiving with the Lions. It was a happy Thanksgiving. Doc sobered up long enough to cook us a nice dinner, which we enjoyed peacefully as we watched the Lions beat the Patriots 34-31 in a thrilling game featuring two of the NFL’s best teams. Doc was right. The Lions were 11-0 and they seemed like they were on their way to the Super Bowl. All seemed right with the world. At least for a couple of days.

On Saturday, as I was getting ready to watch the alternate reality Michigan Wolverines - who were sitting pretty at 11-0, ranked number one behind the explosive Denard Robinson and a surprisingly good defense which had gelled after some struggles early in the year - play Ohio St., Doc came to me one last time and declared his love. Only this time, he had a knife and said he wouldn’t live in a world where I didn’t love him back, and he wouldn’t let me live in it either. I tried to calm him down, and for the first time, I explained to him that my name wasn’t Marty. He refused to believe me and so I was forced to prove to him that Marty was now a middle aged man suffering from Parkinson’s Disease. Doc was inconsolable and even inexplicably threatened to kill Muhammad Ali. I calmed Doc down by repeating to him his words about man’s inability to escape fate. He seemed to accept this, but he then quit speaking entirely for the next several days. He just moped around the house, occasionally weeping. The only sounds that came out of his mouth were a string of mournful howls late at night, when he was sleeping. He would just scream the name “Marty” over and over and over again. I was concerned, but the Lions were 11-0 and well, shit, I just couldn’t walk away from that, you know?

I once again considered knifing Doc and dumping his body in Lake Michigan, but I had made him a promise. He had delivered to me a reality in which the Lions were 11-0 and I owed it to him to allow him to stay on my couch. After all, he was an old drug fiend, and he would probably die soon and so I wouldn’t have to worry about it much longer. A few months of his senile ranting and raving was a small price to pay for my Lions being 11-0 and headed for championship glory.

That all changed on a Wednesday evening. I was getting excited for the Lions upcoming game against the second place Bears. If the Lions won, they would officially clinch the NFC North title. But, sadly, I would never get to see that game. Doc and I had eaten dinner in peace. He still wasn’t speaking much, but he had ceased to cry and scream, and so everything was cool as far as I was concerned. It was obvious that he was mired in a mild depression, but so what? The old bastard needed to deal with reality. It wasn’t my fault that he was hung up on a middle aged man with Parkinson’s. After dinner, Doc quietly told me that he was going into town for a little while. I didn’t care. I told him he could do what he wanted. I also told him to make sure he picked up some more toilet paper, since we were almost out.

Several hours passed, and I was getting ready to go to bed when Doc crashed the DeLorean through the front of the house. He jumped out, his eyes wild, his teeth grinding and I knew that he had fallen back off the wagon. He tossed a half used roll of toilet paper at me and then began to holler at me to get my things. I told him to calm the fuck down and I slapped him several times. It had no effect. I suspected that he had taken PCP but when I questioned him about it, he just screamed at me, bellowing “Marty! This world is no good! No fucking good at all! Muhammad Ali poisoned you, Marty! We have to leave! We have to go back!” He then ranted for a good 15 minutes straight about Clara and then wept when he finally admitted that he had eaten his dog, Einstein, in a drug fueled frenzy after she had left him. Horrified, I began to plot the old man’s demise, but I was taken by surprise when he lunged at me. He knocked me down, and I was surprised by his iron like strength, although I now realize that this was likely because he had taken some sort of synthetic adrenaline. He pulled off my pants and began pawing at my penis.

“What the fuck are you doing, Doc?” I yelled.

He just shook his head, his white hair wildly whipping from side to side and said “Marty, I rebuilt the flux capacitor so that it runs on garbage and semen! YOUR SEMEN, MARTY!”

“Jesus Christ,” I muttered. This had gotten completely out of hand. The Lions might be 11-0, but it would seem that one nightmare had been replaced with another. I managed to grab a lamp off of my night stand and I smashed it against Doc’s skull. It barely phased him, seeing as how he was so amped up on faux adrenaline, PCP, meth and God only knows what else. But it was enough to allow me to wriggle free. I ran from the room, pantsless and terrified. I could feel Doc bearing down on me, but I had to keep running, had to keep moving.

“Marty!” he kept calling to me. “Marty! Come back here! I love you, Marty! I need to save you! Just let me suck some of that sweet, sweet McFly semen out of you, and . . .” I didn’t hear him finish, as I dove into the open door of the DeLorean and quickly shut it behind me. Doc began to pound on the door, and then moved to the front of the car. It appeared he was trying to open the hood. His eyes were wild and manic and I did the only thing I could do. I mashed my foot into the accelerator and I ran Doc Brown over. I backed out of the wreckage of the home of the now deceased alternate reality version of me, and I raced away from the scene. I looked in the rear view mirror one last time, only to see Doc crawling to his feet. I jammed my foot on my accelerator until it hit 88 miles per hour and after a flash of lightning and a crack of thunder I found myself cruising down my street. I looked at the DeLorean’s clock and saw that I had returned to this universe, and that it was Sunday, November 28, 2010. I breathed a sigh of relief. I was home.

I am heartbroken that I will not be able to see the Lions of that other universe build upon their 11-0 start, but I keep telling myself that those Lions are not my Lions. My Lions are 2-9 and I need to accept that. I need to embrace them as my team and stop chasing ghosts, stop facing fantasies until I turn out like poor Doc Brown, wild eyed and deranged, chasing a dream that was never real to begin with. He will never find love with Marty and these Lions will never be 11-0. Oh well. After all, a man cannot fight fate, as Doc Brown so often told me. I see now that those were the only moments of clarity the poor, senile old fool had during our adventure. I live in fear every day that today will be the day he shows up at my door again in a rebuilt time machine, but I can only hope that he will remain trapped in that alternate universe and that he dies before he can complete his time machine of vengeance. In that universe the Lions are 11-0, but he also haunts that terrible dimension. In this world, the Lions are 2-9, but at least I don’t have to worry about Doc Brown trying to suck my dick, and I guess that’s something, right? RIGHT???

Tell us BVO. Tell us what a real man looks like

There appears to be, umm, issues in the Lions locker room

When you think about for a minute, it shouldn't come as a big surprise that most sports reporters are the worst kinds of asswipes. I'm not saying they're all jackasses - Kowalski seems like a decent dude and nationally, few people would be upset about being stuck in an airport bar with Peter King. The majority of them though, are the exact kind of infuriating, drunk-on-the tiny-bit-of-power-they-lucked-in-to fucktards that make you want to reach across the counter at, say, the DMV, beat someone into a bloody, lifeless pulp.

There are a lot of understandable reasons to want to be a beat writer for a major sports team, even though they get paid less than high school janitors. If my company would give me a year off and the Lions let me travel with the team and write about it, my masturbation schedule would be so relentless you could make money on Kimberley Clark stock. I’d be good at it too. I’d promise never to gleefully rub one out in the locker too, because that’s a sin saying “no homo” afterwards won’t cover. That’s the thing, though. The writers we like tend to keep that fan-like attitude of “Jesus, nobody pinch me, I’m doing what I always wanted. I get an inside look at my favorite sport, get to know the players and coaches a bit. I never want to do anything else”. Peter King is so much like this that it led, painfully, to his position as Chief Fanboy for Dark Lord Brett Favre and we forgive him anyway.

But then there’s the dark side of jackass Pontificators. I always picture these people as endlessly informed they were geniuses by unstable mothers and also told they were going to write The Great American Novel by a delusional seventh grade English teacher. (Everyone knows Neil’s going to write that in the off season, anyway). They might like sports, but what they like even more is the sound of their own “important” voice. The novel thing didn’t work out because they don't have the talent, so the next best thing is to work their unwelcome opinions about the world at large into stories about local sports teams. These idiots are ok with the shitty salary because there’s no other way anyone will ever listen to them. This brings us to Brian VanOchten.

Oh man, that was a long preamble and I’m truly sorry. Unlike me, you probably have things to do. But if any of you had seen the spluttering, black rage Van Ochten’s Detroit Lions players show they're real men after loss to Patriots threw me in to, you might begin to understand. I had to approach the topic slowly and from the side or the entire post would have been in 36 point font starting with “FUUUUUUUUUCCCCKKKK YOOOOUUUUUU” and ending with a considered discussion of the most painful methods of medieval torture. That angry. Never in the history of sports media has our collective gullibility been tested as far as that schlub walking in to a locker room where the average body fat percentage is in single digits and then try and sort out for us what a “Real Man” looks and acts like. I mean, The fucking gall.

Really, Brian? Really? You actually did that? Leave aside for the moment the fact that you’re woefully unqualified to make this distinction. To be fair none of us are. Ernest Fucking Hemingway, who did have talent, spent his life trying to figure this out and wound up sticking a shotgun in his mouth after numerous personal failures. But to imply that Houston and Corey Williams should have named names in calling out the captains to make them “Real Men” is beyond idiotic. Oh, of course. The headline “Chris Houston: DeAndre Levy is a Quitter” would have been much more helpful and manly. The headline you would have wrote after that, and I refuse to believe otherwise, is “Chris Houston Shows Lions’ Immaturity” and then spent 800 words on why he should be waived immediately. You fucking well know this is true and so do we.

So what should Williams and Houston said? Nothing? “We’ll be back in the film room Monday, working hard and looking for answers”? That kind of shit is why Joey Harrington got run out of town. Maybe they should have scheduled a Players Only meeting (the equivalent of a white flag, usually) before calling people out, who knows. Like BVO, I never played in the NFL. But I was happy to see a few guys freaking out because they should have uncontrollable rage and frustration. They’d be either inhuman, completely clueless or really, really ok with losing to be any other way.

Like I said, I don’t have the answers. What I’m hoping though is that the post game ugliness in the locker room is part of the players themselves sorting out who the real leaders on the team are. We know who management wants them to be – they’ve ID’d Levy, Delmas, Stafford as the building blocks for the future and likely hope they, along with KVB for a few years, will be the leaders. But its also possible that the real team leaders will come from the less talented ranks. Someone who we don’t pay a lot of attention to know, but in the locker room is known as someone like the Titans’ deranged Courtland Finnegan who despite being undrafted and undersized, is terrifyingly brave, dirty and nasty in big games. The players have to sort this out themselves, without coaches and management and I’m praying that’s happening now.

Beyond losing, I don’t know where the team is at the moment and its clearly apparent that the media, even with locker room access, isn’t going to be overly helpful with this question. I’m not giving up though. I’m just not.

Thanksgiving With Tantalus

Me on Thanksgiving. What can I say? My family has weird traditions.

There was a point in yesterday’s game where I had a moment of pure serenity, where nothing mattered because I realized that everything was going to be okay. I can’t remember exactly quite when it happened, but I remember looking at the TV, nodding to myself and thinking “You know what, they fought hard, they just aren’t quite good enough yet, but I’m proud of them.” In my mind, I planned on breaking out a mildly lazy overmatched gunfighter metaphor, which I have done before, but it was Thanksgiving, I was feeling lazy and hey, fuck it, my team just lost again, you know? There are only so many ways to explain defeat.

But then the game refused to end, and everything went straight to hell and by the time the whole damn sordid mess was over, everything felt ugly and mean and I felt unclean, fouled by the vicious stench of whatever the fuck that fourth quarter was, and instead of proud and optimistic and upbeat, I was left feeling hopeless, irritated and ready for Godzilla to storm Ford Field with a bazooka and a heart full of hate. It was a stunning shift in tone, and I’m still not quite sure what happened. I mean, the Patriots were going to win that damn game. There was little doubt about that. Even when the Lions were leading at the end of the first quarter, it seemed obvious. When they were winning at the half, it still seemed incredibly likely. When it was tied at the end of the third quarter, it felt like we were already dead but just didn’t know it yet. And I think that is where the sense of optimism came from. We were dead but just didn’t know it. There is a kind of honor in that, you know? You keep fighting even though you are standing in a casket with the Grim Reaper pointing at you and chanting some weird gibberish in Latin. Smile and empty your guns.

I think that all disappeared the moment the Lions knew they were dead. Then they just pissed their pants and began acting like frightened children. We wanted them to smile, empty their guns, maybe flip the Reaper the bird and dance themselves down to hell. Instead they embarrassed themselves, dropping to their knees in a puddle of piss, gibbering and weeping, begging for mercy. They tossed their guns at the Reaper’s feet and then offered to suck his dick. It was shameful.

And that is what overshadows everything, all the progress, all the “Ooh, close but not quite” games, all the glimpses at the future, all of it. When the game ends, the only thing we know is that when it matters the most, our Detroit Lions will revert back into the same old sad sacks of shit they’ve always been. Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, life goes on.

Following the game, the Lions depressingly began to do what they always eventually do – cannibalize each other. Both Chris Houston and Corey Williams – both first year Lions, by the way, which I feel is somehow significant here – bitched to the media about how there are some people on the team who are quitters and just playing for a paycheck and all that happy bullshit. Basically, they accused a bunch of their teammates of having Lions Disease.

And that is where we’re at, here, 11 games into the 2010 season, 27 games into the Schwartz/Mayhew era. Our players have quit, our fans are depressed and resigned to failure, our coaches are saying the exact same things our coaches have always said, and the few of us that still dare to believe in a better world are staring down the barrel of a gun, wondering if and when a bullet tipped with failure and madness is going to come screaming out and burrow its way into our brains. It’s terrifying. This whole thing – the whole damn thing – is falling apart. It’s falling apart and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. We just have to stare into that gun and watch with wide eyed horror as the hand holding that gun squeezes the trigger in slow motion. They say that when you die, your whole life flashes before your eyes, time is meaningless, and you live in that moment for a lifetime.

A lifetime. That’s what we’re stuck inside of right now. A lifetime of failure and pain and brutal disappointment. A lifetime of horror and regret and missed opportunities. A lifetime that feels unfair and maddening and just . . . just . . . wrong. And we know that this is it, that if that finger finishes squeezing that trigger, all we can do is close our eyes and hope and pray that those people who say that are wrong, that it will be over in just a millisecond and that we won’t ever have to experience the terrible pain of that life again.

Because we can’t do this again. We can’t tear this whole thing apart and start over because . . . we just can’t. Too much has happened, too many years have passed. We’re old. We’re tired. 0-16 left us crippled and reaching for the razor blade. 0-16 nearly killed us, nearly destroyed our will, our spirit, but we took a deep breath and we decided to try again, one last time. There was still time enough to salvage something out of this life, and even though we would always be crippled, we could look forward to a day when we would smile and feel like maybe, just maybe, everything would be alright. But we can’t do it again. We just can’t. We can’t fail so utterly, so completely, again. It’s just too horrible, too painful. Being a fan shouldn’t have to be like this. Like I said a few days ago, no one understands what this feels like. No one knows what it’s like to be a Lions fan. It’s incomprehensible and ugly. I try my best to explain it, and yet I know that I don’t even come close. Because, honestly, it’s impossible to explain it. It really is. It’s impossible because there is nothing to compare it to. The most savage metaphors are still just that, metaphors. They’re colorful and they’re funny and they at least roughly sketch the outline of something resembling the pain and horror that goes along with being a Lions fan, but they don’t explain it, don’t really illustrate it, don’t reveal it, and that’s because it is unexplainable and, really, unknowable.

We don’t understand it and we’re the ones living it. I mean, I’m a pretty smart dude, very perceptive, and I can’t get a handle on the damn thing. And that’s because it never coalesces into anything tangible. Instead, it just sort of dances on the fringes of our consciousness, terrible and dark, something horrible and unreal, the sort of thing that creeps up on you like a thief from hell and makes you shiver before it slips back into the cold shadows that lie deep within your soul. You always know it’s there but you can never touch it, can never catch it, can never look it in its ugly and terrible face and simply confront it, which means that you can never fight it, which means that you can never defeat it, which means that all you can do is keep running, running, running, and try to stay one step in front of it.

I know that is hyperbolic as hell, but that is what being a fan of the Lions reduces a man to – wild gibberish and maudlin ranting and raving. I’m not even sure what I’m saying anymore. I talk a lot about pain, about suffering – I mean, hell, I just did – but even those words aren’t right. They don’t explain it. What I feel – what a lot of Lions fans feel – is something more akin to a cold, dreadful sense of resignation, a feeling that the world is not for us, and that no matter how much we want it, no matter how much we dare to dream about it, this is all that there is. It is not a flashy sort of emotion. There are long periods where we just sort of shrug apathetically and shake our heads in quiet disgust and tell ourselves and each other that this is what we expected and hell, it doesn’t hurt so bad. But that, that resigned sense of doom, is somehow worse, somehow even uglier and crueler and colder than the immediacy of pain, the immediacy of the fire of anger and rage. Pain, anger, rage, and suffering are children, little babies from hell who hit and then leave. What we feel doesn’t go away. It just sort of lingers. It never lets us go, eats away at our hope, our dreams and leaves us in a sort of dulled haze. We are drooling idiots staring at a team incapable of truly breaking our hearts because our hearts have been frozen in ice and are in the hands of some terrible Failure Demon born in the darkest, most hideous depths of hell.

Jesus. I’m sorry. I don’t even know what I’m rambling about. I disappeared beneath the surface of my own brain a while back and I’ve just been trying to claw my way back out for the last several paragraphs. The only thing I can say in my defense is that this is what the Lions have driven me to, to weird, incomprehensible bullshit that barely makes sense even to me. I am a slave to my own madness, to my own desperate desire to understand this . . . this thing known as Lions fandom. I don’t know. I just don’t. All I do know is that I feel like Tantalus right now. The fruit bearing branches above my head are perpetually out of reach and the water just beneath my chin always recedes when I try to drink. Everything I want, everything I need, is so close but I can never have it, can never touch it, and it has driven me insane.

And right now, I even envy poor Tantalus. At least he always has some sort of vain hope that he will one day be able to grab that fruit or drink that water. I, on the other hand, am just stuck in wide eyed horror, watching as the fruit gets further and further away and as the water keeps receding and receding and whatever tiny flicker of hope lives in my heart is dying, dying, dying and I am panicking because I know that when it finally goes out, I may never be able to rekindle it.

The Lions lost on Thanksgiving, but more than that, they are unraveling – yet again – and the fruit and the water seem so, so far away now, and inside of me, the answers are getting muddled by horrible gibberish and everything is so, so confusing and I am just a child, staring in wide eyed horror, standing alone in the dark and I don’t know where to go or where to turn and I try to scream but all that I hear, hovering on the edges of reality obscured by the blackness, is a dull echo of the past and it is growing louder and louder and louder and now it is screaming towards me from the void and . . .