Detroit Lions 2018 Season Preview, Part The End

We’ve come to the point in this infernal preview in which I am supposed to make some conclusions, maybe tell you that everything will be alright and send you into the season rabid and baying for the blood of your enemies. Let’s face it, you already know there’s a but coming (lol butt cumming)

Butttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt . . . you feel it too, right? I think we were all worried – hopeful, but worried – about what this team would look like in Year 1 of the Matt Patricia era, and this lifeless preseason, when it looked like the entire team was on a walkabout of the soul, getting ruined by backups and trash, has made everyone terrified of what’s to come.

This does not look like a good NFL team. It doesn’t even look like a functional NFL team. I already told you that I thought the defense would be trash, but shit, I did not expect it to appear this bad. The defensive line may as well not even be there, and the linebackers look like they’d struggle in a YMCA flag football league. This is a bad, bad defense, and given that is Matt Patricia’s supposed area of expertise, I feel like the howling scream at the beginning of a Pink Floyd song. Breathe . . . breathe in the air, because once the season starts we’re all gonna be suffocated by cruel Failure Demons.

The caveat, of course, is that the preseason is meaningless and forgettable, but only to a point, man. There are certain things which are just immutable. The final score, the actual result, of preseason games is meaningless. Seeing our dudes get wrecked like tissues on the set of a gangbang is real. You can’t hide that shit or explain it away.

We’re starving. I mean . . . come on. There is no way to say that without it being an understatement. We’re like North Korean peasants showing up at the border looking like zombies, begging for nourishment. But instead of being fed, we’re gonna be told to be patient, to wait until next year’s crops are grown. But by then, we’ll probably be dead.

We don’t have time to wait for whatever grand plan Bob Quinn and Patricia have cooked up. We need the Lions to win now. The sad reality, though, is that this is true every other year too, isn’t it? But at least most years we’re able to delude ourselves that there’s hope. Whatever actually happens on the field once the season starts, when fate usually conspires with failure demons and the NFL itself to fuck us in ways too innumerable to count, there’s usually at least talent available, a vague idea that the Lions could win. This season, defensively at least, that doesn’t even seem true.

There are things that I wish I could tell you, signs that I wish I could see, but Bubba, they ain’t there. This has the look of a team about to get steamrolled. But perhaps more importantly, it has that feel, doesn’t it? There is a spiritual rot hanging over the whole thing, a perpetual stink that has grown with each preseason snap, with each sad day that passes. Robert Ayers showed up and then left like Grandpa Simpson visiting the whorehouse and everyone laughed because of course he did. Things are already grim, gallows humor prevails, and the fucking season hasn’t even started yet! More importantly, the Matt Patricia era hasn’t even started yet.

And that’s what most terrifying here, I think. The sort of spiritual rot I’m talking about usually shows up after a few years, when it’s obvious things aren’t working and everyone is just waiting for a change. Well, it’s already here and they haven’t even played a game. I mean, what the fuck?

There are things we’re used to dealing with as Lions fans, oh so many things, but I don’t think any of us are used to that. I mean, this is a whole new animal, rabid and deranged, chewing on our souls. At least let us hope for a few weeks. Christ!

I’ve already entered the recriminations phase and nothing has actually happened yet. This is bad. Of course, there is always the chance that I end up looking like an idiot once the lights come on, but for right now, the energy is too ugly to ignore.

But then, of course, there’s Matthew Stafford. And there is a plan, a plan which I have tried to find and thread throughout this preview, but each time I’ve talked about it, the more I’ve found myself working harder and harder for it to make any sense. In the end, I suppose, I decided that it’s a coherent plan, but it’s utterly insane.

The Lions want to be the Patriots. That much is obvious, I think. They’re trying to model every aspect of the organization on the Patriot Way. The only problem with that is that they aren’t trying to build the Patriots the way the Patriots themselves were built, on a strong defense and a reliable quarterback who stunningly turned out to be the greatest quarterback in NFL history, which itself was kind of dumb luck rather than any sort of organizational genius, but instead on the Patriots today, a stripped bare team with a shitty defense being held together by the greatest player of all time. That is fucking insane.

The Lions are trying to be the Patriots, but they’re trying to be the Patriots of 2017, not the Patriots of 2002, and that’s where things are getting fucked up. The hope, the only hope really, is that Stafford somehow turns into the greatest player who ever lived and wins this fucking thing himself. Well, I mean, it’s a strategy, but so is setting yourself on fire and running screaming into a pile of cops after they surround your house.

It’s a hard thing, to break before the assault even comes, but it’s also a hard thing to live with 60 years of failure, a multi-generational rot which has left us all broken in ways that defy description. Nobody likes what I’m writing. I don’t like what I’m writing, but what the fuck else am I supposed to say here? The Lions look like a team that’s flatlined before they even lived. That baby is dead in the womb and all that’s left is for the lady to shit it out or whatever.

Jesus. I’m sorry. That was rough even for me. But these are rough times, strange and terrible, and these things happen. I want to hope, I fucking need to hope, but hope in what? I don’t know. I just don’t fucking know.

I suppose I could break down the schedule, start looking for winnable games and whatnot, but that is always pointless and meaningless. No one ever gets that right. You don’t know which games are winnable until you start playing them. Bad teams are suddenly good, good teams are suddenly ruined, new heroes are born, old heroes have their legs blown off.

I guess that’s where I have to try to find hope, in the idea that as much as I think I know, I really don’t. None of us do. Weird shit happens in the NFL, and, well, nothing would be weirder than the Detroit Lions suddenly shucking off 60 years of pain, especially this year, which somehow feels like both a rebuilding year and The End. That is a wretched situation.

Matthew Stafford. Matthew Stafford. Matthew Stafford. I have to keep repeating that and reminding myself that a top tier quarterback is a powerful thing, no matter what other bullshit is going on. He’s still here, and he has weapons. He does. By himself, he should be able to drag this team to at least mediocrity and then who knows what can happen? What weird breaks and crazy NFL nonsense can go down? We’re so used to it all breaking against us, but what if it somehow breaks the other way this time? I mean . . .

Okay, so that is desperate talk. But really, what else do we have? This just feels so wretched right now, a listless wreck of a team whose starters have been pushed around and humiliated all preseason. It would be one thing if those starters were all dudes we expected to be good once the music starts, but I think we were all already holding our breath, with the defense especially. Their humiliation is really the only data point we have to work with.

Matthew Stafford. Matthew Stafford. Matthew Stafford. The offense will be fine. I have to believe that because it’s sort of the inverse of the defensive situation I just talked about. I know the offense has good players. I have more data points there than just this preseason. I know Matthew Stafford will produce, that at the very least he will give the Lions a chance every week. I know this. I know this. I know this.

And yet, right now, it doesn’t feel like it’s enough. A lifetime of failure has made me an expert on the issue. I have a sixth sense for it. I can smell that shit in the air. And right now, it’s fucking asphyxiating me.

It’s not just the players, though, right? There is a palpable sense that Quinn and Patricia are charlatans. I don’t want to believe it, and until just this past week or so, I didn’t believe it. I think this is because I so badly wanted to believe in a plan, in something, anything, that I was able to convince myself that they knew what the fuck they were doing. I could see it. I could see the idea. But ideas aren’t always good ideas and to be honest I’m just sort of repeating myself now and am badly in need of an editor before I start talking about dudes running out of their house on fire again, but shit, I don’t know what else to say.

What else can I tell you? I suppose I could hold to the belief that Patricia’s defenses in New England always started out bad and then improved as the season went on, but is that even true? They didn’t look like they could even stop a Pee-Wee team in the Super Bowl. And as I have already said in the defensive preview, it’s my contention that the Patriots strongest defense was Tom Brady himself, that the defense wasn’t a complete tire fire only because he managed to keep the ball longer than any other team in the league, and when he did have to give it up, he did so giving the Patriots defense the best starting field position of any team in the league. Matt Patricia was a terrible defensive coordinator and he has bad ideas about what makes a good defense. Fuck him.

I am already getting carried away, already condemning dudes to the lake of fire before they’ve even coached a real game. That is insane, but this is the only conclusion I can come to. I really, really don’t want it to be true. I want to stress that because I don’t want you sitting there thinking I’m being negative just for its own sake. I am not that guy. I am a dude who is able to convince himself that Michigan will go 12-0 every single season. Shit, I remember looking at Michigan’s schedule going into 2009 and telling myself “hey, there’s no reason they can’t go undefeated.” This was when Rich Rodriguez was the coach and after they had just gone 3-9. I am an absurdly, unreasonably optimistic person. Nobody ever sees that, though, because the world we actually live in, is so unbearably wretched and because I’M A FUCKING LIONS FAN. Even the most optimistic man in the world will look like a cynical doomsayer if he has to write about this fucking team.

Matthew Stafford. Matthew Stafford. Matthew Stafford.

I feel compelled to call this a 4-12 team, but I can’t do that because of Matthew Stafford. He is the Hope, the one thing keeping me moving forward here. I just can’t see a team with him at quarterback being that bad. Well, I mean, the team probably will be that bad, but Stafford will mask a lot of it. I can’t see him losing to other bad teams, especially at home. The Lions won’t finish 4-12, but that should come with an asterisk because it’s really Matthew Stafford that won’t finish 4-12. The rest of the team could finish 1-15. Fuck.

But that’s sort of the point, I guess. The Lions have done this on purpose because it’s what Papa Belichick does. But take Brady away 10 years ago, and the Patriots were still a decent team. Take Brady away today and Belichick goes 1-15. Fuck Bill Belichick and fuck anyone crazy enough to build a team modeled on the 2017 Patriots instead of the 2002 or even 2008 Patriots.

But again, I’m repeating myself. I suppose I’m desperately looking for a way to convince myself that this will all be alright, that these ideas are Good Ideas, and so I find my brain trying to follow the same paths over and over and over again in the hope that somehow the conclusion will be different this time. But it never is. No matter how I try to break this down, I end up in the same place: hopeless panic.

The Lions look like a team that will be utter shit. The only hope is that Matthew Stafford somehow transcends it all, hell that he transcends himself, but is that really hope? That is insanity, and that is where I’m afraid we find ourselves. Again.

Final Prediction: 7-9, with all 7 wins thanks to Stafford

You Think You Know, But You Don't

Being a Lions fan is the sort of thing that after a while defies description. Hence, this entire blog. I spent years trying to find something unattainable: a reason for it all. I gave up in madness, disappeared to a shack in the woods and huffed ether for a few years. And now here I am trying once again, slamming my head against the wall until my brain is little more than a gooey mist, which is basically the same thing that Lions players do, but at least when they’re done they can leave to the tranquility of early senility or wife beating or waving a gun around in traffic naked until they get shot by cops or whatever the fuck NFL players do after retirement.

The point, my dear friends, is that at least the players can escape. Lions fans, on the other hand, are in it for life. You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. Guitar solo.

This, by itself, isn’t really a foreign concept to fans of all teams. But there is a unique kind of eternal suffering that belongs to Lions fans and Lions fans alone. I have attempted to capture this, to explain it, but I can’t. No one can. It is inexplicable, a sort of generational madness passed on by our fathers and to our sons, a sickness that is genetic, the sort of forever doom known previously only by Pyramid builders and those forced to spend summer camp with camp counselor Adolf. Yes, we’re the Jews of sports fans.

Okay, before this runs even further off the rails and I get letters from anti-defamation leagues, let me refocus a bit. Being a Lions fan is something that no other sports fan can truly understand. You think you can, but you don’t. I have no living memory of the Lions being anything other than “the Lions” and all the jokes and horror stories that go along with that. I’m 38 years old. My parents have no living memory of it. My grandfather was in his 20s the last time the Lions were anything other than “the Lions.” And he’s been dead now for 10 years. This is a thing that is beyond us. We were born into bondage, and we’ll probably die there.

Every fan of every team that has ever existed likes to talk up their own misery in some perverse way. It’s just human nature. I’m sure that somewhere there is a Patriots fan beating his chest and wailing while he tears at his hair-shirt, bemoaning the fact that “the loser Belichick” blew the Super Bowl. It exists everywhere. But not like this.

In fact, Lions fans are almost insane the other way. The collective positivity of Lions fans, the eternal “well, this is our year” is just as pathological and obnoxious as every other team’s “woe is me” sports radio bullshit. They are both defense mechanisms. Theirs is a defense against the possibility of real failure. They are preparing themselves. Ours is a defense against the reality of failure. We are attempting to cope.

Somewhere, there is a Browns fan reading this who thinks “uh, yeah, I get it.” But you don’t. People forget, but this Browns franchise is basically a baby expansion franchise. That’s because the “real” Browns fled town and became the Baltimore Ravens, who have won two Super Bowls. The NFL has done such a good job with their propaganda after decreeing that the new “Browns” would be given the old Browns history and colors and lore that people have forgotten this and actually buy the absurd argument that this “Browns” team is the same as the old Browns team. But it isn’t. It’s still a baby. It doesn’t have the eternal depth of Lions Madness, the 60 year “what the fuckness” of it all.

Yes, I know that there are “Browns” fans that were Browns fans long before the Baltimore weirdness. They just transferred their love like one of those old ladies whose “son” comes home from the war, only its not really their son, but his buddy stealing his identity, and both he and the old lady pretend because they both need it. That’s what modern “Browns” fans are like. It’s sad, but it’s its own kind of unique fucked up sadness. Besides, even the OG Browns had some success with three straight AFC Championship games in the 80s. So they’re out.

There is not another team in the NFL that has experienced the kind of absurd Failure Demons that have plagued the Lions. Since the NFL went to a 16-game schedule in 1978 – 40 years ago – the Lions best 5-year run is a record of 46-34 from 1991-95, the heart of the Barry Sanders years. That’s an average season of 9-7. And that’s the best era in Lions football to anyone younger than a senor citizen. That is fucking nuts.

No other NFL team has a “high” that’s that low. Well, the Houston Texans do. They have a “high” of 45-35, but again, they are an expansion team, a teenage franchise with fans who have not even begun to understand true suffering. Fuck them.

What other NFL franchise can compare? The Buccaneers and the Saints were once notorious punchlines, but they’ve both won Super Bowls now. The Falcons have never won one but have at least been there, and recently too. The Cardinals at least made it to a Super Bowl.

No other franchise has had a legacy of sheer failure that the Lions have. Even franchises that have never really won anything, like the Chargers, have at least had some success. They’ve at least won a few playoff games here and there, or gotten their fans excited enough to the point where they thought they might actually have a chance. But not the Lions. No, the Lions have 1 goddamn playoff win in the last 60 years. 1! O N E!

That lone playoff win was 27 years ago. The Lions lost the next week to the Redskins 41-10.

Who else is there? The Jets? The Jets won a Super Bowl. That was almost 50 years ago, so we’ll ignore that. But even if we ignore that, we can’t ignore that since then the Jets have 10 playoff wins. And, uh, 10 > 1.

So, no, there is no other fanbase in the NFL that can even begin to understand what it feels like to be a Lions fan. Let’s extend it to other major American sports.

Every non-expansion team franchise in every sport has at least had some success. Even if they have had long stretches of shit, there is always that one year when they rise up and at least make a final or fool their fans into thinking that this is their “magical” year. The Sacramento Kings have never won anything, but they did have that stretch during the Chris Webber years when they at least got close. The Lions have never even been close.

The Clippers? Maybe. But the Clippers are sort of like the Browns in that they’ve only been the “Los Angeles” Clippers since 1984. They’re also coming off a five year stretch in which they won 50 games every year and at least provided the illusion that they weren’t the “Clippers” anymore. They’re also the red-headed stepchild of the Los Angeles sports scene. Clippers fans choose to be Clippers fans for some perverse reason. There is no choosing to be a Lions fan. There is no Lakers team here. You’re born into this and you die into this. You don’t move to Detroit and adopt the Lions as your second team like Clippers fans.

Baseball teams? The Padres are comparably young and have been to two World Series. The Mariners are young and once won 116 games in a single season. The Royals just won a World Series a couple of years ago. The Nationals have only been in Washington for a heartbeat. Before that, they were in Montreal, but they were still as young as the Padres. They had their own unique form of misery in the strike season of 1994, but that misery was built around them being the best team in baseball that season and having it ripped away. That is Lions like in its absurdity, but it’s still based around them being the best team in baseball. And besides, they’re not even in Montreal anymore so what are we even talking about?

What about the Toronto Maple Leafs? In many ways, they feel sort of like the Lions sister team in misery. They’re an old franchise, a generational franchise, and they have an old, proud history. They were winning when the Lions were winning. Only grandfathers remember this. And they’ve suffered in sorrow and misery since. But have they really?

Since the Leafs last won a Stanley Cup in 1967, they’ve made the playoffs 29 times. To be fair, it’s always been much easier to make the playoffs in the NHL, especially back in the day when almost every team made it. Since 1967, the Leafs have won 109 playoff games. 109 > 1. Okay, okay, that’s not fair since the true measure would be playoff series wins. The Leafs have 19 of those. Again, 19 > 1. They also have 5 conference final appearances. That is a record Lions fans would kill for. Leafs fans are that “poor” family who whine because they only have two cars and can’t afford to go to Disney every year while ignoring Lions fans sleeping in boxes in the alley next door.

So, no, you don’t understand.

But it goes beyond just the losing. It’s also the way the Lions have lost over the years, which is every way imaginable. The Process of the Catch, 10 Second Runoffs, miracle field goals, missed extra points, the refs missing calls, the refs making phantom calls, whatever the fuck happened in Dallas a few years ago . . . the Lions haven’t just lost, they have lost in the most heinous, ridiculous ways imaginable. It is bizarre and cruel and it feels like we’re the victims of some sort of evil supernatural will.

And we’ve suffered through all of this despite having the most talented player in NFL history in Barry Sanders and maybe the most talented wide receiver ever in Calvin Johnson. We’ve had to watch as their brilliance has been squandered, wasted on a team that ruins everyone, that finally ruined them. Both of them retired before they needed to, their spirits ruined, broken men destroyed by the Lions. Just think about it. Really think about it. We ruined Barry Sanders!!!

It is a legacy that defies explanation, that defies human understanding. It just keeps reaching and keeps reaching and keeps reaching further into the depths of our souls, into a black bottomless pit of madness and despair. You keep looking, but you lose sight of it and it all just becomes a sort of horrific blur. The losing, the ridiculous moments, Barry’s shredded soul . . . it all just becomes a chaotic whirlwind threatening to carry us away every time we think of it.

At some point it has to stop, right? It has to set us down back in Kansas – Barry’s home, by the way, as if things couldn’t get more absurd – after we click our heels and wake up in our beds convinced it and the wicked witch were all a horrible nightmare. But it doesn’t stop. It hasn’t stopped for 60 years. It is our reality, our generational struggle. We have been born into it and it is all we know. The rest of you think you can know, but you don’t. You don’t.

Dead Horse

Let’s just get right to it.  The Redskins are awful, okay?  Just terrible.  They have imploded in ways that have horrified and disgusted their fans.  Once upon a time, that would have included my friend, the esteemed Raven Mack, who I’m sure many of you are familiar with, but he was psychically poisoned by the terrible reign of Dan Snyder: Boy Prince, and had to flee to the Congo to be healed by a witch doctor.  The Lions should win this game.  The Lions had better win this game or else my idiot fan heart will be devoured either by my tears or by hideous laughter, whichever comes first to protect and cleanse me.

But here’s the thing, and this is the sort of thing that makes you just sort of sit out on the porch and smoke a cigarette even though you haven’t smoked in years – the Lions haven’t won in Washington since the Burning Bush administration, when George Sr. screamed at Moses to mobilize his forces in the Egyptian desert.  This makes sense when you consider that, for the most part, recent fuckery aside, the Redskins have been a fairly respectable NFL franchise, while the Lions have been a fairly respectable circus clown franchise.  I mean, it’s not just Washington, the Lions also have that abominable Lambeau field streak, which will only end after the Rapture as foretold in the Book of Revelations, and they once went approximately 252 straight years without winning a game on the road, which we all remember because you don’t forget things like that or like getting bamboo shoots barbed with razor wire and hot sauce plunged into your urethra.

Historically, there is no reason to believe that the Lions should win this game, and so I’m sure that if they do lose there will be people who explain it away as too high a mountain to climb or some such shit, because there is always an excuse and let’s face it, this one is pre-made.  But all of that terrible history is just that – history, and while it may be too much to say that history is a dead thing, which we all know is a hideous lie, as that fucker always comes back like Jason Voorhees and jumps out of the lake to decapitate you just when you finally think it’s all safe, it should not carry as much weight as we give it.  History can be overcome, and it can be beaten, but only if you embrace the now, and while the now isn’t any great shakes for the Lions, the now fucking hates the Redskins.

Their quarterback, their savior, Robert Griffin III, was descended upon by vultures sent by the fates, who tore away his knee ligaments and then pooped all over the souls of every fan brave enough (or idiot enough, depending on your point of view) to believe in the spiritual healing powers of RGIII.  Rather than cleanse the Redskins of their recent woes, RGIII provided damning evidence that the franchise had been taken over by Failure Demons, those vicious parasites.  Most Redskins already suspected that Dan Snyder had secret shadow partners, steeped in evil and misery, but when RGIII went down and a circus erupted involving coaches feuding with doctors and quarterbacks being called cornball brothers on ESPN, perceptive Redskins fans sadly knew that those shadow partners were none other than the dreaded Failure Demons, and that even worse they now had a controlling interest in the once proud franchise.

Like I said, it was bad enough that it helped cause my boy, Raven Mack, to sever the Redskins like a gangrenous limb, if only to save what was left of his own broken soul.  After all, he has seen what that sort of fandom can do to a man during his dealings with me, and I don’t blame him for disappearing into the heart of the Dark Continent to wrestle giant crocodiles and grow Iboga, which he sells to Somalian pirates in exchange for guns and potions he uses to ward off the transmogrifications of the spirits of the white devil men who became trapped in those jungles back in the day and exist now only to haunt and twist the living.

Wait, where was I?  Oh yeah, the Redskins.  Anyway, all of that happened before this season even started.  Once the ball was actually kicked off, the Failure Demons went completely nuts and started openly wandering the field during play, gnawing on whatever was left over of RGIII’s soul, attaching spiritual chains to Alfred Morris and seeping out of Mike Shanahan’s anus shaped mouth like wispy smoke leaking out of a genie lamp.  It hasn’t been good in Washington, which we all knew in a larger, general sense, but as if to mirror real life, whatever the hell that is, the Redskins have abandoned “not good” and entered into an era of dumpster fires and hobos beating off on city buses driven by cackling skeletons, while snake handlers and charlatans sit in the halls of power and do the bidding of their dark masters.  People make fun of Detroit and its football team, but GODDAMN, have you checked out DC lately?

RGIII suddenly moves more slowly than a stoned ground sloth, and has taken to publicly feuding with his top receiver, Pierre Garcon, which in French means Peter Boy.  Actually Pierre is a derivation of the Greek petros, which means “rock” or “stone”, so in reality RGIII is arguing with a Stoned Boy, which makes all the sense in the world.  The open bitchery began when Stoned Boy publicly questioned RGIII’s speed, which is of course a good, sensible thing to do to your quarterback coming off of knee surgery.  Naturally, RGIII handled it like a true leader and had a frank, private conversation behind closed doors with Monsieur Boy, in which… oh wait, you mean he didn’t?  No, instead RGIII took to the press and challenged T.T. Boy to a race.  And all the while the Failure Demons cackled and Dre Bly and Joey Harrington reminisced fondly about selling each other out in times of crisis.

The whole thing has become a hideous circus, with Griffin hee-hawing constantly to the press about how maybe he needs to run more even though his knees are now made of old cheese and ghosts, while everyone else openly speculates that he’s already done and that Shanahan should smother him with a pillow or at least do the sensible thing and go behind his back to Darth Snyder and ask permission to change quarterbacks, which is always a good sign that your coach has control of the situation.  Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Kirk Cousins, who looks like a dude who should be terrorizing new arrivals at the police academy, stands ready for RGIII to fall, so he can pick off whatever’s left like a vulture and “rescue” the Redskins from the unrescuable.

I have spent this entire piece talking about the Redskins and for good reason – if the Lions can’t beat a team like that, a team that psychically damaged, a team being publicly feasted on by the Failure Vultures – then it’s probably time to call it a day, and by call it a day I mean start hanging dudes in effigy and wearing paper bags on our heads like our forefathers did.

The flipside to all that hideous nonsense, though, is that the Lions should win.  They should definitely win.  For once, the psychic energies favor them, and sometimes all you need to do is look at a team in the midst of true hell to understand that your team is actually doing okay.

The Lions lost last week and that sucked.  You know how I feel in general about this team, but my new stance is to just take everything as it happens, one game at a time, like an addict in recovery, and see what happens.  Last week was confirmation to me that things aren’t going to get better, but maybe they can stay just okay enough that the Lions can sneak their way past the gates of hell and get in a couple of nights partying before the demon authorities show up and drag them back in chains, and if that happens at just the right time, then who knows? 

There is a hierarchy in hell, and right now the Lions are just sort of chilling in one of the outer circles, tormented by their past and by the general hopelessness of the future, but not really openly suffering in the present.  The Redskins, meanwhile, are being slow-roasted near the center, hanging with Hitler and the gang, and screaming for a mercy that just isn’t going to come.  This is the new way we have to look at things as Lions fans, our new reality, depressing though it may be.  But really, it’s only depressing if you really think about it, if you let the inevitability of the doom really settle in.  If you just get drunk and scream at the TV every week and pretend that something good could happen, then you can at least tolerate it.  It’s better than what Redskins fans are going through right now.

And so, that’s all that’s left to do on Sunday – revel in the fact that the Redskins are now Failure’s whipping boy, and while Failure promises to get around to us before too long, for now all we can do is hold the Redskins down while they get the belt.  It’s kind of shameful, and in a just universe we’d all just band together and overthrow the Failure Regime, but people are addicted and the Failure regime knows that and will continue to play with us like puppets using their subsidiary, the NFL aka the Dumb Asshole League.  We are a collective of junkie slaves, and we’re just happy when we don’t get the whip. 

Listen, that is a hideously offensive metaphor, but in a lot of ways this is a hideously offensive game.  There are no real winners here, only a sad sort of jockeying to not be at the bottom of the pile.  And right now, the Lions aren’t while the Redskins are.  It’s that simple, and in the Land of Misery, the only things we have to cherish are the simple and the petty.  Most days we wish we weren’t us, but for one day, we get to be glad that we aren’t them.  And for one week, at least, that’s enough.  And that’s how we survive.