Here We Are Again

Well, here we are again, with the Lions set to roll into the desert where Kyler Murray and perhaps the screaming ghosts from  the darkest part of a Cormac McCarthy novel await, ready to drag the Lions down into hell before they can ever really even try to live. The good news is that Murray is a runt of a thing playing in an offense that is 1,000% a college offense, and the speed of the NFL game should work to the Lions favor. The bad news is that Murray is a whirling dervish of a thing playing in an offense designed to create max chaos and opportunities for nuclear bombs that haven’t been seen around these parts since the US government was busy conducting the tests that killed off John fucking Wayne and Yul Brynner. That is the sort of dark energy that surrounds this week one game, an ominous fucked up energy that threatens to turn into a black hole that sucks inside all our hopes and dreams and leaves whatever’s left raving incoherently, naked, skin stripped down to the bone, undead skeletons waiting to be blow apart by some deadly desert wind, the kind that doesn’t stop until it has blanketed an entire town in dust and regret.

But like I said, at least the Lions have caught the Cardinals and Murray at their most vulnerable, before Kliff Kingsbury can transform his college offense into something that can live and kill in the NFL. They should be in max Yakety Sax territory to start off, which spells good news for a Lions defense that could use a bit of good news given that Jarrad Davis is questionable to play at best, and if he can’t go then the Lions defense will be left with the sort of gaping hole in the middle of it that a dude like Murray can be parachuted into and told to just whirl like a mad dervish, a crazy thing that the Cardinals hope can hurt more of the enemy than themselves.

This becomes especially true if David Johnson is good to go for the Cardinals, returning to head a running game that at the very least should serve as a stabilizing presence for Murray to lean on as he gets his bearing in this crazy new world where everything happens at one hundred miles per hour except for when there are commercial breaks, which the NFL uses to bleed us all dry and to suck the life and energy from every football game. If the Lions can keep Murray confused, punching drunk around the endless media time outs then maybe, just maybe, they can regroup behind Matthew Stafford and a rebuilt running game that will try to stay low, avoid those crazy desert dust storms and escape alive before Murray even knows which way his dick points now that he is a grown man.

The Lions passivity on defense probably won’t do them any favors, allowing Murray to take his time and pick them apart. Of course, that all hinges on whether Murray is capable of handling all of this mentally, which he should since the offense isn’t much different than the one he led when he was at Oklahoma racking up all them crazy video game stats.

But the NFL is a different beast than the college game, and both Murray and Kingsbury are brand new puppies here, and its very possible that they get sewn into sacks and dumped into the Colorado River as it cuts its way through the canyons and into myth.

That is where not having Davis is such a killer, and if the Lions can’t generate a pass rush then it probably doesn’t matter whether Murray is ready or not because these things tend to take care of themselves, especially when one team is perpetually fighting with one hand tied behind its back.

Yes, the combination of the Lions passivity on defense and its conservatism on offense gives the Cardinals new regime all the room it needs to breathe on both sides of the football, allowing them to gain confidence in their home base, in the desert where no one gets out alive except for the memories of old Apaches and Comanches, who understood how to fight in this harsh environment and who left many a white man staggering ruined, his head scalped and his brain delirious after too much time wandering in the hot sun. It’s easy to see how this all goes hilariously and depressingly wrong for Matthew Stafford and a Lions team that really isn’t equipped anymore to hang when shit gets wild and crazy Murray dervishes start whirling and old ass ghost warriors like Larry Fitzgerald rise up once again to steal the souls of everyone dumb enough to have gotten themselves into this mess.

The Lions will try to settle things down behind Kerryon Johnson, who they plan to staple to Frank Ragnow’s hip in the hopes that he can win the ground war beneath these dust storms. But Darrell Bevell is no George Patton and Fat Matt Patricia isn’t exactly Eisenhower, so things could bog down here in the desert before the Lions even get a chance to regroup to swarm up Italy.

I can see Stafford thriving with Kenny Golladay and Marvin Jones ready to go, but my guess is that the Lions will stubbornly try to establish that running game at all costs, which means that they will be going ten miles an hour, trying to crawl, while Kyler Murray flies by them overhead leading a squadron of fucking Tomcats eager to blow some shit up.

If that happens, the Lions will be checkmated and left to die in the desert, where no one cares who you are so long as they can drink your blood and suck the marrow from your bones. The problem is, as I’ve said, is that the Lions are pretty much doomed if they can’t get Davis up and running at anything near 100%. That will allow Murray to slow himself down and methodically wreck the Lions beleaguered secondary which is basically just Darius Slay and a bunch of magic beans and let me tell you something, magic beans don’t grow very well in the desert.

But say the Lions defense can hold Murray, getting to him before he can even get comfortable in the desert. Say they do that. Then they still have to trust that Stafford can be Terminator Matt instead of Soft Chubby Matt who just wants to get back to his wife’s side before her brains are mashed into oblivion.

He doesn’t have Golden Tate anymore and he sure as hell doesn’t have Calvin Johnson, which means that he’s left with second rate impressions of both in Marvin Jones and Kenny Golladay. Even if he does manage to get comfortable with the new landscape, it’s possible that the Lions will just take the ball out of his hands anyway and leave them in what they hope are the comfortable hands of Kerryon Johnson. That is a lot to hope for, but I suspect that this is what will make the difference between the Lions leaving the desert with Murray’s scalp or whether they are left to roam frightened and naked, stuffed with peyote and their own insecurities, which will eat them alive like some terrible Indian nightmare come to life before they even know what happened.

This is all frightened and desperate talk from a frightened and desperate man, a man who has seen too much, who has lived through too much, to hope for anything beyond a quick a merciful death before Skynet becomes fully aware and just nukes us all into an oblivion built and fed by our own hubris. Obviously, I am not confident, but if the Lions can’t get it done here, if they can’t say fuck all the outside noise and win before Patricia’s pasta slurping ass can devour them all like some fucked up manifestation of Late Stage Freddy Krueger then I’m afraid they just ain’t ever getting it done.

The Lions have to win this game. They must. They lack the grace that the Cardinals have right now, that period of patience and understanding that every team needs to grow the fuck up and get good before God. The Cardinals can afford to lose here because they are all in on a future that they believe to be legit and bright. Whether that is them running into the sun or the false sun of a nuclear explosion remains to be seen. My guess is that everyone is gonna get nuked here, but fuck it, better to just get it out of the way before False Hopes can be used to swindle us by that never-ending swarm of Failure Demons.

I hope the Lions win. I really do. I hope that I am wrong here and this is just the first chapter in a redemption story 60 years in the making. But I’m probably not wrong and you know this. Deep inside, you know that I am just telling you the things you need to hear instead of the things you want to hear. I wish it was different, but it never is, and so here we are again, waiting to get blown away in the desert, in a place where no one can hear us scream and where our deaths will only be marked as a throwaway line in John Wayne’s obituary, which will read the tale of an American man who died just like every other man dies. No one is safe. No one is exempt. We’re all just throwaway lines in the life story of something bigger than us, and that story always ends in the same way: Everybody Dies.

Lions 20 Cardinals 17

Death can wait.