Detroit Lions Preview, Part 1: Special Teams (Wait... Don't Go! Read it Anyway)

Well, here we are. My Lions preview. Will it be madness? (Yes.) Will there be endless wailing and recriminations? (Yes.) Will I try to find Hope while I beat off the Failure Demons? (Yes. And, yes, I phrased it that way on purpose.)

Rather than just diving right into the deep end or doing the whole goddamn thing at once in a mad 15,000-word rush, my hair and soul on fire, my heart blackening with each flame, my brain melting, ether whisping around it like smoke, I’m gonna ease into it and make love to this thing nice and slow. We’ll start the foreplay by talking about the special teams today, the defense on Monday, the offense on Wednesday (non-Stafford edition) and then a special Matthew Stafford piece on Friday. That’s next week. Then on the following Monday, I’ll talk about the coaching/management/ownership, Wednesday I’m thinking about a piece on the culture/our psychic energies, and then on Friday I’ll finally tell you how I think this fucking thing is gonna play out. That’s right, it’s a two-week long fuckfest of the heart, an orgy of the soul, a buggering of the brain.

Shit. Well, anyway, let’s just get to the special teams before I start (stop?) jacking off.

Let’s start with Matt Prater. We all know what to expect from Prater by now, right? He’ll hit from just about anywhere, including at least one 58 or 59-yard field goal to win a game, and then he’ll also miss an extra point that costs us a game. In that sense, I suppose he’s the perfect Lions kicker.

Last season, Prater hit on 85.7% of his field goals. That’s good. Not great, but pretty good. Slightly above the league average anyway. It actually put the Lions in a tie for 13^th in field goal percentage. It seems like it should be higher, but then you have to consider this: Prater attempted more 50+ yard field goals than any kicker in the league. He went 7 of 11, which account for all but one of his misses. He was perfect from inside of 40 yards. So . . . yeah, Prater is better than his field goal percentage would indicate, which is already pretty damn good. I mean, most teams are gonna take 30 of 35 anyway, right? Add in the range, and he’s still one of the best kickers in the league.

But of course, there’s that one missed extra point he seems to fuck us with every year. Does this happen around the rest of the league? I’m sure it does, but it somehow feels magnified with the Lions, right? Like, Prater isn’t just missing a random extra point in the middle of a blowout, he’s missing one at precisely the time when the Lions need it most. I don’t even blame him, though. I mean not really. This is a Lions Disease thing, the sort of psychic skull-fucking which we’re all so sadly intimately familiar with. It would actually be crazier if it didn’t happen to Prater.

Still, that sort of psychic trauma makes everyone clench whenever Prater lines up to kick. It’s not his fault, it’s just that we’ve been abused our whole lives. We’re always afraid that the whole fucking thing is gonna fall on us all over again at any point. Prater’s only fault is that he is human, and our humanity has been destroyed. We simply cannot tolerate human foibles. We need superhuman shit because we simply don’t have any grace left. It’s been beaten out of us.

All of this is to say that Matt Prater is a Good Kicker. And yet, he will break our hearts. It is not his fault, really. It’s just that our hearts have already been broken. They shatter now at the slightest provocation.

Punting last year was meaningless and forgettable. Sam Martin was, uh, well he wasn’t good. Of course, he only played 10 games last season, but even when he was in there, it didn’t really go all that well. For the season, the Lions only ranked 28^th in average yardage, with 43.7 yards per punt. They were 24^th in net yardage, and 23^rd in most punts downed inside the 20.

The tendency would be to say that the average was dragged down by shitters once Martin went down, but the reality is that Martin’s average was actually worse than the Lions collectively shitty average. Yes, at only 43.4 yards per punt, Sam Martin was Not Good.

It was kind of puzzling too. I mean, in Martin’s first four seasons he never averaged less than 46.0 yards per kick in a season. Shit, the year before he averaged 48.5 yards. So it’s probably not quite time to write Martin off. Let’s wait to see if he keeps fucking up.

I know that was a lot of stat dipshittery and I just came close to talking about Punting Formula, which long, long time devotees will remember is something of an Armchair Linebacker in-joke stemming from a dude on a message board long, long ago claiming he had discovered a special Punter Formula, which was what we told ourselves we never wanted to be here. But the thing is, is that there is nothing really interesting to talk about when it comes to punters. They kick the fucking ball and sometimes it goes a long way and sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t know what more you want me to say. I guess I could drag The Great Willie Young in here, but he has a No Punters clause in his Armchair Linebacker contract, and to be honest I don’t blame him. Am I just gibbering now to pad the word count and make it look like I talked more about the punting game than I actually did? Almost certainly, but you’re still reading so the joke’s on you, I guess. lol owned.

Anyway, on to the return game, where Jamal Agnew was a revelation last season as a rookie. He housed two punts and had the highest return average in the league at 15.4 yards per return. This is the rare sort of Good Thing that doesn’t ordinarily happen to the Lions. We are not a people accustomed to getting Happy Surprises. I mean most of our surprises involve opening what we think is a birthday present only for a tiny little midget clown to pop out and smash us in the face with a pie made of shit and failed dreams.

Naturally, that makes me leery here. Agnew is like getting a brand new bike for a change, only we know that our parents couldn’t really afford it so we’re constantly gonna be waiting for it to get repossessed or for whoever they stole it from to show up and beat the shit out of us before taking it back. We don’t get to have nice things. At least not for long. And since return specialists are a notoriously fickle bunch, prone to big seasons out of nowhere followed by long periods of Jack Shit, it’s really, really hard to Believe when it comes to Jamal Agnew. This is something we’re gonna need to see again before we can truly appreciate him, I think.

Thanks to the NFL’s desire to eliminate the dangerous kickoff altogether, kickoff returns are pretty much obsolete so there’s no point dwelling on that here. Agnew will return kicks too, but mostly that will involve him kneeling in the end zone or watching balls fly over his head like a pornstar in a gangbang orgy.

That elimination of the kickoff has also made kick coverage units not quite as important as they used to be. This makes sense given that these dudes are all millionaires and don’t exactly want to be human crash test dummies, but I think I have a solution.

What the NFL should do is let each team have an auxiliary pool of players who exist just to play on kick coverage units. They won’t count against the roster, they can’t play at any other point in the game, and basically they are just there to destroy the other team and themselves, doomed cannon fodder, the sort of thing empires have always been built upon. Shit, don’t even let them unionize. Just collect a bunch of insane desperados who’ll play for cheap because they are deluded by the concept of Glory and Violence, probably because they were raised that way in order to avoid having to deal with the Big Lie that their kind exists as anything other than to be exploited.

Anyway, just get a whole bunch of those fuckers, dudes who will be drooling on themselves and unable to eat solid foods by the time they're 35, and let them kill each other for literal sport. Problem solved. Kickoffs are back, baby!

I mean, come on, let’s be real here. The NFL doesn’t give a shit about player safety. Not really. They care only so far as it fucks with their public perception and how much trouble they’ll be in with the union. And people don’t care either. Don’t lie to me and don’t lie to yourselves. No one wants to see their precious stars get hurt, but everyone still loves the crazy fucker willing to kill himself for Jacked Up hits and Violence. After all, it’s what the NFL is built on, what our whole fucking society is built on.

My solution solves all of that. It lets people care about the “real” players while accepting – and even celebrating – the ritualized Violence Rituals they so love and crave. Nobody wants to see their civilized neighbor struggle. But drop some bombs on some wild folk with different values and Hell Yeah, that’s just Freedom, baby.

We’re a violent people living in a violent world. Let’s just stop pretending and give in to our dark hearts. Let’s round up some degenerates, pay them in peanuts and blow jobs and let them kill each other. Open the Circus, Emperor Goodell!!! Otherwise, the people will start noticing that you’ve been taxing the shit out of them all these years.

Anyway, uh, that’s my preview of the Lions special teams in the Year of Our Lord 2018. Don’t blame me if it wasn’t that interesting. It’s just not an interesting subject. But we still had some fun, had some laughs, right? I mean, special teams are special teams, we pretty much know what we’re getting here. The Great Willie Young just called me and said “You know your kick coverage idea is dumb as fuck, right? It’s exploitative, man.” And I said “That’s the point, Willie. It’s social satire, plus it would be cool as fuck and you know it.” And then he said “You ain’t using my name in this post, are you? I told you, that shit isn’t in my contract.” And I said “Don’t backtalk me now, Willie.” And he said “You a rotten motherfucker.” And I said “Yeah, but you already knew that.” And he laughed and said “That’s true, man. That’s true.” And indeed it is.