Total Victory

Let me start off with a quick confession before we get to the Ballad of St. Calvin and the Holy Ghost, Matthew Stafford.  Last week, I missed the game because of, uh, let’s just call them reasons and leave it at that, okay?  Anyway, I did record the game and intended on watching it right away, but every time I do that, it’s impossible for me not to spoil it for myself.  I mean, the lure of finding out who won the damn game in 1.2 seconds is too much to pass up.  And so that’s how I came to see that the Lions lost in brutal fashion to the Bengals.  I immediately decided that there was no way I was watching that bullshit, but being a masochist, I decided I would watch the Sam Martin shankapalooza, if only out of some sort of morbid curiosity.  So, I watched it, it was the most Lions way to lose a game imaginable, and then deleted the whole goddamn thing.  So that’s why I didn’t write anything last week.

Anyway, that is the backdrop to what went on this week.  It’s easy to see how the Lions could fold mentally and emotionally after something like that.  After all, we are dealing with a band of idiots who have more often than not proven themselves to be as fragile as the most temperamental of divas.  This could get ugly in a hurry.  Friend of the blog UpHere noted the same thing to me in a twitter message before the game.  This was important because it could either make or break this team. 

The game itself was wild and stupid and weird and filled with laughing gas and tear gas and abdominal gas and every other kind of gas you can imagine, but the main thing to take away from this is that there were more than half a dozen moments in this game where this team could have broken, and probably would have been broken in the past.  Shit, with less than a minute left in the game, the announcers were talking about it like it was already over, bemoaning the Lions killer turnovers and talking about how the ridiculous stats of the offense were all for naught, and blah blah blah, we know how this shit goes.  And yet, when the game actually ended, it wasn’t the Lions melting down, but Dez Bryant throwing a tantrum on the sideline while Jason Witten had to fight the urge to physically assault him and Matthew Stafford was mobbed on the other side of the field like Tom Cruise at the end of Top Gun.

The storyline optics there are so blazingly obvious that it feels almost unnecessary to have to actually talk about them.  You saw the game, that shit was stark.  This is the sort of thing that can make Matthew Stafford indisputably The Man.  I know that sounds like something I’ve said before, especially since the Lions have done this a dozen times since he showed up, but this one just felt different.  I think it was because the moment was such a make or break thing, the emotions and brain goo so susceptible to whatever the hell was going to happen, that what actually did happen just felt even more enormous than it would have anyway.  This wasn’t just a come from behind win.  This was a come from behind win, and a display of Brass Balls Big Dick Swingin’ by the quarterback, by The Man, when everyone on the team was looking for something to believe in, for a reason to strap a rocket to their back and blast off to the moon rather than point that rocket straight at their faces and blow themselves to hell.

This was Matthew Stafford leading an army of wavering soldiers into a battle, having everything go wrong and then at the last second, saying fuck it, swaggering into the Kill Zone, and then doing the Big Balls dance from Major League II before putting a bullet between the eyes of the enemy commander and winning the day.  These dudes will follow him anywhere now.  That’s what that moment means.

But before that, you also had St. Calvin sonning the fuck out of Dez Bryant.  Sure, Bryant caught a couple of touchdowns, but St. Calvin had 329 yards receiving, which, uh… this is why you don’t publicly challenge your betters, son.  It was yet another instance of one of our dudes rising to the moment instead of being overwhelmed by it, of becoming a Destroyer of Worlds because that’s what was called for.  And again, in the end, Calvin set the team up to win, and he and Stafford slapped each other on the back, hugged and laughed it up on the sideline, like two fighter pilots recounting a hyper-adrenalized successful mission while Dez Bryant howled with infantile rage, his teammates incapable of concealing their utter disgust.

It’s a perfect picture, one that should be framed on the walls of our hearts for a long, long time.  This was a moment in which the Lions triumphed against all the Failure Demons and the worst parts of their nature while their opponent crumbled.  It was a moment which negated everything else that had come earlier in the game, when all those turnovers and blown opportunities seemed to signal in all too sickeningly familiar neon lights that this team was going to fail the test yet again.  Instead, the outcome of the game, that moment when Stafford literally flew over both his line and the Cowboys standing across from them, turned all of those failed tests into tribulations that made the moment all the sweeter, all the more significant, and, ultimately, a vindication of this team’s mental and emotional health.

The turnovers were nearly fatal, and the Cowboys big plays in the second half still point to a team that is inherently limited.  These sorts of things happen to this team, and will continue to happen, because they are a flawed team coached by flawed men, and nothing is going to change that at this point.  It just won’t.  But you can let that beat you again and again, and ultimately break you, or you can try to live with it and eventually overcome it, to be the best version of yourself that you can be, warts and all, and that’s what I think we saw against the Cowboys. 

But let’s not let one simple and undeniable truth get lost in all this talk of moments and inherent flaws, and the grandiose psychobabble and hyperbolic gibberish I’m letting loose here: the Lions outgained the Cowboys 623-268.  That’s fucking absurd.  They blew them right off the fucking field.  If they don’t turn the ball over, they beat the shit out of the Cowboys.  Even with the turnovers, the Cowboys were lucky the Lions didn’t run them out of the building.  The Lions were just better, and not just better, but significantly better.  The Cowboys, by the way, are probably the best team in the NFC East.  Okay, okay, the NFC East is a horrific dumpster fire of a division this year, but still.  There’s a chance that if the Lions make the playoffs this year their opponents will be these very same Cowboys.  The point is that the Lions are in this.  They’re really, truly in this.  All they have to do is to get the mental shit lined up, and, well… now you can kinda see why this game feels like a big goddamn deal.

This team will break our hearts still.  I think we all know that.  It is just a part of our identity.  But I think now, there is an underlying sense that even when things go all FUBAR, that it’s okay, because Matthew Stafford has returned from the Outback, and he’s returned as a Spirit Warrior, and that he’s got this, man.  He’s got this.  That sort of confidence, that sense that there is a sort of mental and emotional safety net, is contagious.  Not just for us fans, but more importantly, for the rest of the team.  They can just go out and play ball because Stafford’s got this.  And even when it’s not enough – and sometimes it won’t be – that’s okay, because next week, it will be.  That can be a very, very powerful thing.

I just can’t get over that final scene – and yes, I realize it is sort of ridiculous to talk about this almost like it was a movie, but that’s how epic and cinematic it felt, didn’t it? – of Stafford getting mobbed, jaw squared to the world, fire in his eyes, victory in his heart, while the Cowboys bickered and fought on the sideline.  Not only did the Lions survive their own trial by fire, they utterly broke the will of their opponents.  If this were war, this would be Total Victory. 

This was the Boy Prince, the young Lion who was once knocked off his horse against those heathens from Cleveland only to rally his men to victory with one arm hanging, becoming the King, the Lion in the prime of his life standing confidently on the field of battle, calling his shot, and then turning and walking back to his adoring soldiers while the enemy commander crumpled to the ground, shot between the eyes.  Matthew Stafford didn’t just execute a gameplan, he put the whole goddamn war on his back, and he triumphed.  And everyone watched him do it.

This could mean everything, or it could mean nothing.  The only Truth we know is that life is just a series of moments, moments that define us, moments that exist within themselves, beautiful and alone, and in these moments, regardless of what’s happened in the past or what may happen in the future, Total Victory is possible.  And Matthew Stafford and the Lions just had one of those moments, and no matter what happened yesterday or what will happen tomorrow, that moment will live forever, and it will always be perfect.  Total Victory.

That'll Do

This was a weird game.  In the first half the Lions looked like the team we all know and loathe.  They scored first and then gave up 17 straight points, couldn’t do anything on offense, dropped a billion passes, let the Browns channel their inner Ike on their Tina while they were on defense, and generally looked like they would just be forced to sit helplessly while Brandon Weeden of all people embarrassed them in front of a horde of degenerate Ohioans, who then would all go and bang the family pet or jerk off in libraries or whatever it is the hell those animals do to celebrate while Jim Schwartz rode off the field, blindfolded on a hee-hawing donkey, pelted with feces and shame.  It was just that kind of game.  But then the Lions said fuck it, scored 24 straight points of their own and left the people of Cleveland to wallow in a pool of their own rancid tears and beat their wives and drown their children in the polluted waters of the Cuyahoga in an offering to the Shame God, who has agreed to take their filthy sacrifices, raise them as mutant bastards and populate Appalachia with them.

And so today, the children of Ohio are left to beg for mercy while the children of Michigan laugh and play in the fields of the Lord, happiness and light in their souls.  This could have ended badly – I was roughly 968% sure it would end badly – but then the Lions simply remembered that they were better, stopped fucking around and broke the Browns.  This is the sort of thing born of True Confidence (and again, don’t mistake True Confidence for Jackass False Bravado, which the Lions led the league in last season, and to be honest, all the seasons) as Matthew Stafford seems to be turning into a legitimate professional and not just some dumb Wild West act who panics and needs Prozac every time things start to go to hell.  Today, he and the Lions went to hell, took a look around, said fuck this, and climbed right back out.

The Lions are not a great team.  But they are not a bad team.  They are just sort mediocre, fatally flawed in that eternal way that made me channel my inner Morrissey before the season.  The good news, though, is that most of the league is mediocre in the same way.  The difference is that the Lions have legit playmakers and stars, and that means that despite all those tragic flaws, they can still beat the rest of the teams stuck in this morass of ennui.  They’re still going to lose to the Packers or the Saints or teams of that ilk, but there aren’t many of those teams this year (and really, even the Packers and Saints aren’t necessarily the Packers and Saints, you know?), and really, that means that the world is wide open for them right now.  Just get to the playoffs and maybe something weird can happen.  Who knows?  In order to do that, though, they have to beat these other shitball teams.  Today they did that, and so far, with one irritating exception, they’ve done that all year.

The Lions are 4-2 even though they’ve played 4 games on the road.  If they can manage to go 6-2 at home – and only 4-2 to finish, which is beyond doable - they could go 2-3 on the road the rest of the way and still pull off a 10-6 season and probably a Wild Card berth.  This is a thing that looks like it might happen.  It’s right there.  They just have to keep winning games like this.

It was a sloppy effort overall, imperfect in that maddeningly familiar way, and they failed to just line up and show the Browns who was boss, but Reggie Bush made a few big plays when it counted most – especially at the start of the second half, when the Lions desperately needed to make something happen.  After he scored, it was suddenly 17-14 and you could almost visibly see the Browns and their fans tighten up like they were doing anal kegels.  The defense was awful in the first half, when they let the Browns set their single season high for rushing yards in an entire game, but in the second they shut down the Browns, The Great Willie Young ate Weeden’s soul, and, oh yeah, DeAndre Levy kicked his awesome season into another gear and started firmly making his case for All-Pro honors this year.

Matthew Stafford was Matthew Stafford, only not quite as sharp – for all the horrible drops in the first half, I think I’m the only person who thought Stafford really wasn’t all that accurate either – but when it came time to put the ball in the endzone, he did, hitting new red zone weapon Joseph Fauria three times for touchdowns.  (By the way, a solemn farewell to Tony Scheffler, who probably started packing shit into the trunk of his car sometime early in the 4^th quarter.)  This was a shitty game won by dudes who decided to put that behind them and win as professional football players, which is a welcome change.  Even in that magic 2011 season, it felt like they were winning more as a collection of acrobats and circus geeks than pros.  This feels different, more solid somehow, and that makes me feel better than 100 Wild West comebacks, with St. Calvin catching balls on his nose like a trained seal, and bears riding tricycles through flaming hoops.  There are not nearly the same amount of OH MY GOD adrenaline spikes and there isn’t that same “Hey guys, I just shit my pants and my neighbors are now hiding in the bomb shelter and I hear sires in the distance” excitement, but that’s sort of the point.  You don’t really want that all the time.  You want to just smile, nod calmly, maybe do a single fist-pump and say that’ll do.

Look, in that same vein, there really isn’t a whole lot to say here.  There are not 3,000 word Edgar Allan Poe short stories about night terrors doubling as blog posts to write and there aren’t any even longer hyper-adrenalized Chris Farleyesque OMG DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN THIS HAPPENED AND WHAT ABOUT THAT posts to write either.  There is just this, and that’ll do.

A Slow Death

Some deaths are sudden, like jumping off of a boat only to get mowed down by Nazi machine gunners or getting stabbed in the face by some freak jumping out of the bushes in a Halloween mask all tweaked out on what they got for Trick or Treating at Walter White’s house.  These deaths are horrible and ugly and make everyone throw up who has to witness them, but at least you die quickly and you get to float off to the Great Beyond to ride your Spirit Horse on the Great Plains of Eternity.  Other deaths are slow, they take forever, there are no real outward signs of torment or decay and everyone just sort of shrugs their shoulders when they see you and then walks on by to get on with their own slow deaths.  This Chinese Water Torture sort of death/death by a Thousand Papercuts/whatever the fuck you want to call it, is agonizing because it never ends and soon your Spirit Horse gets impatient, stamps its hooves and then leaves you sitting in the dust all along while it goes to play with the other horses.  This is what the game against the Packers felt like.

If you want to tailor a metaphor to the Green Bay experience in all its loathsomely familiar ways, let’s compare it instead to dying of heart disease because you spent your whole life shoving cheese in your gluttonous feedhole.  The doctor keeps telling you that one day this shit is going to kill you, but you shrug it off, and you shrug it off, you’re still in the game, you’ll take care of it eventually, and then oh shit, you just had a heart attack while playing tennis or having rote sex with your bored wife, whatever.  So you say okay, now I’ve really got to get this under control, but it’s too late, you are too set in your ways and your doctor just sort of shakes his head at you every time you see him, until finally, there you are, lying ravaged in a hospital bed, stroking out, vomiting all over the place while your loved ones just wait for you die and Aaron Rodgers hangs out just out in the hall, where you can still see him, seducing your loved ones and getting them hooked on meth.  You try to do something about it but then your heart explodes and you shit your pants.  That’s what this game felt like.

Look, this one felt doomed from the start.  It was just too much to overcome – St. Calvin being martyred, the weight of history collapsing on us like the rolls of fat pressing on a fat man’s lungs (sorry, it might take me a minute to get off of this theme), Nate Burleson getting shamefully whipped up on by the Noid – it was all just too much.  Still, it’s hard to really quantify just what St. Calvin being out really meant for the offense.  Did they play poorly just because he was out?  Or did they play poorly in general while he coincidentally happened to be out?  I think it’s probably a mixture of the two – the offensive line getting its ass beat for most of the game probably was going to happen either way – but we’ll never really know, especially because we can’t really see just how much his absence fucked with the Lions no-doubt fragile confidence, and when I say confidence I mean true confidence, not the showy kind of asshole swagger that is too often a mask for doubt and fear.  The Lions have a shitload of that.  But anyway, we just don’t know. 

Because of that, it’s hard to say that this game felt that meaningful.  I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was meaningful, but it was meaningful in that way that every game – especially a game against a divisional rival – is meaningful, and it was meaningful because it was yet another lost chance to erase some of that inglorious history that has kept us tethered to cackling Failure Demons all these years.  I don’t know how much it really tells us about where this team is, or what’s to come, because figuring this St. Calvin thing is just a temporary blip (Oh Lord, it better be…), then this performance is unlikely to repeat itself.

It sucks to have to even say that, though, to have to try to contextualize yet another defeat against this insipid team.  And there were moments when it looked like the Lions might have a chance to turn it around, to somehow pull it off despite all the ugly cholesterol clogging their arteries.  They were fleeting moments, but they were there, barely.  The defense bent but didn’t break for much of the game, and as long as that happened, there still felt like there was a chance, however remote it actually really seemed since the Lions offense looked a lot like one of those Drew Stanton quarterbacked offenses from 2010.  You remember those games?  Yeah, the ones the Lions hung in and hung in until their hearts burst, you remember.  Well, they hung in this one for a while, and then that Lions defense broke and those hearts burst.  By the time it was over, the Packers had almost 500 yards of total offense, Matthew Stafford’s knee was reportedly wrapped in ice, and the Lions felt like they were down by roughly 1,000 rather than the 22-9 final score that flashed sadly on the scoreboard and in our hearts. 

That’s the most discouraging thing, really.  For all those glimmers that represented a technical sort of hope, the Lions never really felt like they were in this game.  Like I said, it felt doomed from that start, and it was obvious that they couldn’t really keep up with the Packers.  I’m not going to panic because, again, no St. Calvin means that you have to give at least a partial pass to the offense here.  But not a complete one, because Stafford was sacked five times and the running game atrophied to those familiarly depressing depths that leave us all shivering and shaking like junkies.

For the most part, the Lions lost this game in the trenches, and as cliché as that phrase is, it was pretty much invented to describe games like this one.  The Packers were simply better in this one on both lines – of course, it also helps when the refs decide that holding is even more arbitrary than usual, but when you’re reduced to bitching about the refs, and especially about holding not getting called, it usually means you just got plain beat.  Last week, the Bears were holding even more egregiously, but the Lions were able to reduce it to a mere trifle because they were the better team.  This time they couldn’t because, well, they weren’t.

In the end, I suppose this was sort of a weird game, one that I kind of emotionally divested myself from as soon as I heard that St. Calvin was off healing the sick or whatever the fuck it is that saints of the non-New Orleans type do.  I guess they perform magic tricks and get the Pope to call them miracles?  I don’t know and I was raised Catholic.  Who gives a fuck?  What am I talking about?  Where am I?

Right, so this was a weird game because on the one hand, I am totally willing to give them a pass for this because of horrible circumstances – when you’re riding with Kris Dunham as your primary playmaker at receiver you’re gonna lose – but on the other hand, I hate that I have to sit here and give this team a pass for the billionth time in the life of my fandom.  Excuses in sports are the weakest of weak shit and often reveal a mind softened by failure and defeat.  And yet, sometimes excuses are simply what they are – cold, hard truth that you simply have to accept.  I don’t know.  I also have a hard time excusing this, though, because a lot of the ways the Lions got beat in this game were simply because, well, because they got beat in all the ways that I’ve already talked about.  Really, I’m having a hard time not just talking in circles here, which feels oddly appropriate because that’s sort of the Ouroboros nature of this game with the Calvin Johnson situation that I mentioned earlier.  In the end, any attempt to analyze this game will just end with us eating our own tails.

I wish I had more for you than that, something interesting or at least passionate to say here, but I’m just sort of bummed out.  I’m not even mad, just disappointed that the Lions couldn’t somehow overcome all of that bullshit.  It’s understandable, but still, you know?  I guess this is the slow decay of a mortal life.  It’s sad and tragic in its own understated way, but ultimately inevitable, and against inevitability all you can do is pat grandpa on the head while he’s lying in that hospital bed, wheezing and twitching from all the mini-strokes, thank the doctor for trying and then make the funeral arrangements.  This was a slow death, inevitable and unremarkable, and one day we’ll figure out how to overcome our own inherent weaknesses and beat this fuckin’ team, but for now, Aaron Rodgers is alive and well, and we’re just choking on a cheeseburger.  Again.