Welcome Back

Welcome back, old friend. Welcome back.

Here’s a quick twitter exchange which, honestly, says quite a bit:

@armchairlb (Hey, that’s me! Wheeeeeeee!): I think I'll choose to cling to the 42-11 run the Lions closed the game on rather than the 24-7 hole they climbed into at the beginning.

@Real_Interloper: @armchairlb: first half almost ended my football fandom. Literally.

Indeed.

The bipolar mania which lives at the heart of Lions fandom struck hard today, and it struck in such a stark, ridiculous way that it just rendered the whole experience vaguely absurd, a wild, stupid, emotionally draining mindfuck which somehow managed to encompass virtually every single emotion within the human spectrum. I know, I have said that a couple of times already this season, but Jesus, just look at that split. 24-7 and 42-11. Those two things happened within the same game, which . . . shit, I give up. I fucking give up. How do you explain something like that? You don’t. Instead, all that’s left is trying to make sense of it in little 140 character bursts on twitter or with the help of a friendly bottle filled with 100 proof spirits of fire.

There was a lot to hate about that game, a lot of vicious, terrible things which had me swatting away ghosts and gibbering about Failure Demons and composing horrific death sonnets in my head while I prepared my soul for the long excruciating journey towards the dark side. I could feel the walls of the world rising, rising, rising, all around me, the terrible darkness of the past and my own brutal naked fears closing in. Ugly, ugly things, a savage and brutal reminder of everything I have tried to forget as a fan. There was a raw, helpless dumb anger followed by the overly familiar and in its own way even worse spiteful disgust. I went from hooting at the TV like some mad ape to sneering in disgust and shielding my insides from disappointment, rebuilding terrible, terrible walls which I had torn down so triumphantly, brick by brick over the past year. I hated it and in a lot of ways that numb mocking belligerence felt more terrible than the all too close live wire anger with which I was becoming accustomed.

And it’s that feeling that makes me understand what my friend @Real_Interloper, aka UpHere, was talking about because I felt it too. (By the way, if you have any interest in finance or current events, check out UpHere’s new blog The Interloper, which is fucking fantastic.) Before anyone starts howling about bad fans and all that shit, please, for me, shut up. It wasn’t that things were going badly, it’s that things were going so apocalyptically badly that I suddenly understood how old war veterans feel when they freak the fuck out and start diving into the bushes outside of church because they see men in black pajamas sneaking up on them or because they hear bombs dropping from some ghost plane far above. That sort of post-traumatic “get me the hell out of here, man” freak out is something that’s purely instinctual. It wasn’t like I was sitting there consciously weighing the pros and cons or anything like that. All I knew was that this fucking sucked and, well, get me the hell out of here, man.

But then some angel heard me gibbering or Matthew Stafford’s girlfriend blew him underneath a tarp on the sideline or something because that dude came out and suddenly, those walls all collapsed, the ghosts were sucked back down into hell and there he was, that T-Rex flying a fighter jet. Yes, something happened to Matthew Stafford during this game. I don’t know what it was but it was like Doc Brown had suddenly shown up in the DeLorean with the Matthew Stafford from the preseason, tossed the impostor Stafford in the trunk and got the fuck out of there before anyone knew what was happening. Up until that point, it almost felt like Stafford was caught in some sort of weird vortex in which he was reverse aging or something, reverting back to childish habits and stupid lapses in judgment. Shit, by the fourth quarter I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had to sneak off the field because he was suddenly reliving that time he got a boner in front of his seventh grade gym class.

Never mind all that shit. I have gotten too weird and I’m not even sure what I am blithering on about. The point is, is that whatever the hell was wrong with Stafford’s brain apparently cleared up just in time for him to reach out a hand to us while we writhed like idiot children on the valley floor and say “Come with me if you want to live.” And shit, we grabbed his hand and that beautiful motherfucker carried us all back up the mountain top.

The whole thing was vaguely disorienting. I mean, before the game I openly yelped about how I didn’t have any confidence when the offense took the field anymore and during the first quarter or so of this game there was a point when I not only didn’t have any confidence, it had swung around again to become some sort of weird anti-confidence, like dark matter or some shit. I was confident, but I was confident that the Lions were just going to fuck up and that’s a dangerous and terrible place to be in as a fan. I’ve lived in that place as a fan for so fucking long that I never wanted to go back there again, and yet, there I was. But by the time the game was over, that negative confidence dark matter or whatever the fuck you want to call it had somehow reversed itself so dramatically that I was shocked whenever a pass fell incomplete. Welcome to the madhouse, everybody.

Indeed. It was so disorienting that I’m not exactly sure when things flipped back but I’m pretty sure that I began to float around the room for a moment, like an astronaut in zero gravity before I slammed back onto the ground and then I was watching Stafford throw perfectly precise screen passes and I was watching Kevin Smith – Kevin Smith! – rise from the dead, strangle the crypt keeper, knee Death in the balls and run like the dude I once raved about like a dullard back in the days of yore when no one read this shit and I was just a maniac howling into a dark and lonely night.

The whole goddamn thing felt like some weird temporal wormhole where everything and anything existed all at the same time. Shit, it wouldn’t have surprised me to see Joey Harrington float through playing the piano or Bobby Layne to show up with a fifth of Wild Turkey and smash Joey Blue Skies over the head with it all while the game was going on in the background. I mean, come on, Kevin Smith? Are you fucking serious?

There was one moment, especially poignant, which saw Smith on the sideline, after it became clear that he had slain whatever demons had been guarding his crypt, on his knees, thanking whatever gods he prays to at night that he had made it back. I don’t really want to turn that whole scene into a giant metaphor but let’s face it, I trade in symbolism and metaphors, and, well . . . that shit felt metaphoric.

The weird thing is, is I’m not exactly sure what it was a metaphor for. Our own last second frantic mad dash from the crypt? Maybe. I don’t know. Look, this is something stupid people do, searching for metaphors where there are none but I don’t care. I felt it, man. I felt it. I suppose it was because in some dark corner of my soul, in that same corner where lived those words sent to me by UpHere, that sentiment that . . . that something had fucking died, man, that my hopes and dreams had just come apart in some raw and cruel way that I’m not even sure how to properly explain, mirrored what had happened to Kevin Smith’s career. There was so much hope and then there was just a familiar embrace of darkness. It was almost comfortable, the acceptance that the story had already been written and that there would be no coming back from any of it, but then there was Kevin Smith, running, running, running and suddenly he was back and so was I and my heart and my soul lived and breathed again and holy shit, man, you can come back. You can.

There are a lot of negatives to take away from this game, a lot of dumb fuckups and mental shitbombs that just don’t blow up in the faces of good teams like they seem to do to us, but like I said in my tweet, I’m choosing to focus on the 42-11 rather than the 24-7. It’s not that I’m clinging desperately to some dumb desperate need to believe. I’m not. I think I fought that battle during the game and somehow, I won. Somehow I came out of it intact. I don’t think the Lions are some Super-team that’s going to win every game and run the Packers out of the building on Thursday but I don’t think they’re the same old Lions either. They just are what they are and right now, I’m okay with that. For right now, anyway. A week from now, I might be riding a parade float I built in my own backyard out of old beer bottles, wine jugs and some sticks and pinecones I found in the backyard. Or I may be speaking in tongues and wearing a sandwich board on some terrible street corner, proclaiming that the end is nigh and that we should all repent before the devil Millen steals our souls. Such is the nature of fandom. But right now, I feel okay, neither too high nor too low and I can live with that. It’s actually a nice place to be.

I suppose I’m just happy that my confidence in the offense has blossomed anew and that I find myself believing in Matthew Stafford once again. It’s what I wanted more than anything heading into this game against the Panthers and, hey, I got it. It took a very, very weird road to get to me and I’m pretty sure a hobo got killed along the way but it got there and that’s all that matters to me right now. In a weird way, I think my expectations for this season have finally aligned with reality. Like I said, neither too high nor too low. And what I’m left with is a smile when I realize that my Lions are 7-3 and even though I’m not expecting anything great, anything is possible and it is in that possibility that I have found my own salvation as a fan.

Kevin Smith is not Emmitt Smith and the Lions are not the ’85 Bears crossed with the ’95 49ers but I don’t care. Kevin Smith is Kevin Smith and the Lions are the Lions and I’m good with that. Today, anyway. And that’s enough.

Vengeful Scientists

Sunday was a shitty day. The Lions lost and I came down with the flu, which might seem like a coincidence but I can’t rule out a cause and effect scenario either. Whether it was me getting the flu somehow poisoning the Collective which then caused the Lions themselves to become ill and begin projectile vomiting and power shitting all over Soldier Field or whether the Lions virulent shit-bomb exploded and then spread its poison throughout the fanbase culminating in me sitting on the toilet, out of my head with a vicious fever, speaking in tongues begging The Great Willie Young for mercy, the fact remains that it all happened at the same goddamn time, and frankly it doesn’t matter because now that game needs to be forgotten, I finally feel better and somehow I have to find a way to bring this run-on sentence to a close in a way that makes sense and in a way that will somehow be relevant to this week’s game against the Panthers or to the overarching storyline that is this Lions season and I’m not sure if I can do it but goddammit, I’ll try, just like the Lions and all of us need to try to put whatever abomination that was on Sunday out of all of our heads and move on like men and, uh, lady men. Phew!

Indeed. That was exhausting, which makes a perverse sort of sense because this past week has been exhausting. Not just because of the aforementioned flu demon gnawing on my bones but because the Lions lost to the Bears in an important game and they lost in a way that was ugly and cruel and laced with the ghosts of a million dead screaming souls, lost somewhere between Purgatory and Hell, chattering and gibbering to themselves because they just saw Matthew Stafford’s face melt off and be replaced with a flaming skull of Scott Mitchell somewhere on the shores of the River Styx. In the wake of this epic punch to our collective soul-dongs, the fanbase lost its fucking mind, breaking into two diverse but equally irritating camps, the Everybody Panic We’re All Gonna Die And We’re Never Gonna Win Another Game Until The Rapture camp and the Everybody Remain Positive At All Costs And Never Say Anything Negative Or Else You’re A Bad Fan camp. Poor Matthew Stafford was tied to a horse and dragged down Woodward while a gang of wild hobos dressed like extras from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome whooped and hollered and demanded his sacrifice to the Gods of War. I wrote a piece in which I took turns criticizing Stafford, bitching about the shitty offensive line and yelling at my fellow fans and arguing with myself and then that whole thing culminated with us all discussing various ways for Stafford to get laid in the comments and I think I inadvertently told Stafford’s girlfriend on Twitter that she has to fuck him better. My actual words were “We all have to do our part. There are football games to be won here.” She never responded, which is probably for the best, but I assume my restraining order is on its way. Also, a giant ape attacked downtown Detroit and ate Mayor Bing and then Robocop had to be called in to kill the giant ape but the giant ape killed Robocop and now there’s nobody left to stop Clarence Boddicker. That last part might have been a fever dream but then again maybe not. It was a bad week.

The point is, is that I just want to move on. Fuck that game. Fuck the memory of that game. Someone needs to show up and scrub that shit from our brains like in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Matthew Stafford needs to have that game surgically removed from his brain, his heart and his soul. Someone get me a mad scientist in here. There is work to be done.

Clearly, I am still not in a good frame of mind, but that’s all right. I don’t want to fight it. That will just end up making me feel even crazier than I already am. A frightening prospect to be sure. Nobody needs that. Instead, I am just going to accept the fact that last week was bitter and terrible and mean and that sometimes these things indeed happen and then I am going to try to move on. The good news, I have found, is that the best way to move on as a fan is to watch your team beat the shit out of some ratty-assed butt of a football team. It is a brutally effective healer of the soul.

And this week, the Lions get the chance to take out all of their frustrations from the past week on one of those ratty-assed butts of a team when they play the Carolina Panthers. And then when they’re done killing the Panthers, the entire fanbase will be back to making Super Bowl trips and anointing Matthew Stafford as the champion of their hearts and a knight of heaven. At least until they lose again and then it will be back to anarchy and blood in the streets. This is because people are dumb and reactionary and annoying.

But to hell with all that. Back to the game against the Panthers. It’s time to move on and what better way to do that than to feast on the soul of a rookie quarterback? It is not particularly dignified to feed upon the weak but these are strange and terrible times and we must all get our soul nutrients where we can. That’s not to say that Cam Newton is particularly weak – after all, the dude is a Fantasy Football wet dream – but the thing is, is that in the real world, where it matters, he still isn’t very good. Yeah, yeah, he’s capable of the eye-popping play and he’ll put up big numbers every week, but he’ll also throw 18 interceptions and do all of those dumbass things that only rookie quarterbacks do and if there’s one thing you can’t do as a quarterback against the Detroit Lions it’s do all of those dumbass things that only rookie quarterbacks do. Because then you will be dead and an angel will be playing a harp somewhere and you will open your eyes after being sacked for the 11,000^th time and the only thing you will see will be The Great Willie Young wearing a black robe, a scythe in his hand, dragging your corpse towards the Gates of Judgment.

Indeed. Cam Newton is still a rookie and he is so enamored with himself – and hey, why wouldn’t he be? – that he believes that he can singlehandedly win games. This means that he will run around and try to make something out of nothing and when you do that, you hang onto the ball too long and then Ndamukong Suh is twisting your head off and Kyle Vanden Bosch’s eyes look like the eyes of a hellhound and Corey Williams is chewing on your soul and Sheriff Goodell is on the phone with his posse and issuing posters with the Lions defensive line on the front with the words Wanted: Dead or Alive in old-timey font on them.

What I’m saying is this: there is very real chance that Cam Newton will see his life flash before his eyes on Sunday. He’ll see Ndamukong Suh closing in on him, eclipsing the sun and Newton’s soul, eyes wide and filled with pain and destruction, and then Cam will see himself as a little baby, being rocked by his mama and then he’ll see himself as a little boy playing catch with his preacher man daddy in the backyard and then he’ll see himself getting laid for the first time at some shitty high school party and then he’ll see his preacher man daddy pimping him out to every college with a checkbook and then he’ll see Urban Meyer yelling at him for not going to class and then he’ll see himself on an auction block while his preacher man daddy takes bids from a gang of Southern rednecks and then he’ll see the redneck from Mississippi balk when the bidding gets too high and then he’ll watch as he’s led away by the rednecks from Alabama who will poke and prod him, slobbering all over themselves and then he’ll see them bring him to a place called Auburn and he’ll watch as they throw everything from gold doubloons to their own virgin daughters at him in the hopes that he can throw a football a billion yards and then he’ll see himself get a big trophy called the Heisman and then he’ll see himself shaking Sheriff Goodell’s hand and then he’ll see himself throwing a touchdown pass to Steve Smith and then he’ll see himself spending money on everything from albino tigers to monster trucks to gold plated whores and then he’ll see Ndamukong Suh bearing down on him, the world fading away, everything in slow motion, everything quiet but the roar of his own already dead heart and then Ndamukong Suh will come, the destroyer of worlds, and everything will collapse in on Cam Newton and then there will be nothing but the void, the quiet obsolescence of oblivion and whether he finds peace in that moment is between him and his god.

As for our QB, well . . . this is the perfect week and the perfect team to go up against if he wants to get his shit together. It may be his last chance this season because after this, shit’s about to get real. I still believe in Matthew Stafford but like I said in the piece I wrote the other day, I need to see him pull his shit together and soon. Otherwise I fear that we might have to wait until next season to see if he’s fixed whatever the hell he’s got going on his head. And that’s a lot of waiting and if there’s one thing the species known as the American Sports Fan is not good at, it’s waiting. Especially fans of a franchise who have had their patience frayed and chewed up by the chattering vampire teeth of a billion cruel failure demons over a fifty plus year period of pain and unfathomable agony.

So, yeah, this game is important because it’s going to affect how I view the rest of the season. If Matthew and the boys can pull it together and finally look like the offensive juggernaut I thought they could be going into the season, then I’ll exhale and carry on believing in miracles and all that happy horseshit. If he still looks uncomfortable and the offense can only move in fits and starts then I will have no choice but to officially adjust my expectations accordingly and while that may be the wise thing to do in order to preserve whatever’s left of my lingering sanity, it’s not something I want to do. Because, I’ll be honest with you, I like the high stakes. I like the pressure. I like the feeling of knowing that this shit matters, and that if my team wins then I’ll be ecstatic and I will behave like a goddamn stupid buffoon and that if my team loses, I will weep bitter tears and curse the spirits and shake my fist at the unbearable indignities of life. I like that shit. This is because I am fucking nuts. I am insane. I recognize this. But, to me, that’s the pinnacle of fandom, when the pressure feels real and the stakes feel like they matter because your team has a chance to actually do the goddamn thing that you always hoped and prayed for deep in your diseased soul. Without that, the soul crushing sadness is numbed but so too is the wild idiot frenzy that comes with victory. Go big or go home.

So yeah, this game means something to me. It’s a giant pivot point in this season. If it swings one way, we can go down that crazy stupid road where our dreams will either be fulfilled or cruelly shattered. If it swings the other way, then we can all just take a deep breath and become comfortably numb which, hey, isn’t so bad, but really, what’s the point? I don’t want to be comfortably numb with this team. I want the crazy, stupid love. I want the agony and the ecstasy. (No, I’m not on ecstasy right now, although I don’t blame you for thinking it.) I want to . . . to fucking believe, man.

That’s why, more than anything else, I just want to see the Lions offense move the ball with consistency against the Panthers. Big plays are great. They’re awesome. But I want to see Matthew Stafford fire a ball with machine-like precision into the hands of Nate Burleson on 3^rd and 4. I want to see him throw a perfectly executed screen pass to, well shit, anyone. I just want to see him look comfortable. I’m not worried about the defense. They’ll get theirs. I just want to see Matthew Stafford pick a team apart like a vengeful scientist. Fuck you, Carolina, you’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time. That’s what I want.

Will I get it? Who knows? And that’s where I am right now as a fan, especially when it comes to Stafford and the offense. Who knows? For now, I am still choosing to trust in Hope, in the fiery optimism of my still beating heart. We’ll see how I feel after Sunday.

Lions win.

Predicted Final Score: Lions 34, Panthers 17

Matthew Stafford: Some Real Talk

I haven’t written the obvious piece about Matthew Stafford yet simply because it’s been too damn confusing. I have edged around it throughout the season, which isn’t usually my style since I like to take these things head on and then wrestle them to the ground and bludgeon them like the psychotic freak that I am, but rather than doing that, like I said I have edged around it, dancing and sniping and then pulling away, which is vaguely shameful but the thing is, is that I simply haven’t been able to get my head around the issue. Like I said, it’s too confusing. And it’s too confusing because, well, what the hell even is the issue?

From week one, I’ve felt like something hasn’t been right when it comes to Stafford and I’ve said so, over and over again, in very placid “Hey, I think he’ll be alright” ways but that’s because the dude’s stats, particularly his TD to INT ratio, have been so gaudy that complaining felt like a madman’s path, a fool’s attempt to mine his own wounded soul for something resembling justification for The Fear. But there are the good stats, the ones that everybody points to when they shout me down and tell me to shut the fuck up and get with the Rejoicin’ For the Lord and then there are stats like young Matthew’s third down conversion completion percentage, which, well, I hate to tell you this but it’s dead last in the entire league. Dead last. And suddenly my own unease starts to make a little more sense.

If you can’t convert on third down, your offense simply isn’t going to be able to sustain drives. It’s going to fall apart and then Neil is whipping the remote around the room and carrying on like he’s about to sacrifice small animals all because Matthew Stafford threw an inaccurate pass on third down. Of course, it’s not all Matthew’s fault. Far from it. The simple reality is that the offensive line has been, well, a bit of a butt this year. That’s a purely technical term, so let me translate that for you – the offensive line, especially in the last several games, has been straight ass.

The time for soothing words and gentle pats on the back has come and gone, dudes and lady dudes and now all there is time for is motherfucking real talk. I’m sick of couching my words in gentle ifs and buts, as if I was afraid that if I said what was actually on my mind then my own fragile sense of hope would be shattered. Fuck that. I’ve been holding back. I’ll admit it. I think it’s been out of some need for self-preservation, but really there is no excuse, especially here, which is essentially Real Talk: The Website. The offense hasn’t been good this season. There are no qualifiers there. There are no “But they’ve scored points” or anything like that. Half the damn games this season they have looked utterly inept for much of the game, and I’m not the sort of fan who likes to gibber on about things being unacceptable as if I have an actual say in the matter, but, well, this shit has been unacceptable. There is simply too much physical talent on the offensive side on the ball, too many weapons, for them to not be able to consistently move the ball. Yes, they’ve scored points, but far, far too many of those points have come when the team has already been down and needed St. Calvin to put on a fucking cape and fly to the moon or have been scored by the aggressive and opportunistic defense.

Back to the offensive line for a second. One of the biggest reasons why the offense has failed to move the ball with consistency is because the line just isn’t giving Stafford enough time. This in turn has made Stafford evolve from cocky young franchise quarterback with brass balls into quivering mess who’s afraid Julius Peppers or Jared Allen is going to eat his soul again. Naturally, this will cause some problems.

But it isn’t just the offense line that’s to blame. Nate Burleson has been MIA for much of the season and the running game, aside from Jahvid Best’s Monday night heroics, have largely trod the same butt-filled wastelands as the offensive line. But the one man who has blown the offensive game-plan straight to hell this season is Matthew Stafford.

Yeah, I said it and I expect that I’m going to be yelled at by some people or called a reactionary idiot by others but frankly, my dear, I don’t give a fuck. Like I said, I’ve been unhappy with Stafford’s play pretty much all season long. He just hasn’t looked comfortable and while, yes, that is in part a function of the offensive line’s assery, that still doesn’t explain Stafford’s general inaccuracy. I mean, the dude hasn’t been able to throw a decent screen pass for fuck’s sake. That’s a problem. In an offense that relies on quick screens and accurate short throws to consistently move the ball, that’s a huge fucking problem.

Stafford’s Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Eli Manning act (thanks to UpHere for that gem) has been pretty apparent all season long and I’ve struggled all season long to find a way to discuss it without sounding like the dude who calls into the local sports radio show to whine and mewl like a fool and argue with some radio dude named Mad Dog who barks every time he sends it to a commercial. I despise that kind of dumb, reactionary shit, but goddammit, it’s not reactionary when I’ve felt this way for two and half months now, you know?

Even still, Stafford’s season has been so schizophrenic, so wildly bipolar even within the bounds of the same game, that I haven’t figured out how to talk about it. I still don’t know. One minute he’s throwing the ball behind Nate Burleson on a screen pass and shuffling off the field, head down like he just caught a hobo buttfucking his grandma, and the next he’s launching a bazooka towards Calvin Johnson while the fans go nuts.

The sheer, wild joy which was so evident early on this season precluded me from giving full voice to my concerns because if I actually sat there and bitched in the wake of all of those amazing moments from those first several games I would have felt like a fucking asshole. Nobody likes a killjoy. But still, hovering just beneath my own wild, dumb carefree excitement and glee was a simple question which, no matter how hard I tried to ignore it, just would not go away and that question was this: “What’s up with Stafford?”

And that’s the question I’m still trying to figure out the answer to even as I write this. I don’t fucking know. That’s the simplest and most honest response I can give. I don’t know what’s wrong with him. I don’t want to panic and overreact and freak the fuck out just because the dude has a bad game now and then. I just don’t. But I have heard troubling whispers that the dude is prone to sulking in the face of adversity. I have heard stories that everyone at Georgia hated his guts and these give me pause. Still, I have been more than willing to chalk that up to everything from jealousy to the misunderstood hubris of a young superstar athlete, partly because I needed to do that for my own sense of hope, but also because from everything I’ve seen and heard in Lions land, Stafford is a natural leader, well-liked by his teammates and coaches and I remember him staggering onto the field against the Browns his rookie season even though one of the demons from Hellraiser had just eaten his shoulder just so he could throw the winning touchdown pass. Hell, I like Stafford. It’s been easy to see why his teammates like him. But it’s hard to reconcile that Stafford with the sulky, beaten down looking Stafford of this season. It just doesn’t make any fucking sense. I mean, the guy was generally upbeat and ready to kick the world’s ass when his team was 2-14 or when he had no arms or legs left. So why does he look like he spends every day sitting in his room listen to Cure albums and cutting himself this season?

Again, I don’t know. I don’t fucking know. Look, I have spent the last few days fighting the flu demon. I have felt like a hobo shit on my head and pissed in my mouth. I have been achy and my eyeballs feel like somebody peeled them with fire and malice. I am tired and I just want to feel better. And while this has been awful, the one upside is I feel like it has allowed me to understand what is going on in Matthew Stafford’s head the past couple of months. I feel like he has looked – miserable. I can understand his inability to perform consistently because even talking on the phone makes my head hurt. Making dinner feels like I’m being tortured. I’m not saying that Stafford is sick, but goddammit, he’s been acting like a man who’s sick, who’s tired, who’s beaten. I don’t understand why he’s acting like it but I get why it’s making him so damn inconsistent.

Matthew Stafford’s problems aren’t physical. Yeah, yeah, he supposedly has a broken finger and he fucked up his ankle a few weeks back but these consistency issues have been a problem all season long. Yeah, there have been oases, like the Broncos game, but there was no pressure on him there, either literally or figuratively. The Broncos were a shitty team and he beat them up because it would have been shameful if he didn’t. But even in that game there were too many times when I just felt like Stafford looked, well . . . off. Everyone looked at the final numbers and breathed a sigh of relief, but you’ve gotta remember, one of his touchdown passes was that absurd one to Titus Young in which Titus was literally just standing in the endzone with nary a Bronco in sight, like he was fucking invisible and had teleported there from the future or something. Yeah, Stafford hit him for the TD but Dan Orlovsky could have hit him for the TD in that situation. (Yes, I just crossed myself to ward off the vicious multitude of failure demons attached to that name.) Another TD was to St. Calvin on a big shot down the sideline that saw St. Calvin torch the shit out of the dude covering him. It was a good throw but it wasn’t like it was some impossible throw that only Stafford could make.

Take those away (And yes, I know it’s not fair to do that but we need to do these things if we’re going to be able to honestly figure out just what in the hell is going on here.) and what we were left with was a quarterback who still looked too skittish, a quarterback who lacked any real consistency and a quarterback who, frankly, has been driving me fucking nuts this season. Every incomplete pass, every failed drive, was followed by him unsnapping his chin strap, head down, and then walking off the field like he needed to talk to his therapist. It’s gotten so bad that that particular image, that beaten and defeated Stafford trudge of doom and despair, has been burned into my mind. I’ve seen it too many goddamn times and I’ve seen it too many goddamn times because there is something wrong with Stafford’s brain right now. He’s a mess.

I would have talked about all this after the Broncos game, but again, it just would have made me feel like an asshole, and honestly, the Lions fanbase didn’t want to hear that shit. Hell, a lot of them still don’t because their sense of hope is so fragile, but goddammit, I’m not just going to sit here and cheerlead for the sake of cheerleading. And I’m certainly not going to sit here and let others call me a bad fan or a bandwagon fan simply because I have the temerity to point out the things I have seen with my own eyes and felt with my own soul. Besides, if you have the fucking gall to call me a bandwagon fan after the last few years you’re out of your fucking mind. If anybody’s earned the right to say “Look, sorry if nobody likes it but this is how I see it,” I think it’s me. I’ve paid my dues as both a fan and a dude who has written a billion words about the Lions. I have poured so much of myself as a fan and a writer into this thing that if you sneer and shake your head at me simply because I dare to shake the fragility of your own hope then you should be fucking ashamed of yourself. I’m getting a little carried away here, but I’m pissed off. I’ll admit it. This isn’t about being a good fan or a bad fan or any of that horseshit. It’s just about being a fan and having the fucking guts to face harsh truths when they need to be faced and to overcome those same harsh truths and to not let them defeat you. Hiding from them doesn’t help. Pretending that everything’s perfect is just going to fucking break you when you inevitably realize that it isn’t. I’ve started to sermonize and I have been dragged away from the point of this post, and I apologize, but goddammit, if anyone wants to question the nature of my fandom, tell them to read everything I’ve written here for the last three and a half years. Forgive my arrogance here, but I think I’ve earned the right to say my piece in whatever weird community Lions fans have established on the interwebs. And when I speak, I deserve to have those words respected and not dismissed as the reactionary gibbering of a bad sports radio fan.

Ahem. Sorry for that epic bit of Carelordery, but I felt that needed to be said. Now, I’ll get back to the point. I promise.

I have hammered Stafford hard here, but I don’t want people to think this means I’ve given up on him. I haven’t. That would be fucking absurd. After all, he’s only 23 years old, the Lions are 6-3 and the dude’s already thrown 20 touchdowns this season. But that’s what’s made this issue so maddening to talk about, you know? There is so much hope, there is so much that is right, that it’s hard to also discuss what’s wrong without feeling like a total dickhead. The future is still bright for Stafford. It is. And anyone who says that it isn’t is being a ridiculous reactionary twit. But the problem is this: we have seen what Stafford can do. We have seen it in his throws, in the way he runs down the field after throwing a touchdown pass, in the fire in his cocky fighter pilot eyes. We have seen him drop a pass in with perfect touch and precision. We have seen him fire laser beams down the field into the chests of his receivers. We have seen it. We have seen just how damn good he can be. And so when that’s not there – and it’s been missing in chunks of every single game this season – it’s fucking maddening.

I know that sounds a lot like I’m saying that I want Stafford to be perfect which would be completely unreasonable. I recognize that he’s going to make mistakes, that he’s going to misfire on a few throws here and there, but those should be the exception rather than the rule. And the problem, the biggest problem, and the one which I suppose is the whole point of this entire post is that right now, they’re not the exception. They’ve become what I expect. Two months ago, whenever Stafford threw a pass, I expected it to be a completion. Now, he throws it and I hold my breath. That’s not good. But, really, that’s all that matters. Take everything else away – all the stats, all the fan vs. fan sniping and bullshit gibberish – and that’s what matters. I think he’ll get it back. I think that he’ll make me exhale and regain some of that lost confidence but I need to see it again. And soon. Because the longer this goes on, the longer I hold my breath, and the longer I hold my breath the more poisoned my insides get and frankly, my fan insides just can’t handle that shit. Not after what it’s already been through as a fan. I don’t want to see any more big time comebacks. I don’t want to see any more late game heroics. Okay, fine, I lied, I totally do. But more than that, right now I just want to see first downs. I just want to see consistent, crushing drives, and I just want to believe in the Holy Shoulder of our savior, Matthew Stafford. I just want to feel . . . safe. And right now, I don’t. And that’s it.