Fake Geniuses and Bleached Bones

In a rational universe the Lions should easily beat the Cardinals, who are of shit. They’re 3-9 with a struggling rookie quarterback, and . . . *checks the Jets record and then checks the score from week one* FUCK!

But . . . but . . . the Lions beat the Packers, and . . . *checks the score from the Cardinals/Packers game last week* Well, never mind.

This is the place we’re living in right now. It’s not just that we can’t be sure if the Lions can even beat shits like the Cardinals or the Jets (or the Bills, which lol is coming up) it’s that when you look at the records and the results, we’re one of those teams too.

So much for taking the next step.

But hey, trust the process and all that, which . . . wait, that’s not actually a thing in the NFL. The NFL is not college football, where you take over a shitty program and then recruit your way out of a hole. The NFL is a league built on the idea of parity. You’re either good or you’re not, and there’s no real way of changing that other than, well, to be good. It’s not really something you can build. Look at all the NFL success stories. None of them were really “processes”, at least not in modern salary cap times. They just found players and coaches who won. That was it. That was the process. They didn’t have a bunch of losers whining about how they needed more time or about trusting the process.

The only team I can really remember consciously “trusting the process” is the Dallas Cowboys when Jimmy Johnson took over, but that was almost 30 years ago, and even then he didn’t whine and complain and bitch at the media about it. He just did crazy ass shit like trading his best player for half the Vikings roster and all their draft picks. He made serious moves man. He drafted Steve Walsh with a supplemental first round pick at quarterback and then in the same year drafted Troy Aikman first overall. This is because he understood that this is where things started. He was unambiguously building his team from the ground up. No half measures.

The Lions have been trying to half-measure this thing, and then whining about it. That is a bad combo. Another key difference: Jimmy Johnson took over a Cowboys team that had completely died under Tom Landry. They were already dust and bones when he took over, which meant he could rebuild cleanly. The Lions were 9-7 last season and just needed some tweaks to finally get them over the hump. Instead, Matt Patricia showed up and started moaning like a loser about what a loser he was and why we should be okay with it. Fuck it.

So . . . no, this isn’t like the Cowboys and it isn’t like any other team I’ve ever seen. The Lions are lost. They are just sort of haphazardly rebuilding, but not really, and hoping it will all work out while getting all defensive and bitching about how everyone needs to be patient and trust the process. Fat Matt is out there shrugging at press conferences, yelling at reporters and muttering shit like “it is what it is” which is so passive aggressive and soft. This is bullshit. Grow up. Be a man, goddammit.

Patricia and Bob Quinn so badly want to project this air of confidence, that they are serious men about serious business, and there are times when if you squint through the haze you can convince yourself that this is true. I’ve said it before, mostly because I’ve been caught up in the delirium of a moment and because I so badly want it to be true. But too often, it just feels like a bullshit pose, more defensive posturing from profoundly weak men pretending to be strong. These guys are bitches, and the more I see from them, the more they posture and carry on about how everyone else needs to be patient and fall in line instead of actually, you know, just going about their business like they say they do, the more I know this is true.

These are some hard words, but this is not a soft place for soft people. This is Armchair Linebacker. This is Detroit, motherfuckers. Come to work and shut the fuck up.

Anyway, so . . . yeah. The Lions are caught in this weird twilight between trying to win and rebuilding, not really committing fully to either and it’s a fucked up place to be. They’re trying to rebuild on the fly, but it clearly isn’t working. They are a long way away right now, longer than they’ve been in years, since probably 2010. There are zero examples in NFL history where this exact situation has worked out. Matthew Stafford is a decade in now. There are zero examples in NFL history where that dude suddenly becomes The Man after that long, with the same team, after that team decides to blow it all up and rebuild around him.

The Lions are stuck, thanks largely to his contract. They had one choice: to go for it now. That was it. They had to win with Stafford because the alternative didn’t exist. But that’s now dudes like Matt Patricia and Bob Quinn think. They are egotists, and they had to tear this shit down so they could “prove” that when the Lions won, it was all because of them. They are loudmouth idiot CEOs who walk into a company that just needs the right push and break it because they need people to know it’s their company now. They’re like Dave Brandon, the former Dominos and Toys R Us CEO and former Michigan athletic director, whose motto was “If it’s not broke, break it!” And he did. He broke all those companies, including Michigan, doing horrific damage to each brand along the way. Shit, Toys R Us went bankrupt and doesn’t even exist anymore. Michigan is still recovering from the damage done by Brandon. This is who Bob Quinn and Matt Patricia are. I see that now. I can smell it on them.

The longer this goes, the more defensive they are going to get. Matt Patricia will shrug at press conferences, sulking like Walter in The Big Lebowski, all “I’m calmer than you are” at bewildered reporters and fans. Bob Quinn will stalk the locker room with a baseball bat like Crazy Joe Clark while Lions players sneer in disgust and wonder how small his penis really must be to do shit like this. These are fake tough guys, fake geniuses, and it doesn’t end well for idiots like that.

In the face of all that, who cares if the Lions win or lose against the Cardinals? This is a sort of no-mans land we find ourselves in right now, hoping against hope that somehow, some way, these dudes will prove they are the real thing. We will delude ourselves at points into thinking it’s true because we will force ourselves to, because we can’t handle the alternative, because at least it’s something, right? But it isn’t. It’s all just a fucked up mirage in the desert. We’re gonna die here. Hopefully, our children don’t follow in our footsteps. Don’t come looking for us. Just let our bones bleach under the sun.

Lions 17 Cardinals 14

lol Matt Patricia is Fat

The Lions lost.

Death From Above 2018

The Rams are gonna win.

I'm Not Thankful

Another game, another loss. Another Thanksgiving, another loss. Another year, another lost year. Another . . . fuck, man. Just fuck. We’re so beyond the horizon line when it comes to this shit that there is no way to contextualize it, no way to really analyze it other than to do some Looney Tunes shit where I just flash a whacky sign to the camera and then plummet to my death on the canyon floor below. I mean, I’ll try, but I can pretty much guarantee it will just end in gibberish and tears.

There a lot of ways the Lions lose football games. You know this. I know this. We collectively know this the same way we collectively know how to breathe. It is knowledge so deep, so inherent to our very lives as Lions fans that it’s not even a conscious thing, it is involuntary knowledge. We could hold our breath, but then we’d die. Maybe that’s better, I don’t know. But, anyway, this is Version #9,638, in which the other team doesn’t win the game so much as the Lions just lose the fucking thing.

The Lions defense only gave up 16 points, which should be enough in any game, but then Matthew Stafford almost literally gave the game away and, well, here we are. In the aftermath, the arguments about Stafford have begun, the endless infighting and backbiting amongst Lions fans has unhinged its unholy jaw and swallowed us all anew and we’ve all seen this before, every last miserable part of it, and what is left to say or do? This is Lions football, 60 years running, and there is no escape.

I guess I could talk about Stafford, since that is all the rage. It’s been ten years. When he got here, I was still in my 20’s (barely, but shut up) Twitter wasn’t a thing, there were still people clinging to myspace, Obama had yet to be thanked, Donald Trump was a reality show host, the Red Wings were still good, and people still read shit instead of just watching videos all goddamn day. This was a long time ago.

To put it another way, Stafford has been the Lions quarterback for roughly 17% of those 60 years of wandering in the desert. That’s a lot of wandering.

And the thing is, is that he’s obviously not doing the damn thing this season, and next season isn’t gonna happen either. At that point, he’s what? 12, 13 years into a career with nothing to show for it? And that’s even assuming that this somehow all works out in the end, which is lunatic gibberish kind of shit. So, what then? Does a 42 year old Stafford finally drag the Lions across the finish line and then ride off into the sunset in a robot google car?

This is the reality we live in, and it sucks. But here’s the other side of that reality, and I don’t know if this makes things better or worse: we’re not gonna do any better than Stafford, at least for the foreseeable future. Leaving aside his monster contract, which makes him basically untradeable without completely crippling the cap, what would this look like if we dumped him and started over at QB? Say we get the new rookie hotshot QB – who doesn’t exist in this draft by the way – what then? Wait 3 or 4 years before he’s even ready to do anything beyond waddling in his diaper? No thanks. So then we’re what, into 2022 or 2023 and by then Matt Patricia surely hasn’t survived, literally thanks to a spaghetti heart attack and metaphorically thanks to years of losing, and so we’ll have a new coach with a new plan and maybe he starts looking for his quarterback and then we’re starting over again and then it’s a new five year plan or whatever and then we’re all old and then we’re all dead and our children are bitching about the Lions and 100 years of failure or whatever the fuck.

We’re stuck with Stafford. This is the reality we live in. There are no options even worth considering here. We just nervously hold this goddamn gun to our head and hope that we have the strength not to pull the trigger. Or the strength to pull it. Whichever works for you.

Matthew Stafford is Philip Rivers and that’s okay. I mean, I guess. Sure, it just puts you in some sort of Phantom Zone of fandom, but in that zone maybe you can convince yourself that this year will be the year, that if one or two things break the right way then ol’ Phil Stafford can overcome that slight defect in his makeup and fool the gods for once.

That is the shittiest thing about this, really. Stafford is 99% of a Real Deal Franchise Quarterback. The problem is that the 1% that’s missing makes all the difference in the world. To be so close, to live in a world of constant Almost, is agonizing. We’re all Tantalus only an inch away from that fruit or from that drink of water, but we can never quite get there.

But, I mean, it’s not like we have a choice. This is It. This is what we have, this is who we have. We can’t abandon it. We can’t start over because we’re out of time. I mean, I guess we could. Time is a relative concept to Lions fans, but you know what I mean. To us, here today, the desperation of Time is so acute, so terrible, that to have to suck it up for another decade or whatever is just too much to bear. I can’t deal with that shit and neither can you.

So . . . it’s Matthew Stafford until it obviously isn’t. That is ridiculously grim when you put it like that, but it’s the only way we’re gonna even be able to delude ourselves into Hope anytime in the near future. After all, the Chargers are 8-3 and I’m sure at least 1 or 2 of their 6 fans thinks that this is finally the year for Philip Rivers.

Throwing away a single game in the shadow of all that almost seems trivial, but somehow the goddamn losses never are for us, are they? They all have their own unique flavor. This will always be the Thanksgiving game that Matthew Stafford threw away and gave to Chase fucking Daniel and the Bears. It is its own thing in our diseased minds, both singular and all too familiar at the same time. That is the sick paradox of Lions fandom – it all feels brand new and awful while it’s happening and yet disgustingly familiar at the same time. This is both version #9,638 and The Time Stafford Ruined Thanksgiving.

There are other things, of course. There is the whole Chase Daniel of it all, and there is Michael Roberts quitting on a route as Stafford throws a hissy fit after that last interception. But mostly, it’s about Matthew Stafford throwing it all away because we eternally live in that 1% that’s missing, because he should be something else and so should we, and yet we’re not, and his very existence has become a sick metaphor for our entire struggle. It’s unfair and it’s fucked up, but welcome to the Detroit Lions.

I have no answers. There are no answers. Next year, Matthew Stafford will be the quarterback of the Lions, and we’ll all take a deep breath and allow ourselves to hope that the 1% will magically show up. And then we’ll do the same thing the next year, and the one after that until one day, one season, Matthew Stafford isn’t the Lions quarterback anymore. And then we’ll start concocting elaborate fantasies about the new guy and then 10 more years will pass and this is how 60 years happens, and it is how 60 will become 70 and how 70 will become 80 and how misery is really a thing without end, without bottom. Tantalus is a goddamn Lions fan.

Thanksgiving

In 1934 – that’s 84 years ago – the first televised NFL Thanksgiving game was played. And it was played in Detroit, Michigan. The Lions played the Bears, and, naturally, lost to the Bears. The Lions have hosted the Thanksgiving game every season since, and every season it’s the same thing from people who don’t get it: “Why do the Lions get the Thanksgiving game every year? They suck.”

This misses the point. The Lions get the Thanksgiving game every year because it’s ours. It has always been ours, and it always will be ours. And I say the Thanksgiving game because the Dallas Cowboys stole it from us, copied it, and lived off of what we built to become “America’s Team.” As metaphors for gentrification go, that one is tough to beat.

We’re used to people taking from us. We’re used to being left broken in a ditch while the Dallas Cowboys of the world leave town counting their money – counting our money. We understand this because it has been woven into the very character of Detroit, of Michigan.

These days, people mock Detroit, mock Michigan. They sneer and make jokes about abandoned buildings, about burned out husks of our history, about people who can’t even get a glass of clean drinking water, and it’s all true. It sucks, but it’s true. But the thing is, is that it wasn’t always true, and the other thing is that it’s not our fault. You want to blame us? We’re the victims here. We built something, we made something, and that something is called the United States of America. And you clean-faced bastards stole it from us.

You wanna know why the Lions got the first televised Thanksgiving game? Because Detroit was the heart of this country. Detroit was bigger then, swelled with internal immigrants, the broken, the downtrodden, the oppressed, who came up from down south to find the American Dream, to find it in a hard day’s work and a fair wage, to find it 40 hours at a time, to find it in the satisfaction of being able to afford the very things that they built with their own two hands. They found it, and they thrived. They built a city, they built a culture, they built a state, rooted in that belief: that any man, born anywhere, could roll up his sleeves and get what was promised to him. This is the Only place where the American Dream was Real.

There are still murals in Detroit that show men – black and white – working hard, side by side, to build something. And it wasn’t just something they were building for others, for rich con-artists and carpetbaggers, but for themselves, for each other. That mural will never die. It is part of Detroit forever and ever. So is Joe Louis’ fist. You know the statue. It’s just a giant goddamn fist. That is Detroit. That is who we are.

And when World War II came around, what did we do? Detroit took all of its might, all of its knowhow, and built the machine that would win a goddamn World War. You want to thank someone for saving the world? You thank Detroit. You want to sit down on Memorial Day or Veteran’s Day or, yes, Thanksgiving, and give thanks to someone? You thank Detroit.

But money always talks, and the people who control the money always listen to it, and what they hear makes them just want more and more of it, and so people like the Dallas Cowboys came and took it from us. These rank hypocrites who wear the flag on their chest, who cry crocodile tears whenever a soldier is paraded through the streets, stole the very heart of that flag, pissed on the men and women who did the work that made it all possible. And so the American Dream broke, because in the end, that’s all it’s turned out to be: a Dream.

It’s a dream that’s been leveraged, used and abused by the Dallas Cowboys of the world, to get others to do their work for them and then reap all the benefits. These leeches have always been here. Hell, a Civil War was fought once upon a time over this shit. But these Spiritual Confederates, these traitors of the American Ideal, that thing we’re all taught growing up to believe in, never really went away. They just slinked in the dark until real people, working people, built something that they could take away again. And they did, and, well, welcome to the hellscape that is America in 2018.

It’s ironic that the very people who the Spiritual Confederates rely upon to prop them up are the people who they’ve been robbing blind all this time. It’s ironic, but it’s also kind of the point: the only reason these assholes are even allowed to exist is because not only have they robbed us all, but they’ve convinced us that it’s our fault, that we deserve it, that all of our hard work and sacrifice exists simply so that they can take it from us. They’ve conditioned us to believe that we’re inferior, that we don’t deserve our piece, that a man who breaks his back everyday doesn’t deserve anything more than minimum wage and then a layoff when even that becomes too inconvenient to the bottom line of these vultures. They’ve made us embarrassed to be who we are, and then have encouraged us to lash out against people who are just like us, hard working people who just want their piece of the Dream.

So when you ask “Why does Detroit get the Thanksgiving game?” that’s why. When you look at Detroit, and you sneer at its husk, you remember who you’re sneering at. You’re sneering at yourself. You’re sneering at the Heart and Soul of what America was supposed to be. You’re sneering at that Dream, at the very thing you were taught from birth to revere.

Detroit is a fragile thing these days. It’s been drawn back and drawn back until it exists as little more than a downtown area huddled by the river. It’s an idea more than anything else these days. And yet it’s an idea that people like me still want to believe in. I love Detroit not just because I have lived in Michigan all my life, but because it is the city of Dreams, because it is the city where once upon a time, those Dreams were Real, where America – the romantic myth that we all grow up believing in – was Real. I love Detroit because it’s tougher than you, because despite all its been through, it will still stand the fuck up and puff out its chest and tell all you bastards to go fuck yourselves. Nobody believes in Detroit, but goddammit, deep down, Detroit still believes in itself. It still believes in an Idea, in Possibility, in the heart and soul of a working man’s mural, in the giant fist of Joe Louis. That is MY Detroit, and I will love it forever.

It’s a hard thing, though, to know what you could be and to not really be able to do anything about it because the Spiritual Confederates, the Dallas Cowboys of the world, came along and took it all from you, left you with only that Attitude. We’re still Detroit and we always will be because it’s who we are, and that makes it extra painful when we can’t even afford the basics, when we have to choose between shit like getting clean water and fucking garbage service. It hurts when your football team, the same one that has been playing on Thanksgiving Day since Joe Louis was the Champ, can never get their shit together. It hurts to get up everyday knowing that all you need is a chance because you know who you are, you’ve proven it to the world already and they just forgot. It hurts to know that no one will give you a chance, that they’ll all just sneer and look down on you while they count the money that they forgot they stole from you in the first place. It hurts to know that these swine are out there believing that this is their country. It hurts to live in the most powerful country, the richest country, in the history of the world, a country that we built, and to be left out of it, treated like low class scum by those who stole it. It hurts. It all hurts. But what I want you to do is to stop and think. I want you to be thankful for everything you have this Thanksgiving, and while you’re thinking and giving thanks, I want you to thank God, to thank Detroit, that you get to have it all. You’ll never give us back what’s ours and that sucks, but goddammit, you will turn and you will look at us and you will say Thank You.

Thanksgiving is ours. It is our holiday. It belongs to us. And you will never take this away.

Lions 27 Bears 0