It's Not Our Fault

When you’re winning, everything you do is held up as an example of your stunning genius. When you’re losing, everything you do is help us as an example of your grotesque buffoonery. It is ridiculous and unfair, but that is life in the big city, bubba.

Yesterday, I read something about how Matt Patricia is making the Lions practice in the snow and cold outdoors even though the Lions next few games are all indoors, and it struck me as the perfect example of what I just talked about. If he wins and somehow turns this whole thing around people will talk about how it just shows how “tough” he is, and that making the team practice outdoors was an ingenious way to break them down and then build them back up like some Bear Bryant Junction Boys shit. Lose, though, and you just look like a jackass playing “tough” because you watched Junction Boys one time.

Of course, it doesn’t help that Patricia wore shorts in the snow and cold, which just comes across like a ridiculous and transparent affectation, the sort of thing infamous Michigan failure Brady Hoke liked to do. He would always wear short-sleeves even in November and when he was winning (all one year of it) it came across like good ol’ fashioned meathead toughness, the sort of throwback thing inherent to “real” football. As soon as he began losing, though, it was just one more thing people could mock him for. Instead of making him look strong, it just made him look weak. I mean, dude couldn’t even put on a jacket because he had backed himself into a corner with his affectations. That isn’t “tough”, it’s just fake swagger, and it was embarrassing.

But again, it all came down to perspective. Win and you can eat babies. Lose, and you get mocked for feeding the homeless.

Of course, this is where the impossibility of being a Lions fan comes front and center. We have no perspective. How can we? 60 years of absurdity has left us shivering and shaking like junkies. Everything hurts. You can’t reasonably expect us to have faith or believe that things will get better, or trust the process or whatever buzzwords we’re being hit with because we have nothing to give you. I’ve said all this before, but goddammit, it needs to be said again.

As for the buzzwords themselves . . . real dudes don’t use buzzwords. They just go out and do it. They don’t try to sell people on it. That’s conman shit. It just comes across like one more Snake Oil Salesman trying to take advantage of us because we’re poor and desperate and Grandma has the Rickets or some weird shit. You can’t do that to us. Sure, we’re desperate to believe and we’ll give you a chance despite ourselves, but as soon as shit starts to look shady, we just remember all the other times we’ve been conned and “Trust the Process” goes into the same vast Indiana Jones Nazi vault as “Pad Level” and “Take the Wind.”

There’s kind of a semi-famous anecdote that no Lions coach has gone on to coach another team after being fired by the Lions. It’s only semi-true, but somehow the exceptions just highlight the spiritual truth of it all. Dick Jauron is the only coach in recent memory who’s gone on to coach another team. Don’t really remember Dick Jauron? That’s because he was only the interim coach for 5 games in 2005 after Steve Mariucci got fired in the midst of the Millencaust. He went 1-4 as a Lions coach and somehow got hired by the Bills. He was fired after four seasons, all four of which saw the Bills have losing records.

I mean, does Dick Jauron even count? At best he’s an asterisk on Lions history. Well, let’s go back further. To find the next Lions coach who ever coached again, we have to go all the way back to George Wilson, who was the head coach the last time the Lions won the title. Yes, we have to go all the way back to the beginning of those 60 years of insanity to find someone. And even he never coached in the NFL again. He coached in the AFL after leaving the Lions. I guess this counts, but again, it somehow just makes the whole thing that much more obvious and absurd, the anecdote all the more true, right? I mean, George Wilson has been dead for 40 fucking years.

To find the last Lions fulltime coach, a dude hired by the Lions to be the head coach - no Dick Jaurons here - who then went on to be the head coach of another NFL team, you have to go all the way back to Buddy Parker, who coached the Lions in the early 1950’s. Yes, that is pre-60 years of chaos and pain. He’s so old that his profile pic on pro-football-reference.com shows him wearing one of those old-timey hats that, like, Humphrey Bogart or some old ass dude would have worn. I mean . . . this is fucking absurd.

So that’s it. That’s the list. Dick Jauron, who shouldn’t really count, George Wilson, who coached an AFL team and died before I was even born and I’m old as shit now, and Buddy Parker, who was too old to fight in World War II.

I mean . . . that’s our context. You want us to believe? You want us to Trust the Process? Then you have to understand that this is our context, this is what we know. Words are meaningless and forgettable. You want to be tough? Start with understanding that you are going to be damned by us until you prove yourself otherwise. Understand that and fucking live with it. Don’t whine at us. Don’t sneer and act like we’re the problem. Don’t condescend and hector beat reporters at press conferences, dudes whose fucking jobs are to immerse themselves in the maelstrom of misery year after year. Just get on with it, and hope like hell that you actually know what you’re doing so that one day you can earn this shit. Because no one else who has come before has.

Anyway . . . yeah. Talking about the game against the Panthers seems incidental when placed beside the sheer enormity of all that shit. One game is nothing. Win, and you still haven’t done shit. You’re still 4-6, still in last place, and still just another asshole waiting to be filed away in that massive Indiana Jones Nazi warehouse next to some shit that will literally melt your face. This is who you are until proven otherwise, and baby, it’s gonna take a while to prove it.

That is the world Matt Patricia chose to live in. He has to understand this. He has to get this before anything can change. Not understanding it, not respecting it, is just a recipe for failure. Losing is one thing . . . we’re all too used to that, but losing along with bullshit hubris and unearned arrogance is the sort of thing that makes Lions fans hate you. It is the sort of thing that every other asshole has done. That is when things get toxic.

If the Lions lose to the Panthers – and let’s face it, this is the most likely outcome given the past few weeks, the fact that everyone is hurt, and, well, given the last 60 years – it’s 3-7, and it’s on you to rebuild this thing from the ground up. Believe it or not, Lions fans are out here sucking it up and giving you the chance to do that. That is unbelievable given all that we’ve been through, but here we are. No half measures. Just do it, man. You already broke it up, now finish the job. Break us down to nothing and then prove yourself. That’s all that’s left to do.

The Lions will likely be cucked by Cam Newton this weekend. I accept that. I will even grit my teeth and accept Matt Patricia’s stupid tough-guy stunts. It’s hard, but what else can I do? Does this make me a hostage to my own misery? Maybe. Probably. I should just say fuck this and fuck you and head for the hills, but I came back to this resolved to give the Lions another chance. They’ve fucked me. They always fuck me. But part of me is terrified that one day, they’ll actually change and I won’t be around to enjoy it, and then what were the last 60 years even for?

That is the dark heart of Lions fandom, the sick dysfunctional fucked up thing holding us hostage. I mean, this is the sort of shit that abuse victims tell themselves. I’m not exaggerating that even a little.

This is the cycle of despair. This is how abuse victims continue to get beat on for years and years. This is why they never leave. Because what if tomorrow is different? They tell themselves this because it is the only way, sick and fucked up as it may seem, to validate all the shit they’ve gone through. It has to mean something in the end, or else . . . or else . . . darkness, man. It’s just too dark to contemplate. It’s all that keeps people going, the idea that somehow life is about linear progression, that yesterday and today and their pain only exist to make tomorrow’s salvation mean something.

But that’s all bullshit. I talked about that in my “daddy’s dying” post after last week’s game. Sometimes – hell, most of the time – it never gets better. You just keep getting your ass whipped until you’re finally strong enough – or broken enough – to make yourself walk away for good.

That is depressing as hell, but that is what it means to be a Lions fan. And that is what Matt Patricia and Bob Quinn have to understand. That is step one. And that is the tragedy of this whole vicious cycle. No one has ever bothered to understand this. No one has ever bothered to even acknowledge it. They’ve just blundered in and started beating on us just like the last dude because that is the only way they know how to express themselves. They just try to beat the pain out of us in some idiotic hope that in the end we’ll just be docile lambs waiting to be led. It’s dumb and it’s cowardly and you ain’t a goddamn leader if that’s how you go about your business.

Sadly, that’s what I’ve seen from Patricia and Quinn. Just more of the same. More beatings. More emotional abuse. Believing that they’ll somehow change, that they’ll magically “get it”, is something only a great fool would do. Or someone who’s a lifelong abuse victim.

Fuck. I wish I could end this on a hopeful note, but how do you make any of that into something hopeful? You don’t. You can’t. You can’t control this. I can’t control this. It is not our fault. Cue the Good Will Hunting scene. It’s not our fault. Stop it, Neil. No . . . it’s not our fault. Come here son. Let it out. Shhh, shhh, it’s okay. It’s not our fault.

Panthers 27 Lions 10

You Just Take It

“The Lions should be able to beat the Jets. Let me rephrase that: the Lions have to beat the Jets. Not just for this season, but because if they don’t, the dam’s gonna break and shit’s gonna get toxic. Already. After one goddamn game. That is almost absurdly extraordinary, but we ain’t in Kansas anymore for all the reasons I just spent 1,000 or so words gibbering about. This is the world of the Detroit Lions and you have to understand these things if you want to live in it.

The Lions have to beat the Jets because the Jets are a 5-11 team with a rookie quarterback, a whole bunch of injuries – especially at wide receiver – and nothing that should really scare anyone. If you can’t beat a team like that on your home field, on Monday fucking Night, with everyone watching, you ain’t winning shit all year and Plans and Trust and Hope just become cruel buzzwords uttered by charlatans.”

Read it and weep. No, I mean it. Read it and then literally weep. Because that is the world we find ourselves living in. I wrote that on Friday. It’s Tuesday, and I can’t believe we’re here already.

The Lions didn’t just lose to the Jets, though. They were fucking humiliated in ways that make analysis pointless. The Jets could have won 100-17. The Jets led at the half 17-10 and it felt like a miracle that the Lions weren’t losing by a lot more. I said on twitter “imagine what would happen if the Jets were a real team.” By the end of the third quarter it was 48-17. Yeah.

In that third quarter, the Jets scored just about every way you can. They scored on offense, passing the ball and rushing the ball. They scored on defense, returning a pick six after Matthew Stafford’s 169^th interception of the game. They scored on special teams with a punt return. This would be incredible – and incredibly humiliating – if it all happened in the same game. It happened in the same fucking quarter.

This was a complete and utter meltdown by the entire team. The defense was predictably shit. We all knew that going in, I think. But nobody expected Stafford to look like he’d never played a game before. He was the one who looked like a rookie quarterback, completely incapable of reading simple zone coverages. Shit, I think Darron Lee just picked him off again even as I write this.

Stafford’s disgrace highlighted just how much the Lions need to lean on him, and just how insane the whole “plan” that I’ve talked about over and over again truly is. I barely even know what else to say at this point because, fuck, what can you say?

The Jets started a rookie quarterback who immediately threw maybe the worst pass I’ve ever seen to gift the Lions 7 points. Later, the Jets secondary was hit by injuries. In between, the Jets kept blowing opportunities, and the whole thing felt absurd, like the Jets were trying to lay down and throw the fucking game, making it easier and easier for the Lions to win, only they never counted on the sheer Lions of it all. Just . . . just fucking absurd.

I don’t know what to say. What can you say? What can you say when you’re living this absurd nightmare, when ONE FUCKING GAME INTO THE SEASON – NO, INTO THE MATT PATRICIA “ERA” – you already have had enough? When you already know that it’s over?

That is the insane world Lions fans find themselves living in. That game was so awful, the humiliation and failure so comprehensive, that it’s impossible to see a team coming back from it. More than that, how does Matt Patricia come back from this?

It wasn’t just that the team looked awful, it was that they all looked like they were prisoners being marched through the jungles of Southeast Asia. They looked miserable, like a team that hated their coach, like a team that had already completely given up. And at the head of this Bataan Death March of the Soul was the Golden Boy, Matthew Stafford.

It makes sense, I guess, the way that Patricia and Quinn have carried on the last few weeks, cutting starters, sitting others, openly gibbering about patience and plans. This is a team at war with itself, with a coach determined to mold them in his image no matter the cost. But he hasn’t earned that yet. He has no credibility with which to work, to point to and say “this is why you listen” when he’s going all Bear Bryant Junction Boys on the fellas. He’s just some fat asshole who rode Tom Brady’s coattails, and that’s what the players see. They see his backwards baseball cap and his fucking pencil and it all just seem so precious, a dumb affectation easily sneered at.

I came to the conclusion just before the season started that these fuckers were charlatans. Still, I did not expect to be proven right this fucking fast. I suppose, if you’re desperately clawing for some dumb reason to still be optimistic, it can be found in the previous paragraph, insane as that seems. It almost feels like Patricia is intentionally destroying this team in a wild and ridiculous attempt to change the culture by first razing it to the fucking ground, by running everyone out and then starting again. Wait, how is that a reason to be optimistic? I don’t fucking know, I’m just gibbering here.

If you squint really, really hard though, you can at least identify that as an idea, a plan, no matter how grotesque it is. Maybe he’s not utterly incompetent, just a horrible egomaniac, which in itself is its own incompetency so, uh, nevermind I guess. The point is that maybe he’s a General Patton type who’s trying to iron will his way through the last 60 years, which is a special sort of dumb, but what the hell, Donnie, at least it’s an ethos.

The worst thing about said plan, though, is that Patricia clearly has the full backing of Bob Quinn. This isn’t Patricia’s plan, this is Quinn’s plan, this is their plan to instill The Patriot Waaaaay, which sounds an awful lot like when 100 year old geezers start gibbering about Michigan Men.

This means that Patricia isn’t going anywhere because Bob Quinn isn’t going anywhere. And Bob Quinn isn’t going anywhere because Martha Ford is Martha Ford and oh lord, how long?

So . . . yeah. This is going to suck. And the only prospect for light lies in the insane idea that at some point in some far off future Patricia and Quinn will completely change the culture of the Detroit Fucking Lions by turning them into some Never Never Land version of the Patriots despite the fact that the Patriots are only the Patriots because they have the greatest player in NFL history at quarterback. lol what the fuck, man. What the fuck??? What a scam.

I can’t handle this. One game! One fucking game! That was all it took this time. Even for the Lions, this is something awful. The fans already hate Matt Patricia. The second half of the game, on national TV in prime time, was basically fan misery porn, with the camera hunting out Lions fans looking utterly defeated, some booing with hatred in their hearts, the rest looking like they wished their seat came with a complimentary shotgun to put in their mouths. One game! If this is how everyone feels after one game, how in the fuck do Quinn and Patricia expect to make it out of this alive?

I have barely even talked about Stafford here, but seriously, what’s the point? It’s all broken. I don’t think he’ll play like that again – my god, how could he? – but it doesn’t matter because we’ve seen enough. We know what this team is and everything else is just noise. Stafford could throw for 5,000 yards again – he’ll need to – and it still won’t mean a goddamn thing because we know. We know what this team is now, at its very heart and at its core, we know. We have seen it, and for that, I guess we can feel thankful in a weird way. Thanks for not torturing us and for just putting a quick bullet in our heads and in our hearts.

On the other hand, these fuckers won’t let our corpses rest. They aren’t going anywhere. They’re just gonna keep reanimating us and reminding us how awful they are before shooting us in the head again. Paradise is closed to us, the restful stillness of death is hidden from our souls. Oh God.

It’s as simple as this: you either let yourself die over and over and over again, or you just walk away now and say fuck it. You cease to be a Lions fan. I tried that once. It didn’t work. I knew what I was signing up for when I decided to do this madness again, and so I here I am. I’m not going away. This is because I am a stubborn idiot. We are all stubborn idiots. That’s why we’re Lions fans.

So what do we do? What can we do? That is the naked horror of this whole fucked up thing. You just sit here and you take it, and you take it and then you take it some more.

In 2008, I sat down and I wrote my first post for Armchair Linebacker. The Lions went 0-16 that season. And I took it. We all took it. Now, here we are in 2018, ten years later, and what’s changed? This team looks as hopeless, as broken, as that team. In 2008, Rod Marinelli gibbered about pad level and we all sneered. In 2018, Matt Patricia gibbers about plans and trust and we all wretch. Fuck it.

Maybe there is something about years ending in 8, I don’t know. In 1957, the Lions won the NFL Championship. They then traded Bobby Layne and in 1958, they went 4-7-1. In 1968, they went 4-8-2, in 1978, 7-9, which was a prelude to them collapsing for good to 2-14 the next season which was when the Lions finally bottomed out and irrevocably became The Lions and all that means. In 1988, they went 4-12. In 1998, they went 5-11 and broke Barry Sanders and made him quit forever like Chief Joseph. 2008 saw 0-16. 2018 . . . well, we already know.

The point is that this is who we are. This is who we have been for 60 fucking years. And still, we take it.

Amazingly, though, this somehow feels even worse, doesn’t it? We have always been able to delude ourselves that every year will be different, a new opportunity for something good, something better. That’s gone this time. At some point in that horrific game last night, the boos turned to utter silence, the painful sound of a collective shattered will.

And in the middle of it all sit Matt Patricia and Bob Quinn. Remember, Quinn was the dude who fired Jim Caldwell because 9-7 wasn’t good enough, who said that we needed someone who could take us to the next level. This makes all their nattering about plans and patience a bunch of horrible bullshit, lies to cover their own incompetence, lies to buy them another day, another week, another year of their grifting. These are conmen, charlatans, who are woefully in over their heads. I don’t know how anyone could arrive at any other conclusion. And again, we know this after only one game!

Anyone telling you not to overreact here, that it’s only one game, that it didn’t necessarily mean anything, is lying to you because they are lying to themselves, bless them. I get it. At some point, things get so ugly, you invent new realities to believe in. But that’s all they are, inventions. You buy the con even though deep down you know it’s a con because deep down you’re also desperate to believe in something, and so you’ll believe anything.

But it’s still a con. Come on. You know this. The Lions were so bad last night, so utterly wretched and incompetent in literally every way, that there is simply no way you can reasonably believe the con this time. I mean . . . right?

It’s not just the incompetence, though. It’s the spiritual rot that’s already there. Anyone could see it. Everyone did see it. There was an ugly menace that hung over everything, a team broken before it even took its first snap. Kenny Golladay looked like the only dude who even wanted to be there last night. Everyone else looked like they had already quit. And through it all, Matt Patricia just stood there, that dumb fucking pencil behind his dumb fucking ear, looking like he smelled like piss and failure, and he did nothing. He could do nothing. He was utterly exposed. Tom Brady wasn’t walking through that door to save his ass this time. The emperor doesn’t just not have any clothes this time around, he doesn’t even have any fucking skin. Horrible, horrible.

This is already broken. Already finished. That is a wild thought, but here we are. What do we do now? I wish I could tell you. You just take it. And you take it some more, you take it some more, you take it some more . . .