Detroit Lions Preview Part Whatever: The Dudes and Lady Dude in Charge

On January 14^th 2014, the Detroit Lions hired Jim Caldwell, and I gave up. I did. I’ll admit it. After years of psychological torture, constant kicks in the nuts, half a decade of writing about the Lions, of spilling my idiot brain and bleeding my heart onto Armchair Linebacker, I fucking gave up. I couldn’t take it anymore.

It wasn’t just that. It was a lot of things. I have always had a hard time with the NFL because it has always seemed totalitarian and dystopic to me. A fascist parade designed to get me to love shitty beer commercials and farting horses, to wave the NFL flag like a lobotomized geek, chanting USA while Herr Goodell bent me over a table week after week, his goons rifling through the pockets of my stripped-off pants. I grew to hate the NFL, and in a lot of ways I still do. This will always be a struggle for me, reconciling something I have found I have no real control over – my Lions fandom – with the disgust I feel for these jackbooted shitheads. This has always come out here on Armchair Linebacker, has always bled through into whatever the fuck I’m gibbering about, so it’s not exactly a surprise. It just felt – and still feels – more explicit somehow. I feel dirty and wrong for caring, for continuing to engage in this horseshit drivel, giving my presence to a league of flag humpers and Trumpian dipshittery. But here I am.

I’ve already spun far away from the point, which is that, yes, in 2014 I gave up. And I gave up because after all the Pain and the Fear and the Drain Cleaner and Ether, the Lions hired Jim Caldwell, the man who had a college coaching record of 26-63. It was absurd, too absurd even for the circus of the absurd known as Lions football. I’ve already bitched about Caldwell so much, explained my utter disdain so often, that I’m not going to do so here. It broke me. That’s all that matters.

2008 fucked everyone up. It fucked us up in ways most of us still can’t really comprehend. When you hit bottom, true bottom, you’re left with a desperate need for Answers. There’s only one way to go: up. At least that’s what you tell yourself, what I told myself. I convinced myself that this would be a linear ascent, that somehow 0-16 in some fucking bizarre way cleansed us of our sins, burned it away in the fire, that 50+ years of horror and pain were somehow finally paid for. I believed all of this because I had to, it was the only way I could cope with 0-16.

Of course, it didn’t work out that way, and it caused me to go on a journey of the soul worthy of a nihilistic Cormac McCarthy screed. 0-16 was meaningless. Just another mile marker on the road to hell. It wasn’t hell itself, it was just a shitty thing that happened in an endless parade of shit, and to treat it like some sort of cosmic pivot point was weak and stupid. 0-16 wasn’t the bottom because there is no bottom. That is something I think I had to learn, but when the Lions hired Jim Caldwell – hang on, there’s a fucking spider on my neck, what the fuck??? Okay, I’m back now, it’s dead – I couldn’t handle any of that shit. I wasn’t ready. I was broken. 0-16 finally caught up to me. It had been chasing me all that time, and it finally cornered me somewhere in my dreams like fucking Freddy Krueger and cut my dumb ass up.

So what brought me back? I don’t know. Isn’t that dumb? I don’t know. I think I finally accepted some things about the Lions, about 0-16, about the sheer idiotic randomness of an indifferent universe. But mostly it’s because I decided it’s okay to hope again. lol Neil, you fucking jackass.

I know. I get it. It’s fucking absurd to be doing this to myself again. It’s fucking crazy to think that this will end any way other than the way it’s ended every single other fucking time for the last 60 years. But the moment Jim Caldwell was fired something woke up inside me again (he couldn’t remember how he got there, ha ha ha) and I just fell back into it. Into all of it. I went nuts deep diving into stats and history. I looked at every season of every team, every single one of their players, going back almost 70 years. That’s true. I did that. I am a fucking lunatic. You know this about me by now. But even for me, this was bizarre behavior. I bought Madden and played it for many seasons. I think I was making up for lost time, trying to cram as much football back into me as I could.

But why did this happen and what does this have to do with Matt Patricia? Well, it happened because I decided to give the new guy a chance this time. It’s pretty simple. But I’m not talking about Matt Patricia. I’m talking about Bob Quinn.

This is Bob Quinn’s team. I’ve said that before, but listen, it’s not a coincidence that I kept referring back to the Patriots and Tom Brady and how they built their team throughout this Odyssean preview. Bob Quinn was with the Patriots from the beginning of their dynasty. He was a key figure in their scouting department, a dude who got himself involved with personnel decisions, and a man who generally was deeply entrenched in the building of that franchise. He understood the Patriot Way. That’s why the Lions hired him.

But it’s one thing to stick a guy in upper management and to then hire an endless string of turds with their own vision to coach the team. Jim Caldwell was a dead man the moment Quinn was hired. I hoped so, anyway. I was delighted when it turned out to be true.

Is that cruel? Is that me picking on poor Jim Caldwell some more? Maybe a little. But more than that, I was waiting for it to be true because it gave me a chance to see what Quinn was all about. Whoever he hired would explain a lot about where this team was headed. When he hired Matt Patricia, I knew. I knew that this was Quinn’s team, and regardless of whether the plan is a good one or not, it at least meant that the Lions would have a coherent vision going forward.

Matt Patricia was hired because Quinn was familiar with him and he would do what Quinn wanted and needed. He is Bob Quinn’s bitch. That’s fine with me. I don’t really care about Matt Patricia in terms of “vision” or “plan” because those words belong to Bob Quinn, not Matt Patricia, and if Bob Quinn wants to turn the Lions into the Patriots, that’s fine by me. Execution of the plan is another matter, of course, one that will likely require an insane amount of luck (lol I’m a fucking idiot for getting back into this and daring to hope, aren’t I?) but it’s ambitious, it’s fairly straightforward, and you either live or you die trying. No half measures. And that’s what I think Bob Quinn brings to the Lions.

Of course, there’s still Matt Patricia: the football coach to consider. Bob Quinn won’t be the dude designing game strategy or making decisions in the heat of the moment. That’s on Patricia, and . . . I don’t know, dudes and lady dudes. I just don’t know.

I’m worried. I’ll say that much. I already covered what I think of Patricia as a defensive coordinator in my defensive preview. Go back and read it if you want. I’m not gonna link it because I’m lazy and also because you literally just have to go to the blog’s homepage and scroll down you fucking jackanapes. Anyway, it’s not exactly a glowing endorsement. But head coach is different than defensive coordinator, so we’ll have to see. I know that’s a copout, but what else can I say? Patricia has never been a head coach, on any level, so no one, not even Patricia himself, knows how he’s gonna handle his business in the heat of the moment.

The only thing I know is that he was Bob Quinn’s handpicked choice. So be it. Live or die trying.

The Lions coordinators are further evidence that this is Quinn’s team. Uncle Paulie Pasqualoni is 69 years old (lol for multiple reasons) and I already covered his credentials in the defensive preview too. It’s worth pointing out that he’s only been a defensive coordinator once in the last 30 years, and that was for two seasons with the Dolphins a decade ago. Believing that he will take charge of the defense and be some sort of a master strategist is fucking insane. No, he’s Matt Patricia’s boy the same way Patricia is Quinn’s. He’s just there to execute the plan and to stay the fuck out of the way. No friction here.

Jim Bob Cooter – and I will never, ever get over the dude being named Jim Bob Cooter for fuck’s sake – was retained as the Lions offensive coordinator, which further highlights how impotent Patricia is here, at least when it comes to the vision of the team. Cooter (lol) was kept on because Matthew Stafford is familiar with him, is comfortable with him, likes him, and Stafford is the key to this whole damn thing. He is the heart of Bob Quinn’s grand vision, and Cooter (lol) can hopefully keep himself from climbing naked through strange women’s windows long enough to maintain a frictionless relationship with Stafford and thus a frictionless relationship between Stafford and Quinn.

The Lions offenses under Cooter (lol) have been mixed. His first couple of seasons were mediocre at best, but last season, the Lions ranked 7^th in scoring despite not having a functional running game. Of course, that’s a double-edged sword since establishing a functional running game is Cooter’s (lol) fucking job. But it also shows that Cooter (lol) is capable of scheming around it. Then again, too many times last season the Lions wasted time trying to establish that running game before Cooter (lol) said fuck it and let Matthew Stafford do his thing. I know I’m just writing in circles here, contradicting each sentence with the next, but that’s kind of the point. I still don’t know what to make of Cooter (lol) because I don’t know how much was him, and how much was Jim Caldwell’s dumb ass.

What I do know is that the Lions offense as a whole, just based on sheer numbers, was arguably one of the top 3 or 4 Lions offenses of the past 20 years. That is kind of pathetic and explains a whole lot when you consider how piss poor the running game was, but what the hell, we don’t live in the Garden of Eden.

What I also know is that the only thing that really matters right now is that Stafford likes Cooter (lol who among us, amirite?) and Bob Quinn likes that Stafford likes Cooter (lol) and Matt Patricia is just standing there looking like a Hungarian caveman with his thumb up his ass while he lets them do their thing. It’s coherent. Risky, maybe, but coherent. Live or die trying.

Of course, the big shadow looming over all of this is the fucking Ford family. (Alliteration!) They’ve been the one constant all these years, all these soul-sucking trail of tears years. That is . . . depressing. The hope was that once William Clay Ford Sr. kicked it, his son, Bill Jr. would have a more aggressive style than daddy as he sought to make his mark. Naturally, his old battle-axe of a mother took over instead and told Bill to shut the fuck up and stay in his room while she went to Bible study with Rod Wood and Caldwell. Sigh.

Then again, the NFL is littered with the shithead children of successful people. Mark Davis in Oakland, Jed York’s gumpy ass in San Francisco – dudes like this who inherited their teams are generally disasters, so maybe we got off lucky. Hell, Bill Sr. himself was a trust fund baby. The fucking Ford family, man. The dude who made them all rich, old Henry, was a fucking Nazi sympathizer. He also did more to make the city of Detroit what it was than anyone else, so I don’t know, man. People are ridiculous and complicated. His heirs, of course, have been fuckups because that’s what heirs do. They are soft idiots, raised out of touch in some bizarre world free of consequences, forever arrested in the grips of absurd wealth and their own whims. To expect them to somehow lead anything, even a fucking toy like a professional football team, to anything other than disaster is absurd.

Naturally, they’ve been in charge of this whole broken rickshaw of a ride for the last 60 years. Martha Firestone Ford isn’t a real Ford, of course. She just married into it all, which somehow feels even worse. But it’s not like she’s some street-smart wife who landed a rich dude. No, she’s an heiress herself, of the Firestone family. Tires and cars. The whole thing is fucking incestuous.

Anyway, these are the people in charge of the Detroit Lions. It’s kind of amazing I didn’t give up again in the middle of writing this. But I’ve convinced myself that most of these people don’t matter, that the only person I have to believe in here is Bob Quinn. Is this stupid? Both in terms of the Lions strategy and in my own self-delusion? Almost certainly, but live or die trying, I guess. I’m here again, and I’m still alive. For now.

Reflections On Fandom, Friendship And The Revelations Of Perspective

The Old King And The Prince

Being a fan can drive a dude or lady dude crazy. I submit my entire body of gibberish on this here website as evidence. I have ranted and raved like a deranged lunatic for so long that there are times when I feel like I have lost all sense of perspective, and sometimes it takes something brutal and hard to make me look at what I have as a fan and then pat myself down to make sure that all my vitals and, uh, special parts are still intact. These don’t happen often, but when they do, they are kind of a spiritual fan cleanser. I know that doesn’t make any damn sense, but fuck it, since when have I specialized in making sense?

I, like every other Lions fan, have bemoaned the fact that the Lions are run by incompetent boobs, and that our owner is a 268 year old man who has never won anything and who seems chronically incapable of providing any sort of lightning bolt like spark to revive his team, his beloved company or his city even though devotees and citizens of all of the above have been practically begging for it for years. Indeed, the Fords eat a lot of shit, mostly for being ineffectual. But there is no sense of malevolence behind this general futility, just a general malaise that even they don’t know how to break free from. It permeates everything about them – and about us – from our team to our city and to the company that defined that city for so long. That all sounds vaguely sad, and it is, but dudes and lady dudes, it could be so much worse.

You see, the Fords are just like old, withered kings, slumped on their thrones, tired, their time passed, but they are still worthy of being called kings and they still command a certain level of affection and respect. They are not tyrants, incompetent and blood soaked, meddlesome and terrible, getting in their own way because their own colossal egos constantly whisper in their ears that they have to rule the world. And because of this we are lucky.

I was recently reminded of this fact when our own Raven Mack, who is a king amongst kings, took it upon himself to post Daniel Snyder’s office number in a desperate attempt to get his voice heard. At first, I kind of felt like it wasn’t that cool. I mean, that shit just isn’t my style. And I told him so as I devolved into a paranoid beast, afraid that at any moment Daniel Snyder’s storm troopers would come repelling out of internet black helicopters and have us e-killed. After all, my e-mail address (or at least one of them) was the contact info over to the right of the page there. I just didn’t need the hassle in case things went stupid. I mean, let’s face it, Daniel Snyder is a dude who has sued his own fans and who is currently involved in a huge lawsuit against a newspaper because one of their writers said mean things about him. Fuck that, you know?

But then I realized that I behaved shamefully, because Raven Mack is my bro and I should have understood better what he was going through as a fan. His own despair over his realization that Daniel Snyder makes success for his favorite football team impossible drove him to such lengths. His posting of that phone number is a condemnation of the brutal soul sucking reign of Daniel Snyder more than anything else. Raven Mack knows that his Redskins can’t win in the long run because Daniel Snyder can’t get out of his own damn way. That will drive a man to desperate measures and who am I to condemn him for it? I understand sports pain and I understand the panic that comes with feeling like your team will always be a giant shit heap, rotting under a hell sun. Raven Mack deserves my empathy and he has it. Fuck everything else.

The more I thought about it, the more I put myself in Raven Mack’s shoes and the more I put myself in his shoes, the more I realized that shit, I don’t have it so bad as a fan right now. The Fords offer nothing in the way of excitement or positive energy. They aren’t going to make a difference for the betterment of my favorite football team. They just aren’t. They just don’t have it in them. But they aren’t actively going to make shit worse either. They are just sort of there, and when I look at what my dude, the poor put upon Raven Mack has to go through, that’s not that bad, you know?

The worst thing you can say about the Fords is that they are too loyal and that they are stubborn. They stick to their guns and they don’t fly off the handle and freak the fuck out if things aren’t going well. This can result in grim, torturous death if they make the mistake of putting their faith in the wrong people. Say hello to the last decade and The Devil Millen. This has happened far too often and has resulted in much gnashing of teeth and beating of the breasts and hey, that’s a fair criticism, you know? At the end of the day, the decision to keep a guy or to set him on fire and dump him in the Detroit River lies with them. But at least there is a sliver of hope in all that. I know, I know, what the fuck am I talking about? That’s a ridiculous thing to say. But it’s true. There was always the chance that the Fords would one day get lucky, that they would hire the right guy, the right people, to run this team. And somehow, someway, it looks like that finally happened.

Martin Mayhew and Jim Schwartz have shown me enough the last two years to make me believe in the future, which is really kind of an amazing thing to say given the last decade – hell, a whole lifetime – of sports misery and pain. I believe in them and I believe in the future, and with dudes like them in charge, I can look at the Fords and say hey, maybe these guys aren’t so bad after all. I mean, when it comes to everything else – to community activism, to their relationship with their players, to their honest and genuine desire to be noble stewards of something larger than themselves – they are good owners. They’ve just been fucked by their own misplaced sense of loyalty and their inability to accurately judge the capabilities of the people they hire.

I’ll admit that’s a pretty big stain and it is one that will forever tarnish whatever legacy they have as owners. But, like I said, there was always the chance that they could get lucky and if they did, and if they found the right people in whom to place their trust, then there was no reason why we couldn’t be a kick ass franchise. I mean, everything else is in place. The Fords run a classy and downright decent organization. All you have to do is look at how efficiently they managed to pull off that game between the Vikings and Giants after the Metrodome roof caved in a couple months ago for evidence of that. Compare that to the fiasco the Vikings faced in trying to put on their next home game after that and you can see, pretty damn clearly, that when it comes to the off the field stuff, the Fords are pretty damn good owners.

And now the on the field stuff – which let’s face it, is all we really care about – is starting to look like it has a real future, glittery and bright, a world full of diamonds and candy and blowjobs. The Fords don’t pose any real threat to that. They have shown that they are incredibly loyal and patient people – mostly to their and our detriment – but with Mayhew and Schwartz running things, those black marks are actually now assets. It’s crazy to admit, but the Lions management situation is actually really, really good right now from the top on down.

Just think of poor Raven Mack and what he has to go through. Or my boy, Harpo Garza and the madness of the terrible, never-ending reign of that leprous vampire, Al Davis. (Seriously, goddamn, just find a recent picture of Uncle Al. That motherfucker’s skin is falling off. It’s horrifying.) Or, hell, even Cowboys fans. Jerry Jones and his ego will not let them get back to the holy land. Everyone knows this. These are dudes who all believe that they should be the ones making the final decisions about their football teams, about the dudes who actually play the damn games. They have been convinced by their own monstrous egos that they are brilliant misunderstood geniuses who know better than anyone else. Sometimes this is rooted in past glory, like in the case of Al Davis. Sometimes this is rooted in hubris and a fundamental misunderstanding of why you were once successful, like in the case of Jerry Jones.

Davis was once a football visionary, a man who turned the Oakland Raiders to gold, and who was the driving force behind the ascension of the former AFL. At least he’s earned the right to believe that he’s the king, even if he is just perpetually chasing a ghost. And besides, at least he’s liable to shuffle off to Valhalla sometime before my boy Harpo, which means my boy Harpo has at least a chance of getting his football team back.

Jones is a rich old redneck who was a half-decent college football player at Arkansas a million years ago and he got lucky because one of his old teammates was a dude named Jimmy Johnson. That connection is what created the success of the Dallas Cowboys in the early ‘90s. Jimmy Johnson shaped that team through sheer force of will and a keen understanding of what makes a team successful. Jerry Jones just happened to be there. Once Johnson was gone, the Cowboys began their decline. Sure, they won another Super Bowl with Barry Switzer – another contact from Jones’ days at Arkansas – but they were still huffing the fumes left over from the Jimmy Johnson days. Once those fumes dissipated and drifted off into the great unknown, the Cowboys were fucked. Of course, Jerry Jones’ ego tells him every day that he played college football so he understands the game well enough to be the Man Who Gets Things Done. And it tells him that he was the owner when the Cowboys won three Super Bowls, so fuck it, he believes. It is a delusional belief, completely absurd and obviously dumb to anyone paying attention, but at least it is rooted in something.

Daniel Snyder’s belief in himself however is rooted in . . . well, shit, you tell me. He combines the worst traits of Davis and Jones – that arrogant and unshakeable self-confidence of a tyrant – with a complete lack of anything to point to as a reason for that self-confidence. At least Davis and Jones have reasons for believing they are capable of being dictators of their teams, no matter how shaky those reasons may be. Daniel Snyder’s reasons seem to be that he’s rich, he’s the owner and fuck everyone else. How is a team supposed to ever succeed with that at its heart?

The Fords were always capable of getting lucky, of finding the right people to salvage our sunken ship. Daniel Snyder doesn’t have that. It doesn’t matter who he hires because at the end of the day, it will always come back to him. He wields absolute power and the Redskins fortunes are inescapably tied to him. Think about that and then think about the desperate sadness of my friend, Raven Mack. Think about it. He has no hope. None. The only thing left to him is to post a dude’s phone number in savage desperation, a mournful howl in a thunderstorm, one last terrible wail as his universe explodes all around him. I love that dude. He is a true fan and he deserves so much better. Hell, he started this blog. It’s his world and I’m just allowed to live in it. And it’s a great world, and it’s a world in which I hope he is somehow able to smile again one day and believe in the future that he deserves as a fan.

It’s sad that it takes something like this to realize how good I have it right now as a fan. I’m sure some of you are laughing or scoffing or shaking your heads in disgust and calling me a stupid ass right now, but fuck it, it’s true. I have hope. I have faith. I believe in the future. Some fans – some friends of mine – aren’t so lucky. One of the beautiful things about this blog is that we can share our pain as fans, and even as my fortunes rise, I will be here to bear the sadness and the desperation of my fellow fans, dudes like Harpo Garza and Raven Mack. Because I have known their pain, I have known their sadness, their hopelessness, their desperation and that makes us brothers, fighting together for a better world as fans, a world where we can all believe in the future and where that future is one without limit or end.

(Also, a quick, tacky note: If you want, you can check out an article I wrote for Guyism, about the 10 Most Degenerate Super Bowl Winning Quarterbacks. Doing so – and maybe posting it on your facebook or twitter or digging it on digg,com or whatever – would help me tremendously by providing me with what the ancients referred to as Dollah, Dollah Bills. Also, just so you know, there was originally a fucked up tangent in that piece about Goofy whipping his dick out at Disneyland, but it was cut out, which let’s face it, was for the best. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, other than I feel like I should. It was in the Ben Roethlisberger section, naturally. Anyway, check it out and look for more stuff for me at Guyism in the future. I’ve got a couple of more things brewing too, so hopefully, every corner of the internet will be crawling with my distinct brand of wild gibberish. Thank you, and as always, Vaya con dios, friendos.)