Well, here we are again, ready to hold our breaths and our
noses as we plunge into the liquid shit that is Lions football, hoping that our
brains just give out and shut down before we are either drowned, those shit
waters filling up our lungs before we choke on whatever solids manage to tag
along. I hate that it has to be this way, with me ranting and raving about
liquid shit before the season has even started, but I can’t fix this with happy
thoughts and neither can you, and it simply falls to us to face the grim
reality that yet another Lions regime is hopelessly in over its head, holding
to fake tough guy swagger and the hubris born of being parasitic hangers on to
the Brady dynasty in New England, which they are attempting to coopt in an
infantile and embarrassing second rate imitation of something that never really
belonged to them in the first place.
It’s all well and good to rant and rave about “The Patriot
Way”, but it’s another to actually be able to replicate it, which would only
require going out and getting the greatest quarterback who ever lived and also
a maniacal and humorless dictator of a coach who was bred in the cauldron of
Bill Parcell’s merciless regime, just like Nick Saban, who, like Bill
Belichick, has taken that and conquered an entire football landscape. But Matt
Patricia didn’t grow up at the knee of Bill Parcels. His is an education that
is second-hand, learned from Belichick, who honestly doesn’t give a single fuck
about his assistants. They are easily replaced, and whoever comes along simply
rides in the wake of Tom Brady’s greatness like one of those little fish that
attaches itself to the back of a shark.
The history of success of Belichick’s former assistants
reads like this: File Not Found. Yes, aside from Saban, who had to drop down to
college football to reign as a tyrant over a completely different type of beast
after getting run out of the NFL, all of Belichick’s wunderkind assistants have
gone on to fail, often in hilarious fashion, whether it was fat Charlie Weiss
at Notre Dame or whether it was one of the myriad of coordinators, both offense
and defensive, who tricked NFL owners into hiring them only to flame out and come
running back to the embrace of Papa Belichick, who knows that everyone of them,
him included, is just living off the greatness of Tom Brady.
The Detroit Lions had the bright idea not to just go out and
hire one of these dudes, but to infuse their entire organization with various
Patriot parasites. They started with Bob Quinn, who’s tangential attachment to
the Patriots dynasty was enough to fool Old Lady Ford into handing him the keys
to her family’s football franchise, showing that just like her late husband she
is in hilariously over her head. And once Quinn was entrenched, skulking around
the locker room with a baseball bat like a fake tough guy, he brought in Matt
Patricia, the dude responsible for some of the most mediocre defenses in the
entire Patriots run. Never before did Tom Brady have to carry a team more than
during those Patricia years. Naturally, Quinn managed to convince Ma Ford that
he was the best choice to rescue her franchise while she fucked off to Bible
study and sucking gin through her false teeth.
This, naturally, led to a disastrous first season that saw
Patricia swagger around like a fake tough guy, alienating his team who instantly
saw through his bullshit act, and berate reporters for their posture all while
huddled under a sloppy mess of fat, neckbeard and sweatshirts that probably
smell like the taint beneath Bigfoot’s balls. From there, he used his bully
pulpit to sneer at the long suffering fans, demanding that they trust the
process, which is conman language for “don’t blame me” as the team shits itself
yet again, its only purpose to try to carve out room for him to swindle the
team for as long as he can before he’s finally exposed and sent slinking back
to Master Belichick who will give him a position coach job and where Tom Brady
will have him beaten for daring to try to make eye contact.
It’s hard to trust in these fools’ bullshit when bullshit is
all we’ve been fed for 60 fucking years. It’s especially hard when it comes in
such a smarmy self-assured package that clothes itself in the success of
others. So far, Quinn and Patricia have worked to bring an archaic sort of
formula of “success” to the Lions, trying to build a running game in a passing
league, while holding to a depressingly passive defensive model that is doomed
to break after barely even bothering to bend.
I mean, give it up to them for having a coherent plan, I
guess. It’s just that the plan is of shit. Offensively, the Lions decided to
double down on their conservatism by bringing in Darrell Bevell, whose act wore
thin in Seattle before spending a year in exile from the NFL. His run first,
run second and okay let’s try a pass I guess offense runs counter to what every
successful team in the NFL is doing right now, but that’s okay because, as
always, the Lions have found themselves secret geniuses in love with the smell
of their own asses.
The plan has been to build the offense around a strong
running game, which the Lions have tried to do first by drafting Frank Ragnow
and Kerryon Johnson last season, and admittedly both dudes look like they will
be good players, and then by drafting a tight end, TJ Hockenson, who they hope
can work well both as an inline blocker and as a flexed out safety valve for
Matthew Stafford in the passing game. It’s a coherent plan at least, I give
them that much, but it is rooted in a defunct philosophy that operates at half
speed while the rest of the NFL runs around them in multiple loops, leaving everyone
dizzy and depressed.
The Lions run game should be pretty good, the best it has
been certainly since Barry Sanders was the dude running the ball, but the world
of the NFL is entirely different than it was back when Barry was dazzling us,
and even then it wasn’t like the Lions won anything because they never had a
goddamn quarterback who they could rely on.
The hope, of course, is that Matthew Stafford can be that
guy, but the problem is that the dynamic has changed so much in the last twenty
years. You don’t build your offense around a strong running game and then hope
you have a quarterback good enough to complement it. You build around that
quarterback and give him a bunch of weapons so he can stand at high noon and
trade fire with the Clanton Boys like Doc Holliday.
That is really the only shot the Lions offense has to be
competitive in these modern times. The question, of course, is whether Stafford
is capable of being that guy, which, let’s face it, the results have been mixed
for his entire run with the Lions. But it obviously plays to his strengths more
than trying to make him into a caretaker sort of quarterback, which just isn’t
his scene and will likely leave him feeling frustrated and underutilized.
It doesn’t help that the Lions ran Calvin Johnson out of
town in a depressing echo of the spirit destruction of Barry Sanders and that
they haven’t really bothered to replace him. They followed that up by trading
away their second best receiver in Golden Tate, which admittedly is a move that
they had to make because they couldn’t afford to pay him the number one
receiver money he was surely gonna ask for, especially because he’s on the
wrong side of 30. The problem is that they haven’t bothered to replace him
either and now go into the season hoping Kenny Golladay can fill the St. Calvin
role, which is an absurd thing to hope for. At best he’s a decent jump-ball
kind of option, lacking the separating speed necessary to be a true home run
hitter. He can still be a valuable piece of the puzzle, and he has to be in
this offense, where he is being cast as the default number one receiver, but
there is big difference between being a valuable piece and being the Man.
Meanwhile, instead of replacing Tate, the Lions are hoping that
Marvin Jones can just assume his role as the number two receiver. He’s a good
receiver, no doubt, but ideally Golladay would be a number two option and Jones
a strong number three. Instead, they are each slotted up a role, and the result
is an okayish looking pair of receivers instead of the twin killers you need in
today’s NFL.
The Lions have tried to supplement the two of them by
bringing in Danny Amendola as a slot receiver, whose main qualifications are,
wait for it . . . yes, being a former New England Patriot, where he served as
an extremely poor man’s version of Wes Welker. Naturally, he is on the wrong side
of thirty and he doesn’t have Tom Brady throwing to him anymore. Amendola’s
nickname is “Playoff Danny” owing to his postseason heroics for the Patriots, which
were really mostly all about Brady. It’s kind of an embarrassing nickname,
almost tongue in cheek really, and it is again reflective of the hubris of
dudes like Quinn and Patricia, who are dazzled by the whole Patriot connection
because the only thing they understand is incestuous nepotism. It is literally
the only reason they have the high profile jobs they have now.
Add in Hockenson and Jesse James at tight end (by the way,
Jesse James was the name of a stripper I used to know, which will make watching
the games fun for me at least) and the Lions hope they have enough firepower
for Stafford to use if the running game can’t get going like they want. Is it
enough? Eh, maybe? I like Golladay and Jones, but maybe not in the roles they
are being forced into. I have no time for Danny Amendola, who managed to
swindle a couple of gullible idiots with his shared connection to something
greater than any of them, like the dullest member of a frat managing to score a
big job because the bosses there just happen to have been members back in the
day. Of course, everyone at the frat remembers Quinn as being the annoying
pledge master who bullied all the new boys because he has a small dick and none
of the sorority girls would fuck him, and they remember Patricia as the fat
drunk guy who was rumored to have roofied a coed, and no one ever pressed
charges because her friends managed to pull her out from beneath his vast bulk
and left him laying sweating and drunk in his own shame, heart pumping
desperately to try to keep up with his relentless obesity.
It’s all too depressing to think about, but we have to think
about it. It doesn’t do any of us any good to ignore it and try to cast these
fools in a better light.
So, even if the running game is as good as everyone hopes,
it still leaves the Lions operating in a lower gear than the rest of the NFL,
who will blow by them at warp speed with their big dicked quarterbacks and
mutant receivers. The Lions hope that the offensive line is good enough to
create a viable push in a league in which defenses are just too goddamn big and
fast for that to even really matter, and it probably will be better this
season, especially because Frank Ragnow has a year of experience under his
belt.
Still, while Ragnow will probably be a hoss in the running game,
he struggles with pass protection, which is glaringly poetic when you consider
the overall story of the evolution of NFL offenses, an evolution that the Lions
stubbornly refuse to admit has even happened.
So, that covers the offense, which is doomed to be at best a
shining representative of an extinct philosophy, and it will be depressing to
watch it trapped in amber while the rest of the NFL lives in the future. All
the pieces are there for it to be a good offense, but the philosophy is all wrong.
It sucks, but even if the Lions did decide to get with the times, there are
still questions about whether Matthew Stafford can truly be an elite
quarterback in the NFL or if he’s just destined to be a supremely physically
gifted passer but a dude who just makes too many goddamn mistakes and who will
probably be entering the permanently concussed phase of his career soon.
But I’ve talked ad nauseum about Stafford over the years and
at this point there’s nothing really new to say. He is what he is, and we all know
what that is, and that’s that. You either learn to live with it, accepting him
for who he is, or you continue to rage impotently in the vast void that is
Lions football, hoping against hope that he will be just that 5% better, that
he will somehow manage to be that level of quarterback who just lies
tantalizingly out of reach for him. He is not Tom Brady or Drew Brees or Aaron
Rodgers. He’s Philip Rivers, and that’s okay. It’s not quite good enough, but
fuck it, I’d take not quite good enough over Please Hand Me a Hammer and Also
My Ether Rag.
Anyway, like I said, that’s the offense. It’s with the
defense that Patricia will throw his immense weight behind, hulking with
unearned arrogance, claiming a secret genius that has never been borne out by
his actual coaching. It’s his defense, and defensive coordinator Paul
Pasqualoni is simply a crony, a senile old man who will say “yes boss” in
between drooling applesauce on his quivering wrinkled old chin. He’ll just
stand there and let Patricia oversee a defense that is built with depressing
passivity, holding to cowardly philosophies, afraid to attack because that
would mean exposing yourself to failure, and it’s easier to just play it safe
and let yourself slowly be crushed beneath the wheel.
To Patricia’s credit, I guess, at least it’s a coherent
philosophy and he has set out to acquire players along the defensive front who
understand what he wants, which is boring gap soundness in lieu of going out
and hitting motherfuckers. That kind of bend but don’t break philosophy is all
well and good, and it does keep big plays to a minimum, but it fails to take
into account the fact that NFL offenses these days are just too damn good, too
damn efficient, for it to work. You can’t just sit back and wait for the offense
to screw it up. It just doesn’t happen. Interceptions are the lowest they’ve
ever been in the NFL. Quarterbacks are capable of just sitting in the pocket
and lazering you to death one throw after another. You have to get pressure on
quarterbacks these days to survive, and unfortunately the Lions philosophy isn’t
built around pressure. Instead, it’s built on responsibility and gap integrity,
which is great if you’re a Boy Scout, less great when you are supposed to be a
300 pound fuck murder machine.
The Lions should be decent against the run, but again, this
isn’t a running league anymore. It’s nice to have that as a safety valve, a
decent card to play when offenses try to throw a changeup at you, but to make
that the heart of your defense is the act of a great fool in these modern
gunslinging times. Damon Harrison is a massive presence in the middle, and with
Mike Daniels and A’Shawn Robinson, the Lions defensive tackles are at the very
least pretty solid. Add in ends Romeo Okwara and newcomer Trey Flowers, who,
wait for it . . . yes, is another former New England Patriot, and the Lions
have a nice line to work with, especially if versatile Da’Shawn Hand builds on
a promising rookie season. That is a good rotation. Unfortunately, it’s, at
best, a mediocre pass rushing group, which, sigh, is what you need to live in
these here NFL jungles, where everyone is a meth fueled animal going 100 miles
an hour.
Behind them, the Lions are in trouble especially because
Jarrod Davis is hurt. He’s the most important piece of the entire defense so,
uh, no big deal I guess. It’s telling that Bob Quinn smugly declared that it’s
almost impossible to find the “right” kind of linebacker for this system,
which, uh, maybe makes it not so good a system, Bob. They think Jarrad Davis is
that guy even though he’s been little better than mediocre his first couple of
years in the league. Without him, what the fuck are the Lions supposed to do?
This could get ugly fast, and then it’s the end for Patricia and maybe Quinn too
and oh lord, how long must we suffer? To have to scrap it all and start from
zero again is just too fucking depressing to contemplate, but here we are.
Devon Kennard is a very nice piece for the Lions defense,
and probably represents their best hope at generating a consistent pass rush.
But without Davis next to him, Kennard will have to devote more time to being a
run stopper, which really isn’t his game. Christian Jones is just a guy, and
the Lions reached to draft Jahlani Tavai in the second round. He likely isn’t
ready to really contribute much, and after that, it’s just down to Jalen-Reeves
Maybin, who has done jack shit with the Lions. That is kind of an alarming
situation at linebacker, which is probably the most important level in Patricia’s
defense, acting as the cleanup men as the Lions line holds their gaps and
funnels runners to them.
Behind them, the Lions have Darius Slay and . . . ask again
later. Slay is a Pro Bowler, but he can’t do it all himself, especially since
the NFL is such a pass happy league. Maybe Justin Coleman can step up as the
second cornerback, but that is a lot to hope for given that he has never been a
solid starter in the NFL. His main qualifications seem to be, let’s see . . .
ah yes, a couple of years spent as a backup in New England while Patricia was
running that defense into the ground.
At safety, the Lions let Glover Quinn walk, which needed to
happen, but they didn’t really bother to replace him, hoping that Tracy Walker
can step up after a year of backing up as a rookie. Aside from Walker, who has
never started a game in the NFL, the Lions really just have a couple of warm
bodies. This is a distressing situation, but fuck it, this whole thing is
distressing and depressing and we’re all gonna end up watching the whole thing
being rebuilt yet again a year from now when Patricia is busy slurping pasta
into his maw while Bill Belichick sneers in disgust and tells him to wear a
fucking bib.
That is where the Lions find themselves here, on the brink
of what is sure to be yet another depressing season for Lions fans. At best, we
can hope that these fuckers get broomed out quick, but even then you can’t really
trust Ma Ford to pick the right dudes to run this team. Instead, we get this embarrassing
Patriots cosplay for at least one more season and after that, who even fucking
knows? But what’s one more year when you’ve spent 60 in the hole waiting to die?
Does anyone even remember us on the outside? Did our wife get remarried? Do our
kids even know who we are? No. All we are is a dark rumor, a cautionary tale
for fans everywhere. Behave yourself, or you will end up in the hole with the
Lions fans. At least then we’d have someone to talk to and also gnaw upon when
they pass out in grief and weakness after not having been fed for weeks,
months, years. We are Gollum in his fucking cave, and we don’t even have a
fucking ring to play with.
Predicted Final Record: 6-10
BONUS PREDICTION
Green Bay Packers (+3.5) at Chicago Bears
The NFL kicks off its season tomorrow, and I’ll get a week
one preview up tomorrow sometime, but in case I don’t get it in before these
two teams kick it off at 8:20 PM, I thought I’d get this one out of the way. I
just said in my NFC North preview that the Bears are probably the team to beat
again this season, but I also said that they have to beware of the return of
the devil himself. Last season, the Bears infamously knocked Aaron Rodgers
around, catching him and the Packers off guard before they could see Khalil
Mack and the boys coming. This year, Rodgers will be ready for them, and if he
and Matt LaFleur can get on the same page right away, then he’s going to be an
absolute bastard to bring down again. You can fool the devil once, but after
that he’s gonna be coming for your soul. My guess is that the Bears defense is
for real and that Mitchell Trubisky will continue to get better at quarterback.
But is that enough to catch a devil who’s waiting for them this time? I don’t
know, man. Probably not. If LaFleur is smart, he’ll just get out of the way
here and let the devil get his vengeance. But is he that smart? Probably not,
given that he is young, dumb and full of cum, eager to imprint his identity on the
Packers right away. My guess is that the Packers falter to start, but then
Rodgers says fuck it, ignores LaFleur and steals some souls one more time. Vaya
con dios, motherfuckers, we will all see the devil in Valhalla.
Packers 27 Bears 20
No comments:
Post a Comment