Sunday night's Vikings–Lions game had been long anticipated as the perfect way to end the NFL's often turgid regular season, in that it set two longtime rivals at the peak of their historical powers against each other in a game with real stakes. The winner would get the top seed in the upcoming playoffs, a week off and all its games at home, while the loser would be dropped to the fifth seed, a game every week and all with the likelihood that they would be played at the other team's stadium, all because both teams were in the same division and only one could receive proper compensation while the other got a thumb in the eye. Reward for the victor, rules-based cruelty to the loser. What could be more deliciously unfair, or for that matter unfairly delicious?
And after all that, they had already played each other in a delightful game with plenty of scoring and tenseness that left everyone limp but satisfied that their lads had done their all. Sport at its most satisfying for all involved—this would surely be that again.
Instead the Lions, America's new darlings for about six different reasons including long-suffering fans, a coach straight out of Central Casting, a high-powered offense juiced in part by trick plays like the long snapper hook-and-ladder and a penchant for keeping the opponent in the game throughout, decided to play the game straight and stomped the Vikings flat, 31-9. It was a score that frankly flattered Minnesota, because while the Vikings threatened to score several times including three times inside the Lions' 8-yard line, they failed to do so not through their own failings but by Detroit's suddenly stout defense. They got inside the Lions' 35 six consecutive times and ended up with a total of three field goals. In sum, behinds were often presented and were returned to their owners with free boot marks.
Now if you're a Lions fan, you are wondering what could possibly be wrong with that. Their heroes, who had played five consecutive games in which the aggregate final score was 35-30, had suddenly put together their best game of their best season. Jahmyr Gibbs scored four touchdowns as the central tenet in Detroit's offense, and the defense was so good that NBC's Cris Collinsworth spent the entire second half trying to get defensive coordinator Aaron Glenn to marry him. It was the thing the rest of America actually didn't want—a comprehensive beatdown by a well-built and properly inspired football team. Proof if proof were needed that the Lions were the best team.
The reasoning here is simple. For those not born, raised and spiritually grafted to Michigan, the Lions represented the concept of fun not only unbridled but required. They won all the time, sure, but they let the other guy hang in enough to force head coach Dan Campbell, one of the few people whose neck is actually wider than his head, to run goofy plays that almost always seem to work, but always actually delighted because they not only worked but helped alter games. They'd become fun by necessity, and the longer games stayed close, the more necessary that level of cheek would become. They won 15 games, but their prototypical games were the 31-29 win over Minnesota in Week 7 and the 48-42 loss to Buffalo in Week 15.
Sunday's game was none of that. Well, OK, some of that. Just not as much of that as we'd decided we had been promised. And though this will seem heretical to Lions fans whose last championship was when their grandparents weren't old enough to drink legally, the nation as a whole likes the Lions living by the seat of their pants. Them winning is fine; them winning by scores you'd find in a pastry-sponsored bowl game was ideal.
They now have two weeks before their next game, which means they will fade from our attention while the other playoff teams go at each other, and before that there is the festive Black Monday celebrations in which a bunch of coaches and maybe the odd general manager get fired by easily offended and detested billionaires who know nothing and decide everything. They will use that time to see if they can repair their one persistent shortcoming—getting a player hurt every half, including most of their secondary and offensive line.
Then they shall return, we hope, to their truest selves, as the team that operates with you, the casual viewer in mind. Lions fans are already bought in, as they should be. But there are a lot of other markets who will be either yearning for good luck on draft day, the losers, or getting their coach replaced by Bill Belichick, the ghouls, and they need entertaining too, and on their best days the Lions can keep the audience couchside for three hours and more and still get what they're after—the right to do it again the next week. They don't need a legacy as the new dynasty, not yet anyway. They need to be the team that makes every Super Bowl party a full-on game watch rather than what it typically becomes: 20 conversations on 40 different topics that make the game irrelevant.
We want the Lions to be the best entertainment they can be, starting with if Campbell gets what he told Vikings coach Kevin O'Connell in the postgame handshake he wants: seeing the Vikings again in two weeks. After all, the real goal here is not to win the game, but to win America's eyeballs and hearts—to be in the end the kind of team the Pistons can be proud of.
