Detroit Lions 2018 Season Preview, Part The End

We’ve come to the point in this infernal preview in which I am supposed to make some conclusions, maybe tell you that everything will be alright and send you into the season rabid and baying for the blood of your enemies. Let’s face it, you already know there’s a but coming (lol butt cumming)

Butttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt . . . you feel it too, right? I think we were all worried – hopeful, but worried – about what this team would look like in Year 1 of the Matt Patricia era, and this lifeless preseason, when it looked like the entire team was on a walkabout of the soul, getting ruined by backups and trash, has made everyone terrified of what’s to come.

This does not look like a good NFL team. It doesn’t even look like a functional NFL team. I already told you that I thought the defense would be trash, but shit, I did not expect it to appear this bad. The defensive line may as well not even be there, and the linebackers look like they’d struggle in a YMCA flag football league. This is a bad, bad defense, and given that is Matt Patricia’s supposed area of expertise, I feel like the howling scream at the beginning of a Pink Floyd song. Breathe . . . breathe in the air, because once the season starts we’re all gonna be suffocated by cruel Failure Demons.

The caveat, of course, is that the preseason is meaningless and forgettable, but only to a point, man. There are certain things which are just immutable. The final score, the actual result, of preseason games is meaningless. Seeing our dudes get wrecked like tissues on the set of a gangbang is real. You can’t hide that shit or explain it away.

We’re starving. I mean . . . come on. There is no way to say that without it being an understatement. We’re like North Korean peasants showing up at the border looking like zombies, begging for nourishment. But instead of being fed, we’re gonna be told to be patient, to wait until next year’s crops are grown. But by then, we’ll probably be dead.

We don’t have time to wait for whatever grand plan Bob Quinn and Patricia have cooked up. We need the Lions to win now. The sad reality, though, is that this is true every other year too, isn’t it? But at least most years we’re able to delude ourselves that there’s hope. Whatever actually happens on the field once the season starts, when fate usually conspires with failure demons and the NFL itself to fuck us in ways too innumerable to count, there’s usually at least talent available, a vague idea that the Lions could win. This season, defensively at least, that doesn’t even seem true.

There are things that I wish I could tell you, signs that I wish I could see, but Bubba, they ain’t there. This has the look of a team about to get steamrolled. But perhaps more importantly, it has that feel, doesn’t it? There is a spiritual rot hanging over the whole thing, a perpetual stink that has grown with each preseason snap, with each sad day that passes. Robert Ayers showed up and then left like Grandpa Simpson visiting the whorehouse and everyone laughed because of course he did. Things are already grim, gallows humor prevails, and the fucking season hasn’t even started yet! More importantly, the Matt Patricia era hasn’t even started yet.

And that’s what most terrifying here, I think. The sort of spiritual rot I’m talking about usually shows up after a few years, when it’s obvious things aren’t working and everyone is just waiting for a change. Well, it’s already here and they haven’t even played a game. I mean, what the fuck?

There are things we’re used to dealing with as Lions fans, oh so many things, but I don’t think any of us are used to that. I mean, this is a whole new animal, rabid and deranged, chewing on our souls. At least let us hope for a few weeks. Christ!

I’ve already entered the recriminations phase and nothing has actually happened yet. This is bad. Of course, there is always the chance that I end up looking like an idiot once the lights come on, but for right now, the energy is too ugly to ignore.

But then, of course, there’s Matthew Stafford. And there is a plan, a plan which I have tried to find and thread throughout this preview, but each time I’ve talked about it, the more I’ve found myself working harder and harder for it to make any sense. In the end, I suppose, I decided that it’s a coherent plan, but it’s utterly insane.

The Lions want to be the Patriots. That much is obvious, I think. They’re trying to model every aspect of the organization on the Patriot Way. The only problem with that is that they aren’t trying to build the Patriots the way the Patriots themselves were built, on a strong defense and a reliable quarterback who stunningly turned out to be the greatest quarterback in NFL history, which itself was kind of dumb luck rather than any sort of organizational genius, but instead on the Patriots today, a stripped bare team with a shitty defense being held together by the greatest player of all time. That is fucking insane.

The Lions are trying to be the Patriots, but they’re trying to be the Patriots of 2017, not the Patriots of 2002, and that’s where things are getting fucked up. The hope, the only hope really, is that Stafford somehow turns into the greatest player who ever lived and wins this fucking thing himself. Well, I mean, it’s a strategy, but so is setting yourself on fire and running screaming into a pile of cops after they surround your house.

It’s a hard thing, to break before the assault even comes, but it’s also a hard thing to live with 60 years of failure, a multi-generational rot which has left us all broken in ways that defy description. Nobody likes what I’m writing. I don’t like what I’m writing, but what the fuck else am I supposed to say here? The Lions look like a team that’s flatlined before they even lived. That baby is dead in the womb and all that’s left is for the lady to shit it out or whatever.

Jesus. I’m sorry. That was rough even for me. But these are rough times, strange and terrible, and these things happen. I want to hope, I fucking need to hope, but hope in what? I don’t know. I just don’t fucking know.

I suppose I could break down the schedule, start looking for winnable games and whatnot, but that is always pointless and meaningless. No one ever gets that right. You don’t know which games are winnable until you start playing them. Bad teams are suddenly good, good teams are suddenly ruined, new heroes are born, old heroes have their legs blown off.

I guess that’s where I have to try to find hope, in the idea that as much as I think I know, I really don’t. None of us do. Weird shit happens in the NFL, and, well, nothing would be weirder than the Detroit Lions suddenly shucking off 60 years of pain, especially this year, which somehow feels like both a rebuilding year and The End. That is a wretched situation.

Matthew Stafford. Matthew Stafford. Matthew Stafford. I have to keep repeating that and reminding myself that a top tier quarterback is a powerful thing, no matter what other bullshit is going on. He’s still here, and he has weapons. He does. By himself, he should be able to drag this team to at least mediocrity and then who knows what can happen? What weird breaks and crazy NFL nonsense can go down? We’re so used to it all breaking against us, but what if it somehow breaks the other way this time? I mean . . .

Okay, so that is desperate talk. But really, what else do we have? This just feels so wretched right now, a listless wreck of a team whose starters have been pushed around and humiliated all preseason. It would be one thing if those starters were all dudes we expected to be good once the music starts, but I think we were all already holding our breath, with the defense especially. Their humiliation is really the only data point we have to work with.

Matthew Stafford. Matthew Stafford. Matthew Stafford. The offense will be fine. I have to believe that because it’s sort of the inverse of the defensive situation I just talked about. I know the offense has good players. I have more data points there than just this preseason. I know Matthew Stafford will produce, that at the very least he will give the Lions a chance every week. I know this. I know this. I know this.

And yet, right now, it doesn’t feel like it’s enough. A lifetime of failure has made me an expert on the issue. I have a sixth sense for it. I can smell that shit in the air. And right now, it’s fucking asphyxiating me.

It’s not just the players, though, right? There is a palpable sense that Quinn and Patricia are charlatans. I don’t want to believe it, and until just this past week or so, I didn’t believe it. I think this is because I so badly wanted to believe in a plan, in something, anything, that I was able to convince myself that they knew what the fuck they were doing. I could see it. I could see the idea. But ideas aren’t always good ideas and to be honest I’m just sort of repeating myself now and am badly in need of an editor before I start talking about dudes running out of their house on fire again, but shit, I don’t know what else to say.

What else can I tell you? I suppose I could hold to the belief that Patricia’s defenses in New England always started out bad and then improved as the season went on, but is that even true? They didn’t look like they could even stop a Pee-Wee team in the Super Bowl. And as I have already said in the defensive preview, it’s my contention that the Patriots strongest defense was Tom Brady himself, that the defense wasn’t a complete tire fire only because he managed to keep the ball longer than any other team in the league, and when he did have to give it up, he did so giving the Patriots defense the best starting field position of any team in the league. Matt Patricia was a terrible defensive coordinator and he has bad ideas about what makes a good defense. Fuck him.

I am already getting carried away, already condemning dudes to the lake of fire before they’ve even coached a real game. That is insane, but this is the only conclusion I can come to. I really, really don’t want it to be true. I want to stress that because I don’t want you sitting there thinking I’m being negative just for its own sake. I am not that guy. I am a dude who is able to convince himself that Michigan will go 12-0 every single season. Shit, I remember looking at Michigan’s schedule going into 2009 and telling myself “hey, there’s no reason they can’t go undefeated.” This was when Rich Rodriguez was the coach and after they had just gone 3-9. I am an absurdly, unreasonably optimistic person. Nobody ever sees that, though, because the world we actually live in, is so unbearably wretched and because I’M A FUCKING LIONS FAN. Even the most optimistic man in the world will look like a cynical doomsayer if he has to write about this fucking team.

Matthew Stafford. Matthew Stafford. Matthew Stafford.

I feel compelled to call this a 4-12 team, but I can’t do that because of Matthew Stafford. He is the Hope, the one thing keeping me moving forward here. I just can’t see a team with him at quarterback being that bad. Well, I mean, the team probably will be that bad, but Stafford will mask a lot of it. I can’t see him losing to other bad teams, especially at home. The Lions won’t finish 4-12, but that should come with an asterisk because it’s really Matthew Stafford that won’t finish 4-12. The rest of the team could finish 1-15. Fuck.

But that’s sort of the point, I guess. The Lions have done this on purpose because it’s what Papa Belichick does. But take Brady away 10 years ago, and the Patriots were still a decent team. Take Brady away today and Belichick goes 1-15. Fuck Bill Belichick and fuck anyone crazy enough to build a team modeled on the 2017 Patriots instead of the 2002 or even 2008 Patriots.

But again, I’m repeating myself. I suppose I’m desperately looking for a way to convince myself that this will all be alright, that these ideas are Good Ideas, and so I find my brain trying to follow the same paths over and over and over again in the hope that somehow the conclusion will be different this time. But it never is. No matter how I try to break this down, I end up in the same place: hopeless panic.

The Lions look like a team that will be utter shit. The only hope is that Matthew Stafford somehow transcends it all, hell that he transcends himself, but is that really hope? That is insanity, and that is where I’m afraid we find ourselves. Again.

Final Prediction: 7-9, with all 7 wins thanks to Stafford

Detroit Lions 2018 Preview, Part Who Even Knows Anymore: Cultural Studies

Throughout this dumb Joycian (Joyecian? James fucking Joyce, alright?) preview filled with characters both banal and sublime (I salute thee Great Willie Young and your dude Heimie) I have made repeated reference to spiritual and karmic energies, blithering about cultures and so forth, and to most people, especially in this debased age, such gibberings are akin to sorcery, the bleatings of a stupid man of superstition who probably still believes in alchemy and a literal hell. To be fair, I am a Lions fan, alright? And yes, I do believe in these things. Well, spiritual and psychic energies, anyway. I think they have a power that can’t really be quantified by stats, and if you want to say I’m an idiot, that’s fine, but 60 years of Lions history are sneering right in your soulless face and so am I. Get fucked.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to get so defensively hostile. The point I’m trying to make is that it’s impossible to truly preview the Lions without acknowledging the obese pregnant elephant in the room, it’s fat nuts (look, it’s both pregnant and has nuts, don’t be a bigot, it’s 2018) dragging across our faces as we weep and pray for a merciful death that never comes. 60 years. 60 fucking years. How do you contextualize that? You can’t. It doesn’t make sense. Maybe if you’re 75 years old, you can do something with that in your brain, but probably not. After all, anyone who’s actually had to suffer through all 60 years of that is surely melting away in some home, mind shattered, pudding dribbling from the perpetually downturned corners of the mouth, tear-ducts burning, burning, burning because they haven’t been able to make any more tears for years now. Horrible, horrible.

It is simply not enough to make reference to individual moments, to those “random” skull-fuckings by the league, to Process of the Catch or 10 Second Runoffs or Dallas, just Dallas man. They are just fragments, horrid moments of time that shatter like glass when we think of them, sending tiny shards of fear and loathing into the darkest corners of our mind, moments, slivers, that haunt us but never tell the whole story because to do so would require us to put all those slivers back together into one gruesome and terrible picture which would take our whole minds with it into a screaming chasm of despair, trapped like fucking General Zod and the gang in Superman II as they hurtle into the Phantom Zone.

You can’t explain it. I can’t explain it. I have spent I don’t know how many million words by now trying. It’s not possible. I suppose all you can do is lay it all before you and try to take it decade by decade, era by era and see where this shit went so horribly wrong. So let’s do that, or at least try. Maybe we’ll get closer to understanding this thing, or maybe we won’t. I don’t fucking know.

In 1957 the Lions won the NFL championship. It was their third championship in six years (can you even imagine such a thing now?) and their fourth championship game appearance during that same stretch. This was a dynasty, the sort of thing people convince themselves will last forever because that is how it is today and today is all we have and tomorrow is just today’s reality reinterpreted either optimistically or pessimistically depending on your own nature. It’s not actually real, so whatever is happening Right Now is reflected in how we imagine the future. Anyway, that future must have seemed limitless, full of beauty and glory to Lions fans. At what point do you think they began to realize it was all going horribly, horribly wrong?

The coach of that 1957 team was George Wilson. It was actually his first season as head coach and he must have thought “shit, this is easy” as he prepared his Hall of Fame speech. He lasted eight seasons and never won anything again. But at that point, it must have just felt like a waiting game, that eventually the Lions would get there again. I mean, they weren’t awful. They had four more winning seasons in seven years including an 11-3 record in 1962. Alex Karras was running wild, and things must have still seemed Alright. I mean, can’t win every year, right?

Wilson was done after the 1964 season. The Lions went 7-5-2 and it must have been nice to have actual standards. Harry Gilmer took over for two years, two losing seasons in which people must have started to get at least a little antsy, right? But they were still only a decade removed from their third championship and that buys a lot of time and a lot of good will. Lions Disease wasn’t really a thing yet. They were just a formerly great and proud team trying to work their way back. That was it.

Of course, I have to mention the whole Bobby Layne curse thing, where he famously said the Lions would never win again after they traded him (well, at least for the next 50 years, which just proves that Bobby was a forgiving optimist, I guess.) At the time, that was probably pretty easy to brush off though, the ravings of a bitter veteran. Time is the only thing that can make a curse “real” and time was still on the Lions side.

The Joe Schmidt era took the Lions into the 70s. As one of the greatest players in Lions history, it must have brought a lot of goodwill and good feelings, and the Lions were never horrible under Schmidt. His last four seasons were winning seasons and he even took the team to the playoffs in 1970. They lost, naturally, but still.

At this point, the Lions still weren’t “the Lions” and all that means to us today. They were 15ish years removed now, and I imagine Hope had turned into something more like a wistful sigh, like two lovers whose fire had gone out but were still comfortable and happy together. It’s not like it was, but it’s still a decent life, right?

After Schmidt came a run of mediocrity, as the Lions won 6 or 7 games every season until 1978 under four different coaches. By now, it had been twenty years, and those wistful sighs had probably begun to turn into a quiet but savage desperation, nibbling away at the soul year after year, the memories of youth now faded and twisted into something sad. The love was gone, but so too now was the happiness and the comfort. Left in its place was probably a sort of unspoken resentment. Things had begun to turn poisonous.

In 1979, the year of my birth, the Lions finally bottomed out, finishing 2-14. They were “the Lions” now, but if you told fans then they still had another almost 40 years to endure, and that those 40 years would be even worse, they would have rebelled against their own minds, their own souls. They would have smothered their wife in her bed and then Benoited themselves from a weight machine.

That 1979 season was also the culmination of a decade of horrific pain, both for America as a whole and Detroit in particular. I won’t get into a whole Nixonian cultural hangover discussion because that would take another 10,000 words (or more), but that was there, certainly. The 70s were a decade in which Americans lost Hope, in which they stopped believing in the American Dream. It had turned into something like poison to them, a cruel mockery of all that they had once believed themselves to be, of what they knew they could never be again. Their Glory Days were over. Everything after would be a convulsion, a death rattle in which one could see the entirety of their life, of the American life, in their final breath. This was the decade that saw the Lions truly fall from grace. As metaphors go, it’s pretty fucking obvious.

But more than that, it was a particularly horrific decade for Detroit. The riots of the late 60s tore the city apart, and then the recessions and decline of the auto industry in the 70s fucking broke it. It became a city of utter desperation, people clinging to their rapidly fading memories of what life was supposed to be like, of the promise of a good union job and a spirit of We’re In This Together. It had all become twisted, distorted, ruined as the backbone of America broke and left us all spiritually and psychically paralyzed. Detroit was that backbone, and it’s snapped vertebrae are still trying to be fused and rebroken and fused again by desperate dreamers and believers in the power of the human spirit if not America.

This was the city in which the Lions found themselves breaking, breaking, breaking with each passing season until, finally, in 1979, they broke for good. It was fitting, I suppose, because in addition to all the grand cosmic metaphors, the rest of Detroit’s sports teams – the Tigers, the Red Wings and the Pistons – were also mired in a lost decade of despair. It was truly the Worst of Times for everyone.

And that’s how the Lions entered the 1980s, a decade which was even worse than the one that preceded it. The Lions never won more than 9 games (they did it twice, in 1980 and 1983) and the moment I became aware of the Lions, sometime in the mid-80s to 1987ish, they were in the midst of losing 11 games or more 4 times in 5 seasons. This was a terrible world to be born into.

By now, it was Known. The Lions were “the Lions,” but wait! Hope was on the way.

That Hope was named Barry Sanders, and there was a moment, in 1991, when the Lions went 12-4 and beat the shit out of the Cowboys in the playoffs (their lone playoff victory in the last 60 years) when it seemed like they had finally climbed out of their hole, that they had finally shaken off whatever psychic Failure Demons had attached themselves like parasites, and were ready to run into a new era. It was the 1990s, America was back, baby! And so were the Lions.

But not really. The whole thing was a cruel mirage, just a prologue to the horrors that were to come after. It was like one long con of the soul, a brutal setup for a punchline that only the worst devils could laugh at. Barry Sanders ran and he ran and he ran but it never meant anything. He ran and Wayne Fontes looked stupid on the sidelines, and then Wayne Fontes was finally fired but it was too hard to believe anymore. There was only a sort of wearied cynicism, well earned, that ate at the Lions like some great, hideous psychic rot. It had been 40 years now, and the last ten had seen a player of impossible talent, of transcendent beauty and grace, lead a team that had dudes like Herman Moore setting records at receiver, and none of it meant a goddamn thing. What do you do with that? How do you tell yourself that it will ever get better, that it can ever be any better?

Bobby Ross was hired to replace Fontes, and there was perhaps a glimmer of hope. After all, Ross had won a national championship at Georgia Tech of all places and had led the fucking Chargers to the Super Bowl. He was the Real Thing. Naturally, within two seasons he had utterly broken Barry and he never won a goddamn thing again. Barry retired, disappearing into the horizon like Bruce Banner or Anton fucking Chigurh, and what can you say, man? How do you explain something like this? How did it feel? It felt like nothing. That’s because there reaches a point where pain isn’t enough, where desperation doesn’t matter. There is just . . . nothing. A senseless and meaningless nihilism that takes over because it’s the only thing left.

And the Matt Millen showed up.

Jesus Christ! Somewhere Cormac McCarthy is furiously scribbling all this down. The Millen era was of course gross and horrific and by this point “the Lions” and all that was loaded into that term became a vicious parody of itself. Jay Leno was using it for cheap jokes. Jay Leno! It doesn’t get any lower than that. Meanwhile, the rest of the world finally cracked and burned.

2008 was the first year I wrote about the Lions. It was also the end for Matt Millen, and the pinnacle of Lions misery. 0-16. Rod Marinelli waddling around like he left a load in his diaper, gibbering about pad level. Broken people, broken everything. The economy collapsed again, people were throwing shoes at the President, and nothing made sense anymore. Lost. All lost. It had been 50 years now.

The next ten were chronicled pretty extensively here, give or take a Caldwellian walkabout of my fandom. You know the story since then. You have lived it. I have written over a million words about it. That isn’t even an exaggeration. I had to invent people to get through it. My mind and my soul have been broken, my fandom something more of an existential odyssey of perpetual penance and sorrow than anything else. And so fifty years have stretched into sixty. A demented gameshow host is now the most powerful man in the world. Vaya con dios, y’all. Vaya con dios.

So what do we do with that? How can anything else matter when previewing the Lions this season? It is not just karmic energy or whatever. It is a fucking 100,000 foot tall tsunami that will drown us all no matter what we do, no matter how much we prepare. It is just there and we’re gonna drown in it. Say your prayers.

That is all horrible, of course, but this is what it means to be a Lions fan. Everything else is just a child’s whisper in a hurricane of fire and death. I don’t know, man. Do we need to hold a giant bonfire in the middle of the ruins of the Silverdome, with priests and witches chanting as we burn the past one item at a time? We need an exorcism, an old priest and a young priest. We need something, anything, to get rid of these fucking Failure Demons once and for all, or else they will never stop haunting us, ruining us from within. We’ve already had the best running back ever, the most talented man ever to step foot on a football field. We just had the most dominant receiver in the NFL. We have one the best quarterbacks right now. And none of it has mattered against the power of those goddamn Failure Demons, against the weight and horror of the past 60 years. It hasn’t just broken us, it has broken Barry Sanders, it has broken Calvin Johnson, and I figure we’re about two or three years away from it breaking Matthew Stafford. And then what? Then what?

We keep moving forward because that it was human beings do. We’re that motherfucker in The Road, pushing our child in a shopping cart after the world has ended. We’re Rick Grimes hacking away at zombies even though we know that’s what eventually we’ll become. Nothing matters and we’re all already dead, but something keeps us moving forward because there is nothing else. This is a horror story and we’re the only characters in it.

At some point, all of this has to change, right? But how can anyone truly believe that, can honestly think that, given all that I’ve just talked about? This isn’t just sixty years. This is forever. This is the totality of most of our lifetimes. This is all we know and so expecting the future to be any different is an exercise in cruel absurdity.

And yet, here we are. And here I am, writing this preview of the damned because something inside of me moves me to do it. There is something left unsaid, something elusive, that I have never been able to nail down and I suppose a part of me hopes that this something unsaid, this elusive thing that’s perpetually just beyond me, beyond all of us, will be something good. It is absurd and deserving of endless mockery and scorn, but there you have it. I am basically good, despite all my ridiculous bullshit, and so that is how I continue to imagine the world. It gets harder every day. It gets harder with every second, with every new indignity, with every new horror show, with every new rotten season and year. And yet, I tell myself that there’s an answer, somewhere, anywhere. I just have to be strong enough to find it. We all just have to be strong enough to find it. Fuck off, Failure Demons. I’ve had enough.