Where the Hell Are We? Part 3: Defensive 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 defensive backs, both the safeties and cornerbacks and nickels and dimes and half-dollars and whatever the fuck else you have in your meager wallet. Consider this a quasi-draft preview/history lesson/idiot gibberish. Cool? Cool.)

Ancient History Because I Believe In Psychic Energies: Believe it or not and sadly I will understand completely if you don’t, both because of the Lions own trickster nature and my own reputation as being something of an, uh, unreliable narrator, the Lions actually have four legit Hall of Famers here. Yale Lary, Lem Barney, Night Train Lane and Dick LeBeau all are enshrined in Canton (I believe they embalm you and then entomb you with your concubines and slaves and such.) and would represent the foundations of a glorious history if there was anything, you know, actually built on the foundation. But there isn’t, and so it sits, sad and half-forgotten, a stone ruin in the wastelands of our hearts.

Anyway, we’ll get to that, but let’s honor that ruin, shall we? Yale Lary is perhaps one of the forgotten greats in NFL history and is one of the best players the Lions have had at any position. A safety, he was a 10-time Pro Bowler and 3 time All Pro despite missing two full seasons in his mid-20s serving in Korea. He was also perhaps the best punter in the league during that time, and to make things even better, he didn’t do all this in a vacuum but as maybe the best player on the best Lions teams ever, those 1950s teams that haunt our soul, taunting us as we drag our corpses through this never-ending desert of despair. Even our greatness is just a haunting reminder of everything that we’ve lost, and for most of us, a reminder of everything we never had except as a cruel taunt from half-mad elders who can’t even piss properly these days. Yale Lary is a ghost, and that is his psychic pull on us. No wonder he’s been mostly forgotten. And yet, there was a time when that ghost lived, and perhaps it is the knowledge that it was once flesh that makes us think that one day he will be again. Look, I did not set out to make Yale Lary messianic here, but these are strange and terrible times and these things happen to fragile minds such as my own, and also, again, I don’t have an editor.

Aside from owning maybe the most badass name in not just NFL history but the history of the entire world, including prehistory and caveman days when they had cool names like “Man With Stone Dick”, Night Train Lane also happened to be a badass early cornerback prototype with 68 career interceptions, 7 Pro Bowls and 3 All-Pros to that name. Of course, only a few of those came with the Lions during the twilight of his career and just after the Lions had passed into the Dark Ages even if no one really knew it or understood it at the time. Imagine being a fan then, fresh off the best run in franchise history, believing that Good Times would never leave. You had a dude like Night Train coming in just as Yale Lary was wrapping things up and why wouldn’t it last forever? Now imagine you’re 20 years old in 1960 and someone hands you Biff’s almanac from Back to the Future II and you get to see what that future really looks like. How would you not go instantly mad? Imagine being that dude today, almost 80 years old, having lived through it all, Yale Lary and ol’ Night Train existing as little more than grainy memories, cruel schizophrenic whispers that may have not even existed except they did, you know it, and perhaps maybe that is even worse. Sorry Night Train for not giving you enough of a worthy homage here but I can’t control the weather and it has rained every day since you left.

Jesus Christ, this has been bleak, which I did not mean to do when I started writing this. I anticipated this would actually be the most positive part of this whole goddamn breakdown, but instead I am the one who has broken down and I’m not sure if I can recover. But these are the things that we cannot hide from as Lions fans. The only way through the madness is to embrace it, learn from it, and somehow find a way forward.

Anyway . . . shit. Dick LeBeau and Lem Barney. Lem Barney took up the torch from Night Train and was a 7-time Pro Bowler and possibly the best cornerback in the NFL during the late 60s, where he teamed with Dick LeBeau, who was also a teammate of Yale Lary and Night Train. How the fuck did we lose our way???

Barney was the better of the two, one of those no-brainer Hall of Famers who stormed into the league and then settled into life as a fixture of the Lions defensive firmament. His career stretched to 1977, just along enough for him to be tainted with The Fall, but for 25 years, the Lions always had a Hall of Fame defensive back on the roster and sometimes more than one.

Dick LeBeau, on the other hand, was one of those solid starter types who had a brief Pro Bowl peak of three years and then played a million years, almost all of them quality years. That longevity was enough to eventually get him to Canton as an old man. Of course, that old man has up until perhaps this coming season never left the NFL. He’s been a defensive assistant ever since he retired and a defensive coordinator for roughly the last 75 years, perhaps most notably with the Steelers. He was just allowed to gracefully retire on his own terms after the Titans decided to fire their coach and the new dude didn’t want to bring LeBeau back. He’s a legit NFL legend, but not so much because of transcendent beauty and grace, but because he’s simply always been there and he’s always been at least pretty good. His is a spirit that has spanned the ages, and because of that, his association with the Lions has largely been lost. He belongs to the league itself, and perhaps it is good that he has been allowed to escape the asylum, but then again, if none of us can leave, why should he have been able to? He was ours first and his soul will wail with ours, I swear it. Yes, this is cruel and insane gibberish, but this is Armchair Linebacker and this is the world we were born into.

After those dudes, there’s been literally nobody worth noting. Maybe Bennie Blades, but he looms larger in my mind than the reality deserves by virtue of being a notable dude during my childhood, when all of our heroes, no matter how fringe, assume the status of gods in our mush-brained minds. If you asked me, I would tell you that Bennie Blades was a perennial Pro Bowler and All-Pro who was seven feet tall and once scaled a cliff face with his bare hands to save a weeping baby who had been abducted by Bigfoot. The reality is that he was a solid starter who went to the Pro Bowl one time, swept up in the momentum of that crazy 1991 season, but who never really was anything more than that. He was good, sure, but his best season was perhaps no better than, say, a decent Glover Quin season. Is that worthy of enshrinement in our Hall of Psychic Gods? Of course not, and yet, I will always remember him battling Bigfoot and then making love to wood nymphs while Zeus looked on in proud admiration. Our hearts lie to us because without the crazy worlds they create we’d have to live in this one, and this one is, to put it poetically, a huge butt.

Recent History: Not much to report here, which is both sad and all too telling. Louis Delmas looked like he might enter our hearts as a Haitian Warlock devoted to bedeviling our enemies, but he ended up being little more than a cruel taunt from a trickster god and was banished to oblivion, along with Ernie Sims’ lizards and Jim Schwartz’s sanity and every other thing we dared to believe in as we crawled out of the primordial sewage of the He Who Shall Not Be Named years.

I guess I could mention Dre Bly, who had a brief surge as a legit star with the Lions, but like everything else during those years, I have largely blocked him out of my mind for the sake of my own sanity. Really, when I think of him, the first thing that comes to mind is that he publicly dogged out Joey Harrington, and while that is something we all did to Joey Sunshine, you just can’t do that shit to your own teammates, and so, sadly, Dre Bly, instead of being synonymous with Pro Bowl glory, is synonymous with Stage 4 Cancer. It’s in our brains now!

So we’re left with this: fast-forwarding to Very recent history, which means that we’re basically left talking about Glover Quin and Darius Slay. Quin hit the Pro Bowl during that 2014 season which was probably one of the three best Lions teams of my life, which is perhaps sad, but sad is all we have, my dear friends. Instead of that becoming a new baseline for Quin’s career, he basically has faded back to being just an adequate starter type instead of a star. He’s been okay the past few seasons but not really anything more than that. He seems a little better than that because of that one Pro Bowl season, which tends to linger and prop up a dude’s reputation in our hearts and minds, and because the rest of the Lions defense has, uh, not been adequate, which makes Quin’s own adequacy stand out perhaps more than it should. He’s competent, which is worth an awful lot when you’re grasping for anything to hang onto.

Slay, on the other hand, has seen his own name go from literally a sort of cruel derisive joke (Big Play Slay was really a comment on his tendency to give up the big play as much as it was an admirable moniker bestowed for his own big play capabilities) to a dude who, last season, was a legitimate All Pro. Not just a Pro-Bowler, but an All-Pro. That means he was judged to be one of the two best cornerbacks in the entire NFL, and he played like it, with 8 interceptions and a ridiculous 26 passes defended. He was the Real Deal at a position where we haven’t had a Real Deal since the days of Lem Barney, Dre Bly protestations notwithstanding. If he can maintain that – he probably can’t, but that’s more a statement of how good his season was than of his own ability – he can be a foundational player for the Lions defense, and let’s face it, the Lions defense needs that desperately.

Even if he can’t quite match last season’s performance, a slight step back would still leave us with a Pro Bowl caliber cornerback who can take away the other team’s best receiver, which is one of the two or three most important things for a defense to have these days along with a dominant edge rusher and what I’ll call a hybrid havoc player like a roaming Charles Woodson type. Slay can tick one of those boxes for us as a lockdown corner, and that’s something a lot of teams can’t say.

Unfortunately, the Lions haven’t been able to find anyone to really complement Slay or to pair with Quin at safety. Nevin Lawson has been the other starting cornerback the last few years, but the Lions have wanted to upgrade there and just haven’t been able to get the job done. Lawson is not a good player, certainly not as a starter. He may have value as a package player, a third or fourth corner type, but the Lions need to do better and they haven’t.

Teez Tabor was drafted to be that dude, but he was pretty much a bust as a rookie and while he might pull it together, it’s hard to see it happening. Meanwhile, Tavon Wilson (I keep typing “Tavon Austin”, so if I do that and don’t catch it, forgive me.) was the other starting safety, but he’s not good, which probably explains why he was never anything other than a reserve with the Patriots. Matt Patricia is familiar with Wilson from those Patriots days, so perhaps he can figure out how best to use him.

Where We Are Right Now: Well, again, it gets interesting depending on what Patricia wants to do with the defense. The increased hybridization and specialization of the NFL makes this ambiguous. The one thing we do know is that thanks to the NFL’s pass-happy style, you need bodies here. That’s the one thing the Lions do have a lot of.

They’re pretty set with Slay and Quin, but that leaves a couple of starting spots that need to be upgraded. Unfortunately, those upgrades probably aren’t coming this season. The Lions will probably give Tabor another shot to show that he’s not a bust, Lawson at least has starting experience and maybe Patricia will figure out how to maximize Tavon Wilson. Meanwhile, Quandre Diggs is a de facto starter at nickel, which is increasingly becoming a viable base offense in the NFL. Like Lawson and Wilson, he’s not really any good, but maybe he can take the next step.

“Maybe.” That’s the word the Lions are leaning on this season. They’re clearly hoping that someone or a couple someones will emerge from the mess of bodies they have here, which also includes dudes like Miles Killebrew, who’s ideally a special teams dude, and DeShawn Shead, who was at least passable as a starter for the Seahawks a couple of years ago before missing almost all of last year. But he’ll be 30 this season, and dudes who’ve never really done it don’t usually do it after hitting 30. And then there are basically random bodies like Adairius Barnes, Charles Washington, Stefan McClure and Roland Milligan, and maybe – maybe – the Lions can pull someone from this mess of bodies, but that sounds an awful lot like magic bean talk which in turn makes me want to reach for a handful of magic mushrooms.

The wild card in all this man-flesh might be Jamal Agnew, who was a surprise All-Pro return man last season as a rookie, which means he has the athleticism to make an impact and god knows he’ll have his shot since the Lions need somebody, anybody, to separate themselves before the season starts, because if they don’t? Yikes.