Detroit Lions Preview Part Whatever: The Dudes and Lady Dude in Charge

On January 14^th 2014, the Detroit Lions hired Jim Caldwell, and I gave up. I did. I’ll admit it. After years of psychological torture, constant kicks in the nuts, half a decade of writing about the Lions, of spilling my idiot brain and bleeding my heart onto Armchair Linebacker, I fucking gave up. I couldn’t take it anymore.

It wasn’t just that. It was a lot of things. I have always had a hard time with the NFL because it has always seemed totalitarian and dystopic to me. A fascist parade designed to get me to love shitty beer commercials and farting horses, to wave the NFL flag like a lobotomized geek, chanting USA while Herr Goodell bent me over a table week after week, his goons rifling through the pockets of my stripped-off pants. I grew to hate the NFL, and in a lot of ways I still do. This will always be a struggle for me, reconciling something I have found I have no real control over – my Lions fandom – with the disgust I feel for these jackbooted shitheads. This has always come out here on Armchair Linebacker, has always bled through into whatever the fuck I’m gibbering about, so it’s not exactly a surprise. It just felt – and still feels – more explicit somehow. I feel dirty and wrong for caring, for continuing to engage in this horseshit drivel, giving my presence to a league of flag humpers and Trumpian dipshittery. But here I am.

I’ve already spun far away from the point, which is that, yes, in 2014 I gave up. And I gave up because after all the Pain and the Fear and the Drain Cleaner and Ether, the Lions hired Jim Caldwell, the man who had a college coaching record of 26-63. It was absurd, too absurd even for the circus of the absurd known as Lions football. I’ve already bitched about Caldwell so much, explained my utter disdain so often, that I’m not going to do so here. It broke me. That’s all that matters.

2008 fucked everyone up. It fucked us up in ways most of us still can’t really comprehend. When you hit bottom, true bottom, you’re left with a desperate need for Answers. There’s only one way to go: up. At least that’s what you tell yourself, what I told myself. I convinced myself that this would be a linear ascent, that somehow 0-16 in some fucking bizarre way cleansed us of our sins, burned it away in the fire, that 50+ years of horror and pain were somehow finally paid for. I believed all of this because I had to, it was the only way I could cope with 0-16.

Of course, it didn’t work out that way, and it caused me to go on a journey of the soul worthy of a nihilistic Cormac McCarthy screed. 0-16 was meaningless. Just another mile marker on the road to hell. It wasn’t hell itself, it was just a shitty thing that happened in an endless parade of shit, and to treat it like some sort of cosmic pivot point was weak and stupid. 0-16 wasn’t the bottom because there is no bottom. That is something I think I had to learn, but when the Lions hired Jim Caldwell – hang on, there’s a fucking spider on my neck, what the fuck??? Okay, I’m back now, it’s dead – I couldn’t handle any of that shit. I wasn’t ready. I was broken. 0-16 finally caught up to me. It had been chasing me all that time, and it finally cornered me somewhere in my dreams like fucking Freddy Krueger and cut my dumb ass up.

So what brought me back? I don’t know. Isn’t that dumb? I don’t know. I think I finally accepted some things about the Lions, about 0-16, about the sheer idiotic randomness of an indifferent universe. But mostly it’s because I decided it’s okay to hope again. lol Neil, you fucking jackass.

I know. I get it. It’s fucking absurd to be doing this to myself again. It’s fucking crazy to think that this will end any way other than the way it’s ended every single other fucking time for the last 60 years. But the moment Jim Caldwell was fired something woke up inside me again (he couldn’t remember how he got there, ha ha ha) and I just fell back into it. Into all of it. I went nuts deep diving into stats and history. I looked at every season of every team, every single one of their players, going back almost 70 years. That’s true. I did that. I am a fucking lunatic. You know this about me by now. But even for me, this was bizarre behavior. I bought Madden and played it for many seasons. I think I was making up for lost time, trying to cram as much football back into me as I could.

But why did this happen and what does this have to do with Matt Patricia? Well, it happened because I decided to give the new guy a chance this time. It’s pretty simple. But I’m not talking about Matt Patricia. I’m talking about Bob Quinn.

This is Bob Quinn’s team. I’ve said that before, but listen, it’s not a coincidence that I kept referring back to the Patriots and Tom Brady and how they built their team throughout this Odyssean preview. Bob Quinn was with the Patriots from the beginning of their dynasty. He was a key figure in their scouting department, a dude who got himself involved with personnel decisions, and a man who generally was deeply entrenched in the building of that franchise. He understood the Patriot Way. That’s why the Lions hired him.

But it’s one thing to stick a guy in upper management and to then hire an endless string of turds with their own vision to coach the team. Jim Caldwell was a dead man the moment Quinn was hired. I hoped so, anyway. I was delighted when it turned out to be true.

Is that cruel? Is that me picking on poor Jim Caldwell some more? Maybe a little. But more than that, I was waiting for it to be true because it gave me a chance to see what Quinn was all about. Whoever he hired would explain a lot about where this team was headed. When he hired Matt Patricia, I knew. I knew that this was Quinn’s team, and regardless of whether the plan is a good one or not, it at least meant that the Lions would have a coherent vision going forward.

Matt Patricia was hired because Quinn was familiar with him and he would do what Quinn wanted and needed. He is Bob Quinn’s bitch. That’s fine with me. I don’t really care about Matt Patricia in terms of “vision” or “plan” because those words belong to Bob Quinn, not Matt Patricia, and if Bob Quinn wants to turn the Lions into the Patriots, that’s fine by me. Execution of the plan is another matter, of course, one that will likely require an insane amount of luck (lol I’m a fucking idiot for getting back into this and daring to hope, aren’t I?) but it’s ambitious, it’s fairly straightforward, and you either live or you die trying. No half measures. And that’s what I think Bob Quinn brings to the Lions.

Of course, there’s still Matt Patricia: the football coach to consider. Bob Quinn won’t be the dude designing game strategy or making decisions in the heat of the moment. That’s on Patricia, and . . . I don’t know, dudes and lady dudes. I just don’t know.

I’m worried. I’ll say that much. I already covered what I think of Patricia as a defensive coordinator in my defensive preview. Go back and read it if you want. I’m not gonna link it because I’m lazy and also because you literally just have to go to the blog’s homepage and scroll down you fucking jackanapes. Anyway, it’s not exactly a glowing endorsement. But head coach is different than defensive coordinator, so we’ll have to see. I know that’s a copout, but what else can I say? Patricia has never been a head coach, on any level, so no one, not even Patricia himself, knows how he’s gonna handle his business in the heat of the moment.

The only thing I know is that he was Bob Quinn’s handpicked choice. So be it. Live or die trying.

The Lions coordinators are further evidence that this is Quinn’s team. Uncle Paulie Pasqualoni is 69 years old (lol for multiple reasons) and I already covered his credentials in the defensive preview too. It’s worth pointing out that he’s only been a defensive coordinator once in the last 30 years, and that was for two seasons with the Dolphins a decade ago. Believing that he will take charge of the defense and be some sort of a master strategist is fucking insane. No, he’s Matt Patricia’s boy the same way Patricia is Quinn’s. He’s just there to execute the plan and to stay the fuck out of the way. No friction here.

Jim Bob Cooter – and I will never, ever get over the dude being named Jim Bob Cooter for fuck’s sake – was retained as the Lions offensive coordinator, which further highlights how impotent Patricia is here, at least when it comes to the vision of the team. Cooter (lol) was kept on because Matthew Stafford is familiar with him, is comfortable with him, likes him, and Stafford is the key to this whole damn thing. He is the heart of Bob Quinn’s grand vision, and Cooter (lol) can hopefully keep himself from climbing naked through strange women’s windows long enough to maintain a frictionless relationship with Stafford and thus a frictionless relationship between Stafford and Quinn.

The Lions offenses under Cooter (lol) have been mixed. His first couple of seasons were mediocre at best, but last season, the Lions ranked 7^th in scoring despite not having a functional running game. Of course, that’s a double-edged sword since establishing a functional running game is Cooter’s (lol) fucking job. But it also shows that Cooter (lol) is capable of scheming around it. Then again, too many times last season the Lions wasted time trying to establish that running game before Cooter (lol) said fuck it and let Matthew Stafford do his thing. I know I’m just writing in circles here, contradicting each sentence with the next, but that’s kind of the point. I still don’t know what to make of Cooter (lol) because I don’t know how much was him, and how much was Jim Caldwell’s dumb ass.

What I do know is that the Lions offense as a whole, just based on sheer numbers, was arguably one of the top 3 or 4 Lions offenses of the past 20 years. That is kind of pathetic and explains a whole lot when you consider how piss poor the running game was, but what the hell, we don’t live in the Garden of Eden.

What I also know is that the only thing that really matters right now is that Stafford likes Cooter (lol who among us, amirite?) and Bob Quinn likes that Stafford likes Cooter (lol) and Matt Patricia is just standing there looking like a Hungarian caveman with his thumb up his ass while he lets them do their thing. It’s coherent. Risky, maybe, but coherent. Live or die trying.

Of course, the big shadow looming over all of this is the fucking Ford family. (Alliteration!) They’ve been the one constant all these years, all these soul-sucking trail of tears years. That is . . . depressing. The hope was that once William Clay Ford Sr. kicked it, his son, Bill Jr. would have a more aggressive style than daddy as he sought to make his mark. Naturally, his old battle-axe of a mother took over instead and told Bill to shut the fuck up and stay in his room while she went to Bible study with Rod Wood and Caldwell. Sigh.

Then again, the NFL is littered with the shithead children of successful people. Mark Davis in Oakland, Jed York’s gumpy ass in San Francisco – dudes like this who inherited their teams are generally disasters, so maybe we got off lucky. Hell, Bill Sr. himself was a trust fund baby. The fucking Ford family, man. The dude who made them all rich, old Henry, was a fucking Nazi sympathizer. He also did more to make the city of Detroit what it was than anyone else, so I don’t know, man. People are ridiculous and complicated. His heirs, of course, have been fuckups because that’s what heirs do. They are soft idiots, raised out of touch in some bizarre world free of consequences, forever arrested in the grips of absurd wealth and their own whims. To expect them to somehow lead anything, even a fucking toy like a professional football team, to anything other than disaster is absurd.

Naturally, they’ve been in charge of this whole broken rickshaw of a ride for the last 60 years. Martha Firestone Ford isn’t a real Ford, of course. She just married into it all, which somehow feels even worse. But it’s not like she’s some street-smart wife who landed a rich dude. No, she’s an heiress herself, of the Firestone family. Tires and cars. The whole thing is fucking incestuous.

Anyway, these are the people in charge of the Detroit Lions. It’s kind of amazing I didn’t give up again in the middle of writing this. But I’ve convinced myself that most of these people don’t matter, that the only person I have to believe in here is Bob Quinn. Is this stupid? Both in terms of the Lions strategy and in my own self-delusion? Almost certainly, but live or die trying, I guess. I’m here again, and I’m still alive. For now.