Of Giants, Bills and Drama®

Don't make me twist, motherfucker..

So, the Giants. They managed to hang on and pull this contest out their ass. Honestly, I didn't give them a chance and was very thankful it wasn't broadcast in my city. (FYI: I actually live in no man's land but am forced to suffer through 49er and Raider games, because the local affiliates request them. Yeah. That's a big fucking rant in itself..remind me sometime..) But they won and with the Deadskins appalling loss to the Eagles, Big Blue goes into the bye week sitting alone atop the NFC East.

The Giants game plan was simple: don't turn the ball over. Eli did his part by completing 21-32 to his own receivers (for once) and avoiding sacks. Ahmad Bradshaw, who was essentially the entire running game with Brandon Jacobs sidelined, pounded out 104 yards and three TDs. Big Blue also managed to not fumble and took advantage of Bills mistakes, especially two DPIs and a flagrant facemask. It wasn't all good: the Gmen still committed 79 yards worth of penalties and the defense struggled in the first half, giving up a shittacular amount of yardage and two TDs. But a win is a win. I'll take it.

The rest of the Giants schedule is intimidating..they still have to play at NE, SF, NO and DAL. They get GB at home, at least. But their inconsistent play and all the injuries that are stacking up make me nervous about the remainder of the season. Ok, fuck nervous. Scared. There. I said it.

On a non-Giants-related side note: while Jim Schwartz's postgame tantrum was a bit undignified, the drama stirred up by the sports media was even worse. It's was not a "fracas" and it was not a "scuffle between teams". It was a passionate coach taking a loss a little too hard. And now it's over. STFU about it, please and talk about shit that actually matters. Like Dallas losing again.

The Ballad of Jimmy and Jeffery

They’d been driving all night and even though Jim was tired, he promised himself that he was going to see this thing through to the end and if he stopped he knew he’d lose his nerve. After all, he loved the big fella. Always had. It didn’t matter that everyone else told him things like “Goddammit, Jim, the boy’s flat out retarded.” He saw something in him, something that made him want to love the big man. Jim had been around long enough, done enough, seen enough, that he knew how rare that truly was in the world. But things had . . . gone bad. Just like everyone said they would and so here they were, screaming down a Highway to Hell, speeding through the night, oblivion and regret their only destinations. Jim always knew it would come to this – he wasn’t a fool – but still, that didn’t make it any easier. He tried to avoid looking at the big man and turned the radio dial up all the way. Motorhead. That would keep him going until at least morning.

Jim thumped his head, forward, relentless, thundering away in rhythm to the beat, eyes on the road, always on the road, dry, cracked, all out of tears. He heard a soft groan beside him and felt his breath catch in his chest. He was awake. Not now, Jim thought. Not now.

“Jimmy, what’s . . . what’s going on? Where are we?”

Jim swallowed. He tasted bile and had to fight the urge to vomit. He couldn’t believe that the big man had forgotten. Again. He sighed. “Jeffery, I told you we were going to my daddy’s farm.” His father didn’t have a farm.

Jeffery’s face lit up as recognition trickled from the back of his peanut brain to the surface. “We gonna pet the rabbits, Jimmy?”

Jim gritted his teeth. God, why did this have to be so hard? He forced a smile on his face. It hurt. “Sure thing, Jeff. Sure thing.”

The big man clapped. His joy was infectious. But that only twisted the dagger all the more into Jim’s already wounded heart. They still had a couple of hours driving ahead of them, and things like this threatened to derail the whole damn thing. He couldn’t do it. No. Not after all the big man had been through. The man had been through hell, had seen things no man should ever have to see and through it all he had somehow maintained at least a semblance of his humanity. By the time Jim met him, the man had already been beaten and left for dead and from day one people had whispered in his ear that it would a mercy to put the big man out of his misery, but Jim was stubborn. Always had been. After all, you don’t rise to the heights he had risen without doing things your way, without tuning out the incessant chatter of the geeks and pimps who, more than anything, wanted what he had. No. This was his show to run and he was going to do things his way.

It was hard. There was no doubt about that. But Jim liked a challenge. He knew that the hours upon hours of struggle, the desperate days of despair, the weeks and months and, hell, years of backbreaking work would make the reward at the end of the line taste that much sweeter. And they’d almost made it. Almost. Damn it. Jim punched the steering wheel and instantly regretted it.

“What’s goin’ on, Jimmy?” the big man wailed. He then began to moan, panicked, terrified by the outburst.

Jim sighed, and immediately pulled the car off to the side of the road. This was going to be a Herculean task. He knew that going in, but he had hoped that he’d at least be able to keep the big man calm, to keep him from freaking out before they reached the end of the line. Shit. The thought frightened Jim. They were all alone, the two of them trapped together in this little car, and if things went wrong . . . well, Jim didn’t want to think about what the big man could do with that freakish strength he didn’t even know he had.

It was ironic, Jim knew, that his inability to properly channel that strength was one of the reasons why they were in the car right now. But Jim also knew that he didn’t have time to muse on such things. He had a potentially berserk monster on his hands and if he didn’t do something to calm the big man soon, chances were that Old Man Ford would be giving a tearful press conference the next day and that all the plans of a whole city, all of its dreams, would be lost. That was what was at stake here and so Jim stuffed everything else down, into a place black and foul, a place he knew he’d have to pay for someday, a place he knew would eventually kill him, or at least what was human inside of him, and he reached over and slapped the big man, flush across the face.

“Goddammit, Jeffery,” Jim hissed, “calm yourself.” The big man just stared at him, mouth hanging open, catching flies, eyes wide and terrified and Jim had to bite his own lip until he felt the blood flow to keep from screaming with the sorrow inside of his own heart.

“Jimmy,” the big man drawled, his voice quivering along with an oversized lip. “Jimmy, you . . . you hit me, boss.”

The sheer simplicity of the pain in the big man’s voice broke Jim’s heart but he swallowed it and pressed on. “You’re goddamn right I did, Jeffery, and I’ll do it again if you don’t control yourself.”

Controlling his emotions had never been the big man’s forte. Of course, he wasn’t as bad in that regard as his comrades, the ever volatile Dom and the infantile and infuriating Gosder, but they didn’t have the world howling for their blood. At least not like Jeffery did. And that brought Jim’s mind back to the harsh reality facing them both: Jeffery had to pay. It wasn’t what he wanted. Lord only knows how much he had tried to avoid this day, but the big man had always been hanging on a precipice, dangling by a malformed string, and Jim just didn’t have the strength anymore to hold back those greedy pigs with their scissors made of hate, just waiting to cut that string and send the big man to his doom. Goddamn them, Jim thought. Goddamn you, Jeff, he thought only a second later. Why couldn’t he have just held on? Why couldn’t he have just . . . just . . . succeeded? Instead, he made Jim look like a fool.

The big man held Jim’s gaze for a half second longer than was comfortable and Jim’s eyes flicked away. It was a mistake. The big man immediately began to growl, enraged and Jim had no choice but to scramble away before things got too out of control. He pushed at the big man’s chest even as he kicked at the door. He felt it open behind him and then relaxed his body, waiting for the giant eruption he knew was about to come. He closed his eyes and he thought of home, of his wife, of Matthew and Calvin and Gunther and then his life flashed before his eyes, just like it always did when the big man lost his cool. The big man’s growl grew louder, louder, louder and then Jim felt his massive bear paws on his chest and then he was flying backwards, through the open door and onto the grass and dirt below. He hit the ground with a savage thud, felt something crack inside of him and then allowed one terrible groan before the world went black and consciousness left him.

The dreams were savage, terrible, raw – ugly things that pulled Jim’s mind through a labyrinth of despair and terror. In one dream, he was chased through a cornfield by a naked old man wielding a hatchet who called himself Mr. Dick. The old man was furious and was accompanied by a lumbering manservant he called Lynch. Jim thought he recognized the duo but he was too terrified to think straight and so he did the only thing he could do and he ran and he ran and he ran until he found himself alone in a house of mirrors, mirrors of all shapes and sizes, mirrors which distorted reality, distorted the very truths Jim had spent an entire life accumulating, and in these mirrors Jim saw terrible things. He saw a fat man eating spaghetti, he saw an old balding fool with a wild, feral look in his eyes and this old balding fool was clad in only a diaper, gibbering about pad level. Jim turned away only to be met by the reflection of a middle aged fool with a terrible mustache and failure in his eyes. It was the worst one of all the reflections, those terrible apparitions haunting his nightmares, and it almost broke Jim’s mind completely. The reflection was rank with failure, brutalized and beaten by its own utter incompetence. It looked like the ghost of a man stuck in another time, a tired old substitute teacher or a broken down used car salesman. Jesus . . . please, make it stop, Jim thought, and then the world rushed back to greet him, the early haze of a newborn day tumbling down to him from over the horizon, and with it came the pain and the memory of what had gone down before he slipped into his savage nightmares.

“Jeffery,” he groaned and turned his head. There, sitting next to the car, weeping into his ham sized hands, was the big man. Jim tried to move but was racked with pain, both physically and emotionally. “Jeffery,” he said again.

“Aw, Jimmy,” the big man blubbered. “I . . . I didn’t mean to hurt no one.”

Jim just closed his eyes, searching for a peace that he knew he’d never find again. “It’s . . . it’s alright, Jeffery,” he said. “I know.” He exhaled, a ragged breath fraught with pain. “I know.”

“Jimmy, you think people gon’ be mad at me for what I done?”

Jim managed to prop himself up on an elbow. The effort was overwhelming. “It will be . . .” Jim paused. He couldn’t do this anymore. He couldn’t lie to the big man. “It’s bad, Jeffery,” he said. “It’s bad.”

The big man began to weep. “We ain’t goin’ to pet no rabbits, is we, Jimmy?”

Jim’s whole sense of self collapsed at that moment and he just lay in the grass and stared at the gray sky above. “Jeffery, the world is . . .” His voice trailed off. There were no words.

“Tell Matty I’m sorry,” the big man blubbered.

“He knows, Jeffery. He knows.”

“Jimmy?”

“Yeah?”

“When you all is standin’ there, talkin’ to Sheriff Goodell and cheerin’ on that stage, remember me for a minute. That’s all I want. I just want ya’ll to remember me.”

Jim propped himself up on his elbows again, and the effort almost made him pass out again. But there was something inside of him that overpowered that pain, that fought back against the weary despair and the ragged sense of loss he realized he’d already let take over his heart. “Goddammit, Jeffery,” he said between clenched teeth. “I’m not gonna let it happen like this. You get your fat ass in that car. We’re going back home.” Goddammit. He knew that everyone would be upset, that they’d scream at him, call him names, beat him with their vicious slander, not understanding that each assault only made his resolve grow stronger. “How hard is it to just leave the fool in a cornfield in Indiana?” they’d ask him, but fuck them, they weren’t the ones who would have to look into the big man’s eyes. They weren’t the ones who would have to avoid looking in the rear view mirror while the big man blubbered and tried in vain to chase down the car as it sped away. Fuck them, Jim thought. Fuck them all.

“Jeffery,” Jim moaned.

“Yeah, boss?”

“Help me get back into the car, would ya?”

The big man clambered over and lifted Jim off the ground, cradling him in his massive arms. The big man could be surprisingly gentle, which perhaps, Jim mused, was part of the problem. He knew that when they got back they’d have to spend countless hours trying to get the big man to learn when and how to use that frightening power. Already the big man was squeezing, harder and harder, as if he had forgotten that he was carrying Jim. Goddammit, Jim thought, trying to ignore the sharp pain in his ribs, this is going to be a pain in the ass.

Once they were safely back in the car, Jim took a deep breath and tried to ignore the pain which accompanied it. He probably had a broken rib or two. But that just made him think of Romo and that made him smile and he decided to hang onto that thought and use it to get through the ride home. Yes, Jim thought, things were already looking up again. And hey, at least Jared Allen wouldn’t be around this week so maybe things would go better for the big man too. Maybe some of those howling voices would calm down a bit once things got back to normal. After all, it wasn’t like the big man was fucking up every week. Shit. Jimmy realized that the big man would have to deal with that freak DeMarcus this week and instantly he began to feel the pain again. Goddammit, why did there have to be so many of them? If it wasn’t Jared Allen, it was DeMarcus. If it wasn’t DeMarcus it was Matthews or Peppers or . . . did it ever end?

Get a grip on yourself, Jim told himself. He looked at Jeffery and the big man looked back at him with a beatific smile. No, it wasn’t all bad. After all, they’d made it through worse before. He just thought they were done with all that. That was it. He thought they’d finally triumphed over all the bullshit they’d had to go through back when the big man was abused by Peppers. He could still remember that day like it was yesterday. By the time they all got back to the locker room, Jeffrey’s pants were smeared with his own shit and he was blubbering like Rainman, repeating the name Peppers over and over and over again. But they had gotten through that and after that Jeffery had held up against all comers. He had managed to keep the Grit Merchants clean and so far this season, he hadn’t let Matthew even get touched. God damn that Jared Allen, Jim thought. The asshole had terrified Jeffery, had rattled him with bizarre hoots and grunts near the point of attack, had caused the big man’s peanut brain to turn to peanut butter. Fuck him, Jim thought. Fuck him.

“Jimmy?”

Jim sighed and chanced a look at the big man. It almost broke his heart. “I love you, Jimmy.”

Jim looked away, stared out the window at the empty fields hurtling by and sniffed back a tear. “I know, buddy,” he said. “I know.”

I Know I Shouldn't Complain, But . . .

Here's a picture of a happy monkey to distract you from the unseemly bitching below. I know some of you are inexplicably prejudiced against sweet little monkeys and their old man hands but I refuse to be cowed by your vile anti-monkey agendas.

I’ve been a big supporter of Jim Schwartz and his coaching staff pretty much since the day he was hired. He and his dudes do all of those big picture things well – they understand how to put together a team, they know how to create a defense that is nasty and provides a ton of pressure, they understand how to move the ball without having to resort to clichéd three yards and a cloud of dust kind of Manball nonsense – but there has been one thing about Schwartz and his coaches that has bugged me almost from day one, and this one thing reared its ugly and mocking head once again in the game against the Buccaneers on Sunday, and that one thing is their clock management. More specifically, it’s their clock management philosophy, and even more specifically, it’s their philosophy when they’ve got the lead in the second half.

I’ve written about this before, several times. (One of the hidden dangers in writing about the Lions for long enough – and really, about anything long enough - is that, after a while, it feels like you’ve already addressed everything there is to address. At some point, it just kind of feels like you’re just repeating yourself and it’s kind of hard to get up for that shit, you know? But I digress.) But I think it bears repeating here, because it’s an issue that just refuses to go away and it’s an issue that I fear will cost us a few times this season. And really, it’s almost impossible to ignore because the way it played out against the Buccaneers was so exaggerated. I mean, it’s one thing to shut it down and start playing to run out the clock with four or five minutes left in the fourth quarter. It’s quite another to start moonwalking your way out of the stadium, nervously glancing at the clock when there are four or five minutes left to go in the third quarter.

I mean, come on . . . really? I said in my post-game gibber-fest that Matthew Stafford looked like he could have thrown for 500 yards in that game and while that is obviously hyperbolic as hell, he was easily headed for 400 and would have almost definitely gotten there had the playcalling not shrunk to “Hey, uh, let’s run the ball into the line and hopefully a wizard will open a wormhole in which time and space is distorted and on the other side the clock will have reached zero. That will work, right? Goddamn, I’ve got to stop dropping acid before games.” That may or may not be a completely accurate transcription of Scott Linehan’s internal monologue on Sunday. I don’t know. It all depends on whether that Creole mind-reader gave me good information. I paid him in beer and frog skins and he looked happy enough but goddammit, I had a hard time understanding him with that ridiculous accent of his.

Anyway, I bring up Matthew Stafford’s possible stats not to whine or bitch because he didn’t get them but to show just how unstoppable he and the offense were during the game up until the point Acid Wizard Run Fest 2011 started. Sure, sure, they weren’t successful on every drive but they were successful enough that it was clear that the Buccaneers couldn’t stop them enough to win. All the Lions needed to do was . . . well, to keep doing exactly what they had been doing up until that point. It wasn’t like they needed to chuck the ball fifty yards down field on every play. I’m not saying that, and it’s that kind of black or white thinking which always clouds the issue whenever this topic comes up. People tend to think that you either have to try a bunch of risky throws or you have to sit on the ball and run it like a frightened turtle. That’s bullshit. All you have to do is play your game, execute your offense and not get bogged down in clock watching. A few screen passes on first and second down would have had the same effect as a strong running game. They’re safe, they’re effective and most importantly, they don’t result in the offense staring down a third and nine after only taking 40 seconds off the clock.

You know what works best in a ball control offense? CONTROLLING THE GODDAMN BALL. That’s the whole point. That is the essence of that particular offensive philosophy. Still, some people get tricked into thinking it means running the ball in as predictable a way as possible. Which is funny, because when you do that, your offense becomes the exact opposite of a ball control offense. It just becomes a predictable, shitty offense which specializes in the oh so exciting three and out and whose most explosive play is the forty yard punt.

Look, I get that this is about identity. This is about Jim Schwartz wanting to be able to show that his team can exert its will late in games, that it can beat down a team to the point that they just lay down and let the Lions steamroll over them, but when your identity is predicated on an explosive passing offense and a mauling, pressure fueled defense, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to completely abandon that in favor of . . . of what, really? Some clichéd idea of identity? Some half-assed 50 year old Lombardiesque aesthetic? I mean, this isn’t 1961 anymore and this isn’t a grind it out, run the ball down their throats league anymore. It just isn’t. It’s a passing league and it has been for a while now.

All you need to do is look around at the rest of the league. The Packers, the Saints, the Patriots, the Colts before Peyton Manning’s neck decided it was sick of supporting his vile head . . . all of these teams are built around the pass. Their coaches might not admit it because coaches are prone to bullshit clichés, but it’s true. They understand, deep down, that the reason their teams win is because of the quarterback. It’s just the way it is now. The teams with the best quarterbacks win. It’s that simple. They don’t win because they play sound, fundamental football that would give ol’ Vince Lombardi a hard-on. No, they win because other teams can’t stop their passing attack when it matters the most.

All you have to do is look at what happened on Monday night. Did the Patriots win because they lined up and ran the ball down the Dolphins throats in the second half? Hell no. They won because Tom Brady threw for eight billion yards and the Dolphins couldn’t stop it. Did the Lions jump out to a two touchdown lead over the Buccaneers because they slammed the ball through the heart of the defense out of the Power-I? No, they took that lead because the Buccaneers couldn’t consistently stop Matthew Stafford and the Lions passing game. So why change that?

It’s maddening and you see it all around the league. You see teams do something that works and then when they jump out to a big enough lead, they quickly switch to that fetishized Lombardiesque bullshit and abandon everything that they had done to build that lead.

And therein lies the irony. The reason Jim Schwartz does this maddening bullshit is because he wants to exert his team’s collective will through the strength of their identity. But in doing so, he completely abandons the team’s actual identity and the result is a fourth quarter that looks like a French army furiously backpedaling in front of a gang of wild–eyed Nazis. The Lions were successful because they exerted their will. They had spent the whole game beating the shit out of the Buccaneers with their identity, both offensively and defensively. Jim Schwartz’s brain tricked him, just like it tricks so many other coaches at the end of games, into believing that Identity and Will are synonymous with Manball, and that everything that had happened up until that point was somehow unreliable and fluky and not to be trusted because it didn’t match that fetishized cliché burrowing in from the back of the brain, which is a cliché that we are brought up to revere, to worship, a cliché that we associate with the concept of good football. It is almost instinct, and I understand that it can be tough to overcome but the good ones eventually do.

But really, that’s only part of the issue. The real issue is that at some point in the third quarter, Jim Schwartz looked at the clock and his objective changed. Up until then, his objectives were to bludgeon the shit out of the Bucs and to not let up until the field was smeared with their blood. This philosophy was evident both offensively and defensively. The Lions attacked, attacked and then attacked some more. But as soon as he looked at that clock and wanted it to start running a little faster, everything changed. As soon as he communicated via the playcalling that his primary objective was now to get the hell out of town with a win, the team’s entire identity changed. They weren’t the Detroit Lions anymore. Now, they were just a collection of dudes watching the clock and trying to hang on. The team went from hyper-aggressive to passive, a nauseating 180 that made watching the fourth quarter a living nightmare.

All of a sudden it felt like watching the Jets game from last year. You remember that game, right? The Lions jumped out to a lead, then Matthew Stafford got hurt, the offense was neutered and the Lions – and all of us – spent the rest of the game just hanging on, hoping that the clock would run out before anything bad happened. That’s basically the same thing that happened against the Bucs. The Lions basically took Matthew Stafford out of the equation, the offense was neutered and the Lions – and all of us – spent the rest of the game just hanging on, hoping that the clock would run out before anything bad happened. It’s a philosophy of failure, a loser’s mentality, and that shit has to stop if we have any hope of taking the next step on this long journey out of hell and into paradise.

The one thing that I’m clinging to right now is that the Lions started their epic sphincter tightening almost immediately after Matthew Stafford limped off the field with cramps. It’s entirely possible that given young Matthew’s sordid injury history that the Lions freaked out and decided to play it as safely as possible and honestly, you can’t really blame them, you know? But shit, at some point you’re going to have to take the training wheels off and let the dude prove that he can take it. Then again, maybe Stafford’s cramps were precluding him from doing much more than handing the ball off on every play. Maybe he was effectively injured, in that purely temporary way that can only be caused by cramps, which effectively hampered the Lions offensive possibilities. I don’t know, but that’s kind of what I’m hoping. After all, when the Lions were forced to throw the ball following the failure of their running game, Stafford seemed gimpy and ill at ease. This is not something to worry about. It was just one of those freak things that happens (And isn’t it funny how those freak things always seem to happen to the Lions? And by funny, I of course mean horrible and awful and GODDAMMIT I’M AWARE THAT I JUST BROKE THIS CHAIR INTO A MILLION PIECES AND YES I UNDERSTAND IT IS FUTILE TO TRY TO STAB MY TV WITH THOSE PIECES BUT THIS AGGRESSION BY THE FAILURE DEMONS WON’T STAND) Hopefully, that’s all that was.

But even then, I think that probably just made Schwartz pack it in earlier than he wanted to. Had Stafford been able to outrun the tentacled grasp of the heat demons, the Lions probably would have pressed the issue for a little while longer. I think they probably would have still shrunk back with too much time left on the clock because that’s what Schwartz and his dudes have shown a tendency to do from almost their first preseason game. Go back if you can find it somewhere in this wonderland of insanity we call a blog. Watch me bitch about the Lions clock management and general conservatism after the very first preseason game. I have been on this shit since the start and it still feels like a weakness that can be – and very likely will be – exploited.

Look, two touchdowns is nothing in the NFL. The way the game is played today, a two touchdown lead can evaporate almost immediately. That was evident following the very first game of the season, that Thursday night game between the Packers and the Saints. The Packers were in control until – oops! – they weren’t, and the Saints were sitting on the one yard line with a chance to tie things up. Just like that. One long breath and that game had completely and radically changed. It was no different in the Lions game against the Buccaneers. The Lions had a two touchdown lead with only two minutes left to go and yet the last play of the game saw the Bucs doing the Benny Hill Yakety Sax special, and while that shit was hilarious, it was also made possible by the unsettling realization that had it been successful, the game would have been tied and we would have been dead men walking in overtime. Two minutes. That’s all it takes. And sometimes it’s even less than that. Just ask Notre Dame. Shit, just ask the Lions. I mean, all of that happened even though the Bucs failed to recover their onside kick. Sure, a big part of that was because Gosder Cherilus was possessed by a particularly troublesome Failure Demon which caused him to temporarily lose his goddamn mind, but the simple fact is this: the Lions left a window open for the Buccaneers to wriggle through and they almost did. That’s it. Shut the goddamn window. In the aftermath, people were blaming Cherilus and damn right, but the person who left that window open in the first place was named Jim Schwartz. I don’t like it either but there you have it.

I like Jim Schwartz – fuck that, I love Jim Schwartz – and like everyone else, I have smiled dreamily and scribbled his name on my Trapper Keeper, but that doesn’t mean that the dude is perfect. He’s not and, to me, this is the single biggest flaw he has as a coach and it’s a flaw that will very likely kill us dead at some point and that sucks. It’s a flaw that will cause me to write at least one outraged howl against the universe following a completely preventable loss and it’s a flaw that I fear won’t go away any time soon. But I’m hoping that I’m wrong. I’m hoping that all Schwartz needs is some experience with games like this to realize that you have to play to the end, that you can’t sit back and watch the clock and hope the game magically ends quicker than it should. My dude UpHere wrote this following the game:

“They were ACTING like a really good team, trying to run the clock down, playing soft D in the back, but almost gave it away.”

I agree with him in part. The Lions were ACTING like a really good team – or at least what Jim Schwartz imagines a really good team to act like according to some worn out hoary old cliché- but they weren’t acting like the Detroit Lions. They weren’t acting like the team that had gotten them to that point. And in doing so, they revealed a weakness. They revealed a team that wasn’t as confident as they were trying to portray. Really good teams don’t care how much time is left on the clock. They mash you until the clock strikes zero and it comes time for the EMTs to show up and scrape your corpse off the ground. They know who they are and they stick to it, no matter the circumstances. The Lions were playing like a team that was acting like it was lucky to be there, a team that had jumped out to a big lead and was just trying to hold on before midnight struck and they turned into a pumpkin. It’s all about attitude. The Lions have that attitude, but it’s almost like they don’t know how to act when that attitude gets them what they want. In that way, they’re just like the rest of us – confident but still frightened, sure and yet unsure at the same time – and I fear that it will be that way for a while. I think the biggest difference between 9-7 and 12-4 might just be the difference between being a good team and realizing that you’re a good team. And that’s what this season might be all about.