Where the Hell Are We? Part 8: Draft Aftermath

(Quick note before we begin: I’m going to Florida to hang out with The Great Willie Young and won’t be back until late next week, so this is it for this week and next week. After I get back, I’ll do individual draft profiles like a fucking nerd and I have some other fun stuff planned, so you’re stuck with me for a while. Yay?)

“The best-case scenario here is that Wiggins is really good depth and that the Lions manage to snag, say, Frank Ragnow of Arkansas in the draft to be the starting center for the next decade.”

That was me, a couple of weeks ago, once again showing that in the blizzard of idiot gibberish there is occasionally a perfect snowflake that flutters to the ground. You just have to pay attention. I do know what I’m talking about once in a while, and you should cherish me as a somewhat useful idiot. On the other hand, I understand it’s hard to read more than ten words these days and I assume 99% of you have already checked out here to look at memes and jerk off. I mean, that’s what I’m doing right now and I’m the one writing this.

Okay, let’s start over. Anyway . . . yeah, I nailed the whole Frank Ragnow thing so, naturally, I think he’ll be a Hall of Fame demigod. Or at least a very solid 10-year starter, a Pro Bowler and a dude nobody really talks that much about because he’s a fucking center and the only time anyone really even notices the center is when he’s messing up or flipping off the fans or getting driven into Matthew Stafford’s lap during a running play. Fuck you, Dominic Raiola.

Shit, let’s start over again! I like the pick. I probably shouldn’t mention that I actually thought that “best case scenario” involved getting Ragnow in the second round rather than the first, but I believe in being honest with you and besides, why quibble?

Ragnow is a safe pick, and fans don’t really like safe picks. They want something flashy that immediately causes an endorphin rush. They don’t want an infrastructure pick, and that’s exactly what Ragnow is. He was picked to solidify the Lions foundation. If your building is built on quicksand, nothing else will matter. That fucker is going down.

But Ragnow was just part of a larger plan which revealed itself I think over the weekend. Drafting Ragnow in the first shows that the Lions really, really want to finally fix the offensive line. Drafting Tyrell Crosby in the fifth – a dude who was supposed to go earlier than that – shows just how much they want to build that wall up front. Despite only having six picks in the entire draft, the Lions spent two of them on the interior of the offensive line. They then used their seventh-round pick to draft a fucking fullback. Yes, in 2018. That is three out of six picks devoted to building a strong running game and protecting Matthew Stafford. Message sent.

If that wasn’t enough, they traded up to take a running back, Kerryon Johnson, in the second round. Combine him with the free agent signing of LeGarrette Blount, and the signings of offensive linemen Wesley Johnson and Kenny Wiggins, who both have starting experience, and Bob Quinn is practically screaming in your face with a bullhorn what the priority is here.

The Lions are acting like Doomsday Preppers when it comes to the line and the running game, hoarding dudes and guns and food and ranting that you’re gonna get eaten when the grid goes down, and it’s hard to really blame them. I mean, we’ve been living in the End Times for the last 60 years already. It’s about time someone starts trying to build a shelter.

The upshot of all this is that the offense looks ready to go in a big fucking way. The offensive line now has five legitimately solid players up front, a few of whom could be stars, and several quality backups. The running game is both better and more coherent, with LeGarrette Blount set to do the tough inside running and Kerryon Johnson able to give them something more explosive on outside runs. And then Theo Riddick is still there to be an ideal third down back. Of course, Stafford is Stafford, the receivers are the best tandem we’ve seen since Herman Moore and Brett Perriman, and if Kenny Golladay stays healthy, they could be ridiculously scary. All that seems the least bit unknown is tight end, but in Luke Willson, Levine Tuiolo and Michael Roberts, all of whom are physically talented dudes, someone should emerge.

This all sounds so great I barely know what to do with myself. And then there’s the defense. And this is where I start staring longingly at the ether and drain cleaner, because right now . . . I don’t see it.

But part of the reason I don’t see it is because we don’t really even know or understand what we’re supposed to be seeing. We won’t really have a sense of what this defense is even supposed to be until we actually see them in a game. But the draft did at least give us an idea of what it will look like.

Going into the draft, it was basically taken as gospel that the Lions would draft an edge rusher. Or two. Or however many would make us feel confident that Aaron Rodgers wouldn’t rise from his throne in hell to pull us apart like characters in fucking Hellraiser again. Instead, the Lions drafted none. Wait . . . what?

Yes, instead of drafting an edge terror in the first round, which everyone thought was a foregone conclusion – hello, Harold Landry! Goodbye, Harold Landry! – the Lions just ignored the position completely. They also didn’t take a defensive tackle, which was probably their second biggest need – at least according to conventional wisdom. So what the fuck is going on here?

Well, the Lions did draft a defensive lineman, trading up in the 4^th round to grab Da’Shawn Hand, who is neither an edge dude nor a defensive tackle. Instead, he’s a defensive end whose main attributes seem to be his versatility and ability to hold up at the point of attack. And therein lies the answer.

If you’ve paid attention to the Patriots, you know that their defense is not an attacking defense. Like, at all. They don’t feature big pass rushing terrors and tackles for loss. They are the epitome of bend-but-don’t-break and occasionally oops-we-broke-and-just-cost-Tom Brady-another-Super Bowl. They also can’t really be easily identified as a 4-3 or 3-4 team, and most of the time, you can’t even identify who’s actually a starter. I talked about this when I did my overview of the defensive line. Positional ambiguity has never been more relevant, and Da’Shawn Hand’s position is ambiguous as hell. Is he a 4-3 end? Is he a 3-4 end? Is he gonna slide inside occasionally? What’s his real role? We don’t really know, and so all we have to go on are little bread crumbs we can pick up along the way.

The Lions say they want to use Hand in “heavy packages,” which screams “situational player.” But, they also traded next year’s third round pick to trade up to draft Hand, which to me says that they need him to be more than just another body.

And then you have to remember that both Bob Quinn and Matt Patricia are former Patriots and it starts to feel like Bill Belichick is the emperor cackling “good . . . goooood!” from beneath his hobo hoodie robes. Of course, Bill Belichick would be content if the Lions went 0-16 because he’s an emotionless sociopath, but the point is that this defense is almost certainly being built in his image, which explains why we need to pay attention to what the Patriots defenses have done.

Those defenses rely on the defensive line not to make plays but to control the line of scrimmage, to be responsible in maintaining gap integrity and all that nerd shit. Theoretically, this then frees up the linebackers to make plays. Of course, this requires that your defense have kickass linebackers, which . . . uhhhh.

Okay, okay, in hindsight, this really, really explains why Bob Quinn drafted Jarrad Davis in the first-round next year. You can see the plan. Jarrad Davis is supposed to be the centerpiece of this entire defense, both figuratively and literally. The hope is that he develops into an All-Pro. “Solid starter” isn’t going to be enough here, especially because the Lions don’t really have any other good linebackers, which is kind of a problem given the whole “kickass linebackers” thing.

Maybe Devon Kennard can be utilized as a big play outside linebacker type. Maybe Christian Jones will thrive in a new scheme. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. Those maybes are scary as hell. And why wouldn’t they be? I mean, the last 60 years haven’t exactly given us reason to take a leap of faith. We’re abuse victims and you don’t ask abuse victims to blindly trust.

Look, most of the team’s needs heading into the draft were on defense and they didn’t really address any of them. At least not based on conventional thinking. The defensive line added a 4^th rounder who was mostly a disappointment in college who didn’t really do any one thing well, they traded away a future 3^rd rounder to get him and, man, they have to be seeing something I can’t. They did nothing at all at linebacker, they ignored cornerback – understandable if you take yet another leap of faith that Teez Tabor won’t be a bust – and then drafted a small-school safety in the 3^rd round. They seem to be excited to get Tracy Walker, and maybe he’ll turn out to be another key piece of the puzzle, but again, that’s yet another “maybe”, another “leap of faith” and “I can’t see it, but I guess I have to trust they know what they’re doing.” This is just too fucking much for a fanbase that can barely handle having to do one of those things at a time.

I can see where the Lions defense wants to go, I just don’t really have any faith that they’ll get there this season. There are just too many missing parts, too many leaps of faiths and maybes, and the whole thing will probably be a sloppy mess this season. Which kind of sucks because it means it’s another wasted Stafford year, and just ask Barry Sanders and Calvin Johnson what those will do to a dude. Hell, just ask me. Just ask yourself.

Still, I can at least see a plan. Is that enough for now? Maybe. I don’t know. The one thing that is taking shape to me is that this is Bob Quinn’s team. This is his vision, his plan. He hired Matt Patricia because Patricia is a dude who’s already familiar with that vision, that plan. This is a naked attempt to transplant the Patriot Way, and if it works things are gonna be amazing for the first time in, well, ever really. If they don’t? Well, we know exactly what that feels like. We’re being asked to take yet another Leap of Faith even though we’ve already broken every bone in our body in failed leaps. We’re like a really gullible Evel Knievel. Every bone in our body has been shattered, and so have our souls. And yet, here we are, putting ourselves together again and preparing to leap. Please catch us this time, please don’t be yet another trickster demon, Bob Quinn. Because there’s nothing left for us to break.

Where The Hell Are We? Part 7: Quarterbacks

 (I’ve decided to do a pre-draft series taking a look at the Lions position by position while I’m still upbeat and motivated and before being a Lions fan leaves me feeling depressed and incapable of stringing words together besides “fuck” and “this”. Each section will take a brief (lol sure) look at the team’s history at the position/notable players/etc., a look at more recent years and, finally, the situation as it stands today on the eve of the draft. I’ll do something like two a week, starting with the defensive line and ending with quarterback. And lo and behold, we've arrived today at quarterback.. Consider this a quasi-draft preview/history lesson/idiot gibberish. Cool? Cool.)

Ancient History Because I Believe in Psychic Energies and Dear God Especially Here: I can barely even handle writing this section because . . . JESUS CHRIST! The story of the Detroit Lions at quarterback is the story of the franchise itself, just full of failed hopes and misery and failure demons and every other kind of demon in hell, just constantly gnawing at our souls, punishing us for something truly heinous we must have done in another life. Maybe Lions fans are the collective souls of the entire Nazi party reincarnated. Who knows? You could be Hitler.

Anyway, shit, we’ve already veered into wild ranting and idiot gibberish, so clearly this is going to go well. It all starts, of course, with Bobby Layne. If you just read that in the voice of Vincent Price, I don’t blame you because there’s no bigger spectral ghoul in our absurd history than Bobby Layne.

It has nothing to do with Bobby Layne as a player. Well it does, and it doesn’t. It does because he’s the one Hall of Fame quarterback we have in our history, the leader of those 1950s teams that stand as the high-water mark in Lions history, just before the crest broke and a great tidal wave of misery washed back on us all. Horrible, horrible. And it doesn’t, because despite all of that, despite what should stand forever in our minds as a perpetual reminder of glory, Bobby Layne’s name to us is dark and full of terrors because he’s the one who infamously cursed the Lions to a half century of failure when they traded him to the Steelers.

Naturally, this is kind of absurd. I mean, Christ, nattering about ancient curses is something none of us should allow to happen, and yet . . . and yet . . . 50 years of misery and failure has stretched to 60, and how long, Bobby? How long must we endure for your hissy fit?

And it was a hissy fit. That’s because the whole legend of Bobby Layne has kind of been twisted to the point where everyone believes the Lions ineptly traded away their franchise player in his prime, and thus deserved everything that befell them. To most people, the whole Bobby Layne saga is just example number one of the Lions being the Same Ol’ Lions lol amirite that we’ve all heard so many fucking times in our lives. But the truth is that Bobby Layne was already on the decline when the Lions traded him away and within a couple of years he was basically finished. Did they trade him too soon? Eh. Maybe a year too early. But that is hardly GUILTY YOUR HONOR kind of evidence worthy of a 60-year curse.

Still, Bobby Layne was a Hall of Fame quarterback for the Lions, and he deserves to be remembered as such. Unfortunately, he’ll always be remembered as the genesis for everything we know and loathe about this goddamn team. That is a hell of a legacy to leave, but it shouldn’t really be that surprising. I mean, after all, this is a franchise in which it is practically a requirement to leave a legacy tinged with tragedy and deep psychic scars for all its Hall of Famers.

It’s sad that, for the most part, Bobby Layne’s very name has been reduced to something of a psychic bogeyman, a dirty word people barely dare to even whisper when they talk about the Lions. It is insane and it is ridiculous, but “insane” and “ridiculous” pretty much sum up being a fan of this goddamn team.

After Bobby Layne and before Matthew Stafford was literally 50 years of absurd failure, the sort of thing that Browns fans are only beginning to understand. Every single quarterback who the Lions threw out there failed, some more tragically and ridiculously than others. Instead of talking about all of them one by one like Arya Stark reciting her death list, I’ll just focus on five tragedies in particular.

After nearly 30 years of wandering in the desert, relying on names like Jeff Komlo and Gary Danielson to combat Bobby Layne’s psychic five finger death touch, the Lions said fuck it and went big, drafting Chuck Long in the first round in 1986. He was supposed to be the Answer. Finally. Naturally, he basically played one horrible season and then flamed out of the league. Next!

Only a few years after drafting Long – and a year after drafting Barry Sanders – the Lions decided to try to take a spiritual flamethrower to Bobby Layne by drafting Heisman winner Andre Ware. The idea was to pair him with fellow Heisman winner Barry Sanders and create an unstoppable run-and-shoot offensive juggernaut. It turns out, though, that Andre Ware was just a product of a crazy Houston offense in college, the sort of dude we’d dismiss as a “system quarterback” if he came out today, like one of those Texas Tech quarterbacks who throws for 5,000 yards and doesn’t even get drafted. Back then, nobody knew better, and so of course the Lions were the team that got to learn the lesson. Andre Ware played a total of 14 games over 4 years, starting only 6. Next!

Nearly a decade went by before the Lions tried to draft their next franchise quarterback. His name? Joey Harrington. Next!!!

Okay fine, “next” was named Matthew Stafford, and that’s worked out pretty well. Finally. But we’re not done with the tragedies and there’s a couple more I want to talk about, a couple of players who weren’t horrible busts but still contributed their own painful psychic wounds to our collective psyche.

We’ll start with Greg Landry, who arrived only about a decade after Bobby Layne left and before anyone really even understood the hell that was about to come down on this team and its fans. Landry was legit good, a true double threat passer/runner who was headed for legit stardom. He might have even been the best player in the entire league in 1971. Things could have been much, much different for us, but then Greg Landry ruined his knee, he never quite came back, and he hung around for years as just a ghost of himself, a cruel mockery of what we might have had. The Lions spent so much time, and wasted so many years, trying to chase that ghost, that it’s Greg Landry’s ghost who might actually be responsible for our misery, not Bobby Layne’s. If the Lions had just mercilessly tossed Landry aside and started over as soon as his knee was doomed to hell, maybe, just maybe, they could have pulled out of their tailspin. But they didn’t, they kept deluding themselves into believing Landry could come back, and by the time they finally decided to give up the ghost it was too late and the Forever Rot had already set in. Bobby Layne is a dick.

And finally, there is Scott Mitchell, who I’m including because he taunted us like a cruel desert mirage in that crazy 1995 season, which saw him put up huge numbers and convince us that our search had finally ended. Naturally, he melted down so hideously in the playoff game that year against the Eagles (spoiler alert: the Lions lost) that he never recovered, neither did the Lions, and we were left eating sand again and weeping blood tears in our spiritual Sahara.

This parade of failure demons is not a legacy that anyone should have to deal with, and so it’s honestly no surprise that so many of us have had such a hard time trusting in Matthew Stafford. We’re like a dog that’s been beaten since he was a puppy. Our new owners seem like they might be nice. Hell, they’ve treated us pretty well for years now. But all it takes is one bad thing, one raised voice, one rolled up newspaper, one interception or offseason weight gain, and we’re pissing ourselves and baring our teeth. It’s just monstrous, it’s not fair, and we can’t help it. It’s not our fault. It’s not our fault. It’s not our fault.

Recent History: I already mentioned Joey Blue Skies or Joey Sunshine or whatever the fuck his stupid nickname was, and let’s face it, his particular scar still burns bright on our flesh so there’s no need to reopen that wound.

After him, Jon Kitna was at least tolerable for a year or two, but then he got caught up in The Horror of 2008 and died during the Bataan Death March of 0-16. Dan Orlovsky and Daunte Culpepper died with him, and when it was all over we were left with the number one pick in the draft, which was spent – wisely, for the first goddamn time – on Matthew Stafford.

I’ve already used the beaten dog analogy to describe our relationship with Matthew Stafford. But it’s deeper than that. We’re so beaten, so fucking afraid, that nobody can discuss Matthew Stafford rationally. He’s a flashpoint for Lions fans. You either give into The Fear and irrationally curse him, riding him unfairly and making him die for all of the Lions sins – and god knows that’s a lot – or you reflexively get defensive and refuse to consider even the mildest criticism of him. It’s a shitty discourse that has no winners. It’s like nuclear fucking war. The only way to win is not to play, which perhaps helps to explain why I threw up my hands for several years and refused to take part.

But here I am, and I’m struggling to find the best way to talk about Matthew Stafford. And so I’m going to do the cowardly thing and punt here. I’m going to do a positional season preview – again! – just before the season starts, when everything is settled and we know who’s actually on the team, and I promise I’ll deal with it all then. I might even devote an entire piece to just untangling this whole mess. Because there’s a lot to say about Matthew Stafford, and before I can do that, I have to be able to rationally sort out my own feelings about him. And those feelings are complicated. They are. And that’s okay to admit. That’s the first step for all of us, I think, the only way forward. We have to be willing to acknowledge, if only to ourselves, that we’re all both right and wrong about Matthew Stafford, that the past has fucked us up so much that it’s nearly impossible for us to treat him the way he deserves to be treated, on his own merits. Matthew Stafford belongs to something far bigger and far deeper than just himself. That’s unfair. It really is, but it’s also reality. How do we untangle him from that? Can we? Should we even try? I don’t know, and that’s one of the biggest things we all need to deal with. I look forward – kind of – to trying to help us do it.

Where We Are Right Now: This is the easiest part of this whole damn preview or overview or whatever the hell you want to call it. Matthew Stafford is The Guy, and that’s that. There’s no point in even speculating about anything else. He’s the franchise, for better or worse, he’s paid like it, and that’s not going to change anytime soon.

The only intrigue here lies in the backup. I like Jake Rudock. I can also admit that I like him mostly for tribal reasons and for fond memories of his one year in Ann Arbor. Believe me, about halfway through that one season I never believed in a million years I would say that because he was awful. That owed more than anything to his unfamiliarity with a new system and a new complicated playbook which he only began to learn literally a month or two before the start of the season.

The second half of that season, though, saw Rudock explode and by the time Michigan finished whipping up on Florida in their bowl game, he was arguably the team’s MVP and had played himself into an NFL draft pick. He’s not the most physically talented, but he’s smart as hell, he has an almost supernatural sense of calm, and he’s in many ways the ideal NFL backup. But he’s also not an NFL starter, and through that lens, it doesn’t really make sense to call him “the ideal NFL backup.” I mean, if he can’t be The Man, then what’s the point? Either he never plays or he’s forced into action and we’re all calling our priests for our last confession. How is any of that ideal?

Still, I might be underselling him, especially because he seems to be a valued trade asset, which means at least somebody out there thinks he can be The Man, or at least The Temporary Man, which I guess is like a gigolo or something? I don’t know. All I know is that’s where his real value to the Lions lies. They know they can get something for him, and so I expect them to do just that, and soon. Probably on draft day itself.

That’s also why the Lions just signed Matt Cassel, who’s pretty much an old man at this point, but he’s an old man that’s also had a least the idea of success in the NFL, which makes him the ideal NFL backup in a completely different way than Rudock and shit, I’m not making sense anymore.

But anyway, to hell with all that. Cassel was the dude who took over for Tom Brady that one year when Brady was lost for the season. He led the Patriots to an 11-5 record. They missed the playoffs that year, but you can see from the record that was more a weird fluke than anything. 11-5 teams don’t miss the playoffs. That season made Cassel a hot commodity, and he signed with the Chiefs, where he briefly tantalized with a single Pro Bowl season before retreating back into the world of backup and part time starter. He’ll be 36 this season, which makes this a purely temporary situation, and if the Lions want to develop someone like Rudock, then Cassel isn’t the dude. But they’re also all-in with Stafford, which means there’s not a whole lot of sense in developing anyone behind him right now. They just need a capable veteran who can step in if disaster strikes. That’s Matt Cassel. Of course, if disaster strikes, it really won’t matter and the only quarterback we’ll be talking about is Bobby Layne again and his damn ghost. Would somebody please call a fucking exorcist?

Where The Hell Are We? Part 6: Running Backs

(I’ve decided to do a pre-draft series taking a look at the Lions position by position while I’m still upbeat and motivated and before being a Lions fan leaves me feeling depressed and incapable of stringing words together besides “fuck” and “this”. Each section will take a brief (lol sure) look at the team’s history at the position/notable players/etc., a look at more recent years and, finally, the situation as it stands today on the eve of the draft. I’ll do something like two a week, starting with the defensive line and ending with quarterback. Today, we're talking running backs, which means we're talking Barry Sanders, which means we're all about to cry. Consider this a quasi-draft preview/history lesson/idiot gibberish. Cool? Cool.)

Ancient History Because I Believe In Psychic Energies: Normally, I do this in roughly some sort of chronological order, but this feels impossible here because Barry Sanders just overshadows everyone and everything. The entire time you’d just be waiting for me to get to Barry Sanders, and cursing me for talking about dudes you’ve never heard of. I mean . . . it’s Barry. He’s the alpha and omega of whatever meager greatness we have to cling to.

People, including me, have written and talked about Barry so much, though, that it’s hard to come up with anything original or new to say. I wrote something years ago for my buddy Ty Schalter’s site, The Lions in Winter, back when he was doing that and wasn’t a big shot Twitter blue check. Start there, I guess and then come back to me here. Or don’t, I don’t know. What does strike me about that is that I wrote it eight goddamn years ago, and even that had been an epoch after Barry retired. That’s why this is all going down in the “Ancient History” section. There’s something almost shocking about that to me, but it’s true, Barry’s been gone for 20 years now. That means an entire generation of Lions fans have no living memory of him. He’s just a name to them. A legendary name, yes, but still, just a name.

This, uh, this has me feeling shook. Even worse is that the game I built that piece for Ty around, the 1991 playoff game against the Cowboys, when Barry disappeared in a mass of Dallas players only to reemerge streaking towards the end zone like some fantastic wizard, was 27 years ago. 27 years! That game and that moment was formative in my Lions fandom. It is a touchstone that I go back to again and again and again. It is my heart and it is my soul as a Lions fan, and I barely know what to do with the revelation that anyone younger than me – and I’m creeping up on 40 – doesn’t remember it. 27 years! That’s more than a quarter century.

But this is all threatening to spin off into another post that I have planned on the sheer scope of our misery, and so I’ll try to move on and actually, you know, talk about Barry Sanders and other notable backs, which pretty much just means Billy Sims.

How much does Barry Sanders dominate our history? The 7 best single season, uh, seasons in rushing yards in Lions history belong to Barry. 9 of the top 10 are his. He averaged over 1,500 yards a season for his career. He rushed for 5.0 yards per carry. This is the greatest running back not just in Lions history, but NFL history and I’ll hear no backtalk about this. I mean, he fucking AVERAGED more than 1,500 yards per season!

But even more than that, there was something magical, something otherworldly about the way Barry Sanders ran that sets him apart from anyone else in NFL history. He wasn’t human. Sure, he was flesh and he was bone and he was blood, and in the end, his heart and his soul proved all too devastatingly human, but when he had that ball in his hands, he was a different species. He was something evolved, or some weird mutant branch of humanity that made him closer to an X-Men member than just a regular dude. I keep going back to that run against Dallas in that playoff game. To watch it on television or in the highlights is one thing – you see him crowded by pretty much the entire Cowboys defense, only for him to mutant juke his way past them all – but seeing it live was something else altogether. All you could see was a mass of Dallas players. It looked like Barry was underneath them, completely buried. The play was dead, over. And then suddenly he was 10, 20 yards behind them, running for the end zone and nobody knew what the fuck happened. It is the damnedest thing I’ve seen a football player do (I also saw Charles Woodson’s one-handed leaping interception against Michigan State in person, but this was even more amazing. I’ve been blessed.) Hell, it was the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen a human being do.

And yet, there is something painful about the memory. Not just because it was the apex of my football fandom and it happened when I was a child, but because there is something painful and tragic about the entire Barry Sanders mythos. I mean, right? He left before his time. He’s unfinished to us. For years after his retirement, people whispered that maybe, just maybe, he could come back, and then we looked at the calendar one day and realized he was 45 years old and that our dreams were dead. That too is Barry Sanders’ legacy, that unfinished symphony. He is Brian Wilson’s Smile album, only Barry can’t go back and finish it when he’s 60.

It’s hard not to feel at least a little bitter about that, and isn’t that fucked up and tragic? The most beautiful, unearthly football player who ever lived belonged to us, to our hearts, to our hopes and dreams, and when we say his name, we’re left with a sigh and a shake of the head. If anything sums up the brutal pain of being a Lions fan, that might be it. I love Barry Sanders, but I’m also a little pissed at him, which is extraordinarily unfair, but this is the psychic weight that drags us to the bottom of the sea. It is a genuine tragedy.

I could write all day about Barry Sanders, and as much as I’d love to, this isn’t really about him. It’s supposed to be about the running backs, and about who we are and where we’ve been, and even though Barry Sanders obliterates the rest of it, overshadows our whole world, there is more to it than just him.

Billy Sims was the proto-Barry. Okay, okay, that’s overstating things ridiculously because, come on, there could never be another Barry before or after him. But what Billy Sims did, like Barry, is represent Hope to Lions fans. He entered the league and was immediately maybe the best running back in the NFL. And then halfway through his fifth season, he torched his knee and never played another down.

Four and a half years. That’s all we got from Billy Sims. If Barry Sanders’ time was all too cruelly brief, then what the fuck was Billy Sims’? His time was almost 35 years ago. I have no memory of him. Most of you reading this probably have no memory of him. He’s a ghost, like so many other ghosts in our history, and it’s hard to talk about someone who you only know as a ghost. In 10 years, Barry will be a ghost too. This is the sort of thing we have to deal with and it’s no wonder we’re all half-mad.

That stat I mentioned earlier about Barry having 9 of the 10 best single season rushing yards in Lions history? Yeah, Billy Sims has the other one. He could maybe have been one of the all-time greats. Or perhaps Lions Disease would have proven fatal to him, just as it has everyone else. It took Barry. It took Calvin Johnson. Why not Billy Sims? We don’t know, and maybe that is Billy Sims’ true legacy. He stands as the one great What If that we have. We know what happened to Barry. We know what happened to Calvin. We know how the story always ends. But perhaps, in some alternate universe Billy Sims kept going, the Lions built up a monster team around him and things were different. Probably not, but hey, Wonder is a powerful thing, and that’s what Billy Sims will always represent to us.

It’s kind of cruel – what else could we expect? – that since we were blessed with two unreal talents in our history, we were left with almost literally nothing else in our history here. I mean, this is it. Barry Sanders, Billy Sims and sorrow. And given that both Barry Sanders and Billy Sims are painful tragedies themselves, that makes this whole goddamn thing just heinously cruel, the sort of thing that makes otherwise normal men and women tear their flesh, weep and throw profane gibberish at the sky and a god who may or may not be there and if he is, he’s clearly a sadist of some sort. What did we do to deserve this? How do we make sense of any of it? The only answer I have for you is that the universe is cruel and indifferent and these things happen. But even that is insufficient because why does it keep happening to us? I just shrugged. In real life, writing this, I literally shrugged. That’s because I don’t know what to tell you. I’m at a loss just like you are, and I suppose the only comfort that we can take from all this is that we’re not alone and that we’re in this together. We’ll figure it out. One day. Hopefully.

But yeah . . . nothing. Steve Owens was the first 1,000 yard rusher in Lions history. His career immediately tanked after that. That was all the way back in 1971. There are only 3 other running backs other than Barry and Billy Sims in Lions history with 1,000 yard seasons. Their names? James Stewart, who did it twice, Kevin Jones and Reggie Bush, who barely cracked it in 2013. This is obscene. It is emotional violence.

This entire section, the tragedy of it all, is almost art. You could hang it on the wall at the fucking Louvre. It is the universe’s cruel masterpiece, and we’re all a part of it, twisted screaming faces in the background somewhere, mute witnesses to the horror of it all. And yet, we’re also here, living, breathing, continuing to absurdly hope that somehow, someway, it will be different in the future, that another savior will come. But our savior already came, and we fucking killed him.

Recent History: After Barry sagged on the cross and died of Lions Disease, what could we do? What could we possibly feel? It didn’t matter who came after because they would always be swallowed up by Barry’s tragedy. This is when James Stewart had those two 1,000 yard seasons, but nobody cared because he wasn’t Barry. His presence was little more than a cruel mockery. He wasn’t horrible. He was just okay, and “just okay” was an unforgivable sin in the wake of Barry’s brilliance. He was, is and always will be just a reminder of everything that we lost.

After him, we managed a couple of one-year wonders. Kevin Jones had one good season. Kevin Smith tried but was sucked into the hurricane of 2008 and lost forever. Jahvid Best was already half-dead and witless when we drafted him. He died quickly. So did Mikel LeShoure. Virtually everyone that came along failed in some way, whether they were taken by injury or their own incompetence or simply swallowed up in the horror of it all. Reggie Bush looked like he might be the answer, or at least half an answer, but he had his one decent season and then he was done too and history will judge him for two things: 1) getting stripped of his Heisman and 2) rolling in the filth of a Kardashian. This is his legacy and we wash our hands of him.

All this helps to explain that mind-boggling stat. You know the one. The one that they’ve taken to showing and discussing in every Lions game, the one that says we haven’t had a 100-yard rushing game from any single player in roughly 10,000 years. This is Not Good. Even in the brutal death march of our history, our 60 years wandering in the desert (take that Moses), this is something that stands out as particularly pathetic and fucked up. Ameer Abdullah is the latest in a long line of failures, and so we turn to the future and we hope and we pray and we trust in deliverance because that is what people do. That is what people must do. Because the alternative is too dark and full of terrors and I’m not walking back across that desert, man.

Where We Are Right Now: Ameer Abdullah is finished. That much is pretty clear. He tried, he failed, and it’s time to move on. Theo Riddick is a great receiver out of the backfield, but that’s it. He’s not really a running back because he’s not that good at, you know, the whole running out of the backfield part. And so the Lions signed LeGarrette Blount, two time defending Super Bowl champ, and honestly, I’m not really sure how to feel about it.

Blount has never really been a top tier running back and that’s okay. He’s not The Man, and as long as we go into this accepting that, we might be okay. But he’ll also turn 32 this season and the history of 30+ running backs in the NFL is grim as hell. No other position turns you into a senile grandpa faster than running back. On the other hand, Blount’s only carried the ball 200+ times twice in his career. Normally, 30+ running backs have an entire history of workhorse back-breakage behind them, which helps explain why they get old so fucking fast. Blount doesn’t really have that, and so maybe, just maybe, his legs aren’t as old as most 32 year old running backs’.

Is this me desperately searching for reasons to Believe? Probably. I mean, even if Blount still has fresh legs, it’s not as if he’s suddenly going to break out and become a monster. He has two 1,000 yard seasons in his career, but for the most part he’s been the 2 in the 1-2 punch most teams favor these days at running back. He’s a time-sharer, and that’s okay as long as the Lions have somebody else for him to share that time with.

This means the Lions probably need one other featured back. Preferably someone with some shake to him. I’m mildly intrigued by Tion Green who had some good carries late in the year as an undrafted free agent, but I also don’t want to put all my hopes in him. That would be absurd. And besides, Blount probably makes him redundant.

Zach Zenner is forever intriguing to Lions fans because he’s a scrappy underdog type (a.k.a. he’s a white dude) but he’s probably run out of time and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s gone soon. So, what all this means is that the Lions need another dude and they need another dude with talent, not some Scrappy-Do type who gets fans excited during preseason and then runs for 90 yards at the end of blowouts during the regular season.

This means that, yes, the Lions probably need to draft a running back like Nick Chubb or Sony Michel or the list goes on and on, which is good. It means that there are options here and that the Lions don’t need to reach too early in the draft. But they do need someone, probably somewhere in the first 3 rounds. And if they get the right guy, we might finally – finally! – start to move on from Barry’s long shadow. But probably not. After all, it’s been more than 2,000 years and we’re still trying to dig out from the shadow of that other savior we fucking killed. And yet, we’ll keep on and we’ll keep on and we’ll keep on because that’s all we can do. It’s all we know how to do. Goodbye Barry. I loved you.