I have struggled this season with trying to find the right things to say about the Detroit Lions and the way they hurt us, but I have been befuddled because how in the hell do we constantly find newer depths to visit in this bottomless ocean of pain? It’s not enough that the Lions are losers, we have to watch them lose in weird and stupid ways, like a 95 yard field goal or whatever the fuck that was, and then yet another field goal after a few fleeting moments of feeling something akin to good. Frank Ragnow has been taken by The Fear, which nipped and nipped at him until he physically broke. He’s gone for the year. Meanwhile the rookie tackle Penei Sewell is hurt too and OH NO NOT THE BEES!!! NOT THE BEES!!!
This was always going to be a rebuilding year, but shit, you actually have to start building things besides a wonky house of cards that collapses whenever anyone walks by. The Lions have already lost to all three of their divisional rivals, and every week someone else is hurt and by the end of the season, we’ll probably be pulling kids from the JV teams of local high schools to finish out the stretch. And of course, there is the specter of 0-17 hanging around, which I don’t think will happen, but Jesus Christ, if it can happen to only one team…
Yeah. My first gibberings about this team came during that spectacular 0-16 season, for which I probably should have won a Pulitzer for chronicling. And now here we are, wondering if this will be the first team to go 0-17. Might as well get it out of the way in the first season of this never ending death march they call NFL football.
Beneath it all is a team filled with players it doesn’t make any sense to get attached to because they will all be dead, drowned as sacrifices to the gods before the Real Players get here, and that kind of sucks, but I barely care because I already know this. DeAndre Swift is a dude who tantalizes but comes up short, and he may have murdered a man on the 4th of July. Jared Goff is tainted as a reject and while he is not abjectly terrible, he isn’t good either, and the result is like watching a crippled kid trying to walk again, but he doesn’t have any confidence and he falls down and no one is there to pick him up. The mean offensive line promised us is already plagued by everything including the fucking plague, and it is all this team can do to eke out 3 or 4 yards and establish an identity that might only exist in 1967 football.
To make a long story short (lol okay Neil) nothing is right about this team and there is little to embrace until… I don’t even know. The team gets another #1 draft pick quarterback? At this stage that could mean any number of college dudes, and the Lions would almost certainly fuck up and take a USC quarterback which never goes well while Malik Willis, the kid from Liberty does freakshow things for the Broncos or some such team just waiting for their guy so they can break out.
The Lions chose to rebuild from the inside out, looking to the lines for early returns, but it’s been rough. This is the Hard Way to build a team rather than the Easy Way which involves getting a supernova quarterback straight out of school. That’s fine, we’ve tried that shit a couple of times with middling results. We still thank Matthew Stafford for his service and we also dunk Joey Harrington’s head in a toilet.
Old school, they call it, and a lot of times that can be code for “outdated” or choose your adjective. The Lions want to win with a snarling defense and an offensive line that pushes everyone around, and that’s fine, I love that style of football, but it is a hard thing to pull off in today’s game which is all about playing basketball on grass (or turf) and at some point, you do need the expensive fireworks, the toys that go boom, and the Lions have none of that. Swift could be one, but he isn’t matching the hype on the field. TJ Hockenson is legit, I think, but he is also a tight end, and that has its limits.
It’s pretty clearly a talent issue more than a coaching issue at this point, which is what we all should have expected, but still, not this bad and ridiculous.
It’s not that the team is awful (well, not *completely*) having earned enough to get a win or two with their hard play, but they are losing dudes and getting more and more desperate, breaking at the wrong time, leaving everyone scrambling to try to figure out what the fuck to do in this Purgatory that is starting to look a lot like Hell. There are no fixes on the way, easy or hard, and the team can’t exactly rely upon the goodwill of the football gods since those fuckers are eternally pissing on us from the mountaintop just for a laugh.
And that’s how you end up with a winless team losing in shittier and shittier ways week after week, and it’s no wonder the head coach is crying like a baby in his press conferences, soul already shattered and ruined by Lions Disease, a terrible thing, worse than Covid even.
I actually admire Dan Campbell for being open with his emotions. That is the sort of thing that can breed trust with your players and fans. The dude cares, this is meaningful to him, and that is the sort of person you want to succeed.
BUT
But the optics of it are just horrible, the Lions coach weeping in a press conference. It is almost parody and yet it’s real. Other teams could probably get away with this, but not the Lions. It just looks like a broken man breaking down even further, especially since he seemed so eager and innocent when he took the job, ranting about biting kneecaps and just loving the football life. And now here he is, weeping for everyone to see, just another victim of Lions Disease.
Is there hope still to be found here? Sure. I like these dudes, and at least they have a plan. Whether they can execute it is another thing, and of course, the vagaries of football are like a medicine man rolling the bones and the bones don’t like the Lions, they never have, and that means that the plan is almost certainly going to Get Fucked, and then it becomes a referendum on whether these dudes can pivot and improvise just to get a decent fucking team on the field.
There are no givens here, other than pain, misery, and all the crazy shit that happens to the Lions to keep them broken and ruined. We have grown accustomed to those things, which is horrible, wearing them like chains that we can never be rid of. Maybe this all ends up working out okay, but probably not. And we know this too, which is why we are perpetually guarded about our hearts, which have been broken so many times it might as well be a fucking cartoon because these things aren’t supposed to be real, at least not This Real. There are supposed to be moments to cherish, to savor as we get glimpses of a Better World, but we don’t get that. We just get the shit end of the stick again and again, and it’s not supposed to be like this, but shit man, here we are, and it is like this, and all you can do is make compacts with your own personal gods and support each other in our ridiculous failings because we are Lions fans and that is the most dangerous thing in the world to be.
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