Over and Over and Over Again

Week one was humiliating and awful in such a complete way that it’s going to naturally distort everything that happens after. And I don’t just mean this season, I mean for the entirety of Matt Patricia’s tenure. It was that fucking bad. Week two was bad in more of a familiar, mundane way. Progress? Can such a thing even exist after that first game?

You’ve seen that Lions game against the 49ers 10,000 times. They look like shit early, fall behind, and Matthew Stafford has to race against the clock and his own dipshit coaches to try to rescue it in the 4^th quarter. Flip a fucking coin, generate those random numbers, boy.

I hate those games. Hate them in a way I didn’t even hate the loss to the Jets. And I hate them because they just feel so arbitrary, so pointless, and so indefinitive, that any meaning anyone takes from them is basically just a funhouse mirror reflection of their own point of view. It sucks so much, and I think it’s what made me stop wanting to watch this shit the first time around.

Matthew Stafford has an absurd amount of comebacks in his career, but they all feel like that coinflip, random number generator bullshit. There is no real life to it. It’s more like “well shit, looks like the Lions are gonna lose again, only oops I guess not, oh wait double oops they lost anyway this time.” Who cares? The victories and the losses essentially feel the same, indicative of nothing other than this is an ugly league with a lot of horseshit teams.

Jimmy Garoppolo isn’t any good. That was my biggest takeaway from this game. The dude doesn’t know what he’s looking at and so he holds the ball too long or makes bad decisions, and that sort of quarterback makes things infinitely easier for any defense. Of course, the Lions still gave up 30 points, still can’t stop the run, and still can’t even fucking defend a kick return, so whatever, man.

I get that people want to see progress, and are going to cling to this game as “progress” of a sort, but the Lions were down 30-13 going into the 4^th quarter against a quarterback and a team that clearly aren’t very good. I mean . . . yeah.

There’s a hazy idea that the Lions defense just needs time to adjust to Patricia’s scheme, but all of this rests on a premise that you believe that Patricia is a good defensive coordinator with a good scheme, which I don’t believe at all. Even if the players improve and get their responsibilities down cold – like Jarrad Davis knowing which fucking gap to cover – what does that mean? That they end up like Patricia’s Patriots defenses? Big fucking deal.

I have already covered this to death. I think Patricia is a fraud. His defenses always did pretty well at not giving up a ton of points, but they gave up a ton of yards. Bend but don’t break, blah blah blah. Sure, but I’ve also already demonstrated why I think that disparity between points allowed and points given up was almost entirely due to Tom Brady. The Patriots led the league in time of possession on offense last season and also led the league in starting field position for its defense, both of which point to one dude: Tom Brady. He took care of the defense by taking care of the ball and by making sure they had excellent starting field position when he did have to give it up. Oh, and their special teams weren’t a rotten ass either. That helps.

Look, there’s a reason why Tom Brady is the greatest quarterback in NFL history. It’s not just because he’s a great quarterback who wins on a great team, it’s because he’s a great quarterback who has won – especially in the last decade – in spite of his team. People marvel at him because he comes back from 28-3, because he turns into a terminator in Jacksonville in the AFC Championship Game, because he throws for 500 yards and still almost wins yet another Super Bowl despite the Patriots defense looking like something out of the worst Lions fever dream.

All of that happened with Matt Patricia as the Patriots defensive coordinator. I’m not saying he ruined the Patriots defense – they’re still shit this season – but that he was largely ineffective, just a dude who was there to run Version 168 of Bill Belichick’s defense. Take Tom Brady away from the Patriots and who the fuck is Matt Patricia?

So, no, I’m not expecting nor even hoping for the defense to magically turn it around once everyone learns to do what Patricia wants. I have hammered this point so many times over the past few weeks, but I have to hammer it again because it’s kind of the crux of this whole shitty-ass feeling I have about this team. They’re bad, but so what? They’ve always been bad. The difference is that I can’t convince myself that any of it will matter, that they will ever be any good at all as long as Matt Patricia is the head coach because I’m being asked to Trust in The Plan, and what the fuck is The Plan? To turn the Lions into the Patriots minus Tom Brady? No fucking thanks.

I don’t like watching this team again. Already. It’s been two weeks and I already feel the same sort of disgust that drove me away in the first place. That’s, uh, that’s not good. I don’t know how much longer I can do this. Or even if I should. Why would I do this to myself? Why would I subject you to the same fucking post over and over and over again complaining about the same shit over and over and over again?

So, I tell you what. This is going to be a day by day thing for me for right now. I’m still going to do this, but there are probably going to be times when I say “Uh, no thanks” and maybe not write anything. Fuck, I’ll probably still do something even then. The Great Willie Young beckons.

So . . . yeah. Don’t come to me for analysis because I’ve already analyzed this fucking team and they have analized me right back. Over and over and over again.