Why Your Team Sucks 2022: Detroit Lions

Last year was the best season in Lions history.

The Lions have single handedly made me unable to enjoy sports unless my team is up 20 with 10 seconds left.

I'm to the point where I can't figure out if Goff can't read in general, let alone a defense.

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers have won the Lions' division more recently than the Lions have. 

My hopes always die around Columbus Day.

My wife just gave birth to our second daughter at Henry Ford Hospital. As a gesture that I can only imagine is a cruel joke, they gave us a pink hat with the Detroit Lions logo on it. I threw that fucking hat right in the trash.

Stafford has 400% more playoff wins in his career in one year not in Detroit than Detroit does in the Super Bowl era. I really want that commercial to go away.

Nate Burleson broke his arm trying to pick up a pizza. Stephen Tulloch tore his ACL doing the Discount Double Check. John Jett, a punter, suffered a season ending injury playing safety in practice. Mike Utley got paralyzed on the field, Chuck Hughes died on it and Eric Andolsek got killed by a drunk driver while mowing his lawn. I predict that Amon-Ra St. Brown will somehow suffer a career-ending injury from an errant Hard Knocks crew member. 

As an adult, I’ve taken my Barry Sanders jersey with me around the world, and everywhere I go it is met with gushing enthusiasm. I’ve grown to resent this. I wish that, just once, someone else would tell me to go fuck myself.

If you ever want to see a perfect example of why it’s bad for cities to give sports teams hundreds of millions of dollars to build a new stadium, drive down to Detroit sometime for a game. You’ll see parking lots, parking garages, and cops enforcing parking violations. You’ll see acres upon acres of empty lots fenced off from no one, because no one really lives near Ford Field. The only type of development you’ll see on these lots are fire hydrants: little specks of red dotting either frozen or muddy earth every 200 yards or so, per Wayne County regulations.

The Detroit Rams. What a goddamn pathetic thing for fans to rally behind.

(I was rooting for Stafford too though)

The last professional football game I attended was a Thanksgiving Day Lions-Packers matchup in the new-at-the-time Ford Dome. My only memories of the game are (1) watching Brett Favre warm up with all the seriousness of a day-drinker on the beach, and (2) getting an entire beer spilled down my back by some asshole in a Scott Mitchell jersey. We left at halftime to get home in time for the "good games." (Dad’s quote)

One team had us beat in the “longest playoff win drought” category. Now we don’t even have that anymore.

Vegas sports books are taking a large number of bets that the Lions will finish over their predicted win total of six. This is what a young, enthusiastic, leg-gnawing coach will get you: the faith of the masses that your favorite team will have a Jeff Fisher-esque 7-10 season. At least the coach hasn't proudly announced his belief in forced birth yet.

Watching Barry Sanders rush for 2000 in ‘97 was really fun, but this was during the days of blackouts if the game wasn't a sellout. Every week was a "Oh my god I hope I get to watch this!" adventure during the week. We couldn't even sell out with Barry Sanders on the roster.

My dad got season tickets to the Lions in 2008 when they went 0-16. He renewed for several more years after that. I never questioned it and at times supported it. "It's a fun outing." "You'll want to be there when they win." Why is it fun going to see them get beat every week and they'll never be good?

The Green Bay Packers once beat us twice in the same season when the official records say the Packers lead for 0:00 of either of those games.

Dateline 1979:  I had just gotten a job at Pontiac Airport. It was my first real job. One of my coworkers asked if I wanted to go to a pre-season game with him at the new Silverdome. I’d watched them build the thing from the air but had never been inside it, nor had I ever been to a Detroit Lions game. There was no infrastructure to actually get to the venue and park a car, so we had to take a bus from some mall on Telegraph Road. It was inconvenient, but the Lions played well. At halftime, my friend asked me to join his family tradition and attend the Thanksgiving Day game with them. He bought 10 tickets from the box office at halftime for $10 each.Gary Danielson proceeds to break his leg. Lions go into Thanksgiving 1-11.  My friend’s own family won’t buy the tickets from him. We show up with two extra tickets to sell, which normally would be no problem, except the Lions have had a city ordinance passed THAT WEEK prohibiting sale of tickets on Silverdome property. The PA system is blaring this news and the fact that there are undercover cops enforcing this. We had to go out on Featherstone Road to sell our extra tickets and were lucky to get $8 for a $10 ticket.This is how the Lions management treat people Drew. This was the last dime the bastards ever got from me. Fuck Martha Firestone with a Hankook tire.

Today on local sports radio, the hosts were talking about what it would take to have a "good season". They proceeded to list off half a dozen conditions first; "if [player] takes a step forward", "if [player] can remain healthy", and so on. It was like a verbal Rube Goldberg machine. And the definition of a "good season"? Not a playoff victory, or even a playoff appearance. Just a winning record. And fans called in and agreed. THAT is how low the bar is set in Detroit. The Lions are so abjectly terrible, they have conditioned their fans to be people who are satisfied to make back the dollar they spent on a lottery scratcher.

I have an actual shred of hope for a somewhat entertaining and improved team this season. This now means that Dan Campbell will be caught on a hot mic saying the N word and that DeAndre Swift will get crushed by a lighting rig.

They will inexplicably beat the Packers at home, and then just as inexplicably completely shit the bed against the Giants two weeks later. 

I'm an out-of-market fan, so I purchase Sunday Ticket to watch the Lions every week. Every year, my husband asks me with a slight sliver of hope in his voice if I want to renew it for another season. When I answer in the affirmative, I can always hear the soft sigh he gives. I know he's thinking about all of the cool photography stuff he could buy with that money, rather than spending it on a service that will inevitably cause his wife to be in a pissy mood every Sunday. Yet, he renews it faithfully, every year. This is how I know he loves me: he lets me make these mistakes for myself, continually, with only the mildest judgment. 

With the way writers and fans of other teams are talking about the Lions this offseason, you would think they actually won something important. Apparently, all you need in order to be a Coach of the Year frontrunner is to not be Matt Patricia. "Hard Knocks" is going to ride that narrative until the wheels fall off, trying to make Dan Campbell look like Bill Parcells when he's really just Bowflex Rex Ryan.

I moved to rural Thailand two years ago and now teach English to a school full of children who wouldn't recognize a football if I brought one to class with me. My girlfriend is from the area and we've lived together through one full NFL season so far. I imagine my initial explanation of why I continue to watch the Lions sounded to her like a recently released former cult member now struggling to assimilate after being freed.

I missed out on attending the last game of the season because of a COVID scare, so I had to watch from home as the Lions beat the Packers by what I could've sworn was three TDs, but what the Internet tells me was only one. Anyway, I got so high on the resulting hopium fumes that I'm somehow now convinced we have an outside shot at the third wild card and a summary execution in the first round.

Jim Caldwell got fired and he got replaced by a Wooly Willy for reasons that I still can't fathom or accept.

The last time these dipshits won a championship, Nancy Pelosi was still in high school.

They just came off a 3-13-1 year, have $31M man Jared Goff under center, traded up to draft a WR that won’t play more than eight games this season, and have a new OC. And this is the most hyped Lions season since 2012, the season after their first playoff appearance in 12 years. They ended that year 4-12.

Dan Campbell is still destined to the fate of nearly all Lions coaches that preceded him:

1. His teams will be ass

2. He will get a vote of confidence and/or contract extension

3. He will be fired

4. And just like every Lions head coach since 1964, he will never be a HC in the NFL ever again.

The new Principal Owner, Sheila Ford Hamp, is the latest in the Ford Dynasty to inherit the franchise without ever having a real job.

I grew up in Michigan so my Lions fandom was inflicted on me by growing up there, but I live on the East Coast now. While waiting to pick my son up from kindergarten one day I noticed one of the other dads was wearing flip flops with the Lions logo on it. I asked how he came to be a Lions fan: did he or his parents grow up in Michigan? 

"Nope, born and raised here," he replied.

"So how did you become a Lions fan then, with much better choices out here?"

I did not expect his reply. "I was a kid when they lost all their games and went 0-16. I started following them after that."

Needless to say, I don't trust this guy's judgment and will refrain from having conversations with him at all costs. 

The first NFL season I was old enough to remember is the 1991 season. The Lions made the NFC Championship Game. Six-year-old me just assumed that winning a lot of games and almost making the Super Bowl would be a semi-regular thing. Fast forward 31 years and I'm 100% convinced the Lions won't even win a four-team division before I die.

The late Gary Moeller is the second-best coach we've had in the last thirty years.

As recent immigrants to Michigan in the late 80s, we gravitated towards all things USA, like football. Including the Lions. Little did I know that our 1991 playoff run would be our last one in my lifetime. I am 45 now. I should have moved to Windsor.

Matt Stafford's fat smug face on AT&T commercials makes me want to hurl. He can drown in a bucket of vaccines.

My first memory of the Detroit Lions is Reggie Rogers killing three teenagers while he was driving intoxicated. One of the kids was the son of my dad’s good friend. He was the first “cool old kid” I knew when I was a little boy. The two other teens in the car with him were his cousins in town for a family funeral.My most recent memory of the Lions is sitting in my little sister’s hospital room this past fall. It was a few days after she had brain surgery to remove a growth on her frontal lobe. After her surgery, she didn’t recognize anybody, and would only remember her family and friends through asking us questions and slowly piecing things together. She still didn’t recognize anything, it was more that things seemed vaguely familiar. The only reason she would sit and chat with me is that I seemed like a nice enough fellow, I sort of looked like her, I wore my university badge—same as the hospital she was in—and she recognized my last name as her maiden name.During one of our chats, her neighbor on the other side of the curtain was watching the Lions lose to the Rams. My sister was still out of it, and things like tv were too much to process and she complained to me that the sound was hurting her head. She must have caught a stray bit of the announcers on tv saying the Lions were losing because she said, “Sounds like the Lions are losing. They always lose, right? That’s their thing. I remember that.”My sister didn’t even recognize pictures of her son and husband and gave me a side eye every time I entered her room until I would show her my work ID with a picture of me and a last name that seemed familiar to her. But she knew deep down in the darkest reaches of her fractured memories that the Detroit Lions stink.She eventually got her memories back and is currently doing much better! Oh, blah blah blah, Barry Sanders and Calvin Johnson, etc etc….

September 12, 2010. The first Sunday of a new NFL season.

My grandfather (“Pa,” as we called him), had been living with Parkinson’s Disease for a decade, and the end was near. So, a dozen members of my family--aunts, uncles, cousins--had traveled from various points across the Midwest to my grandparents' house in central Michigan to say their goodbyes. But as anyone who has lost a loved one to degenerative illness understands, the family had been saying its goodbyes for a long time. Watching Pa’s slow transformation into a living memory had been an agonizing experience--for his grandkids, definitely for his children, but especially for my grandma ("Na"), who'd spent every day of the last 10 years caring for him as he declined.

My grandparents met while serving in World War II. Pa’s leg had been blown off by a landmine, and Na was his nurse during recovery. They fell in love, got married, and had kids. And now, 65 years later, here she was taking care of him once again, their relationship coming full circle. In a sentimental, writery sort of way, it was a fitting and poignant end to their love story. But Na was not a writer, she was a nurse, and in a real-life, human sort of way, the previous decade had taken an enormous fucking toll on her. For that reason, amidst the sadness of the day, there was also a sense of imminent relief.

And for the Lions, there was hope. Matthew Stafford was entering his second season. His rookie year (particularly the now-infamous mic’d up Browns game) had done enough to convince us he was the Quarterback Who Was Promised. The Lions had just drafted Ndamukong Suh; Calvin Johnson was Calvin Johnson; Jim Schwartz would tweet about listening to Iron Maiden on the way to games. 24-year-old me could not have been more in on a Lions team.

Pa was a Lions fan of the Greatest Generation, and like many men his age, his fandom was anchored in two steadfast principles: an undying love for Bobby Layne and an undying hatred of the Chicago Bears. How appropriate, then, that the family’s final game with Pa could be this one--the birth of a new era of Lions football, announced through the destruction of the franchise he loathed. What a way to go.

And for a while, we actually believed things would work out that way. The Lions came out swinging. After a second early touchdown put them up 14-3, my oldest brother walked across the living room to Pa’s bedside to tell him the good news: not only were the Lions beating the Bears on opening day, they were doing so behind a quarterback from Bobby Layne’s high school! My brother swears to this day that when he delivered the message, Pa’s eyes lit up with the faintest glimmer of recognition--even happiness. I choose to believe him. Here, at the end of this interminable march to death, was a brief moment of joy. 

But Lions fans are rarely afforded that privilege.

The Bears scored a 79-yard touchdown on the next play from scrimmage. Just before the half, Stafford took a hit from Julius Peppers and stayed down on the grass, holding his shoulder. Shaun Hill closed out the first half, and when he started the second, the pit in our stomachs widened into an abyss. Late in the fourth quarter, the Bears scored a touchdown to take the lead.

Lions fans all know what happened next. Calvin Johnson, walking demigod that he was, tried to save us. But as the referees kept debating his game-winning catch, as more time passed without confirmation of the touchdown, we all knew where things were headed.

When the catch was finally overturned, everyone reacted in their own way--the younger generation with rage and profanity, the older generation with chuckling disbelief. But if anyone had taken a moment to look over at Pa in his bed, I like to imagine they would have seen a second glimmer of recognition in his eyes: an exhausted disappointment as this goddamned team let him down one final time.

He died the next day. My brothers and I still watch every Sunday.