Jahvid Best

 Jahvid Best's brain.

Some of you might recall that the last thing I wrote for the site before devolving into a steady stream of embarrassing histrionics about burnout was a piece about Junior Seau’s death, concussions, how enormously screwed up the NFL is when it comes to player safety and all that jazz.  In the end, I essentially concluded that nobody knows what in the hell is going on and we’re all just fucking vultures and jackals trying to make peace with ourselves.  Naturally, the Football Gods have seen fit to reward my delicate contemplations by turning Jahvid Best’s brains into a bowl of lukewarm soup (Cream of head trauma?)

Of course this has led to everyone fretting and pulling out their hair and wearing placards on the side of the road, ringing a bell and screaming the end is near.  This is because Best is our most explosive playmaker at running back and because the other option there is coming off his own grotesque season-ending injury and is one bong hit away from being strapped to a table and tortured like William Wallace by Sheriff Goodell.  The situation, she’s-a-no good.

There is hope – fading, but it’s still there, well, kinda anyway – that a doctor will examine Best and shine a flashlight in his eyes without making the poor dude puke, but that hope is tested week after week when Jim Schwartz is asked about Best and responds with what can be described as a shrug and a “Well, fuck if I know.  The dude’s head is made of cheese-whiz and shattered dreams.  Uh, ask me next week?”  This is not a good sign.  I mean, even if Best is medically cleared to play, let’s face it, all someone has to do is breathe on him like a child blowing on a dandelion and the dude’s head is going to melt like at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Now, the question then becomes, do we even want him to come back?  And this is where things get tricky.  Refer to the whole Seau article for more on that.  I mean, as much as I feel like we need Jahvid Best, I also don’t really want to be watching a game in October and have to take a half-hour long break while the stands go silent, all the other players gather on the field in prayer, the announcers take that hushed “Oh fuck, I hope he isn’t dead” tone and Jahvid Best himself lays on the field, swallowing his own tongue while trainers try to strap a surfboard to his back.  As it is, he’ll probably be slurring his speech like me on a Friday night by the time he’s 35 and shaking like Muhammad Ali by the time he’s 40.  Every time he touches the ball we’re all gonna get a knot in our stomach, hoping that this won’t be the play that turns him into a broccoli stalk. 

But aside from all that pesky human interest shit, there’s also this: is it really a good idea to pin so much of our hopes and dreams on a dude who probably has his own personal ER team on standby in the locker room every game?  At some point we all have to come to terms with an obvious and terrible truth: Jahvid Best is fucking broken, y’all and what he’s got, nobody can fix.  It’s just the way it is.  It sucks.  I know.  I want him to be the Superman Made of Lightning and Joy backfield counterpoint to Matthew Stafford’s Bombs Over Baghdad (and Green Bay, and Minneapolis, and Chicago, and . . .) aerial attack just like the rest of you.  But right now, all we’re doing is making love to wishes and I don’t know if you’ve seen the Wishmaster but that shit doesn’t turn out so well.

The scary thing is that we really don’t have too many alternatives.  Like I said, there’s Mikael LeShoure, his slain Achilles and a cloud of smoke and then I guess there’s Kevin Smith who I think we can all admit is a nice story but I think we can also all admit that we wanted something better than the Littlest Engine That Could at running back this season, right?  I know that’s not really fair to Smith, but his own track record isn’t exactly one of pristine health and dependability, you know?  I guess we could clone Calvin Johnson and teach him how to take a handoff or just eliminate the running back position all together and just have our receivers carry shotguns during the game so they don’t get killed, but . . . yeah. 

So what do we do?  What in the fuck do we even hope for here?  I mean, really, what we’re down to when it comes to Jahvid Best is praying for miracles and healing potions discovered in the Amazon Rain Forest.  We’re about one collective day away from kidnapping him and dunking him in the Healing Waters of Lourdes.  And while Hope is great and a good thing, there is honest, productive Hope and then there is wide eyed, buoyed by terror Delusion disguised as Hope and we spent way too many years dirty dancing with that motherfucker for me to want to go back to that shit.

What’s left?  I don’t know and neither do any of you.  I’ll admit that I haven’t exactly been the best fan this offseason.  I still know my shit but I haven’t been obsessively tracking the fringe roster invitees and scouting the backup punter’s cousin’s dogs trainer’s nephew’s 40 time like a lot of you probably have so maybe there’s a surprise dude just hanging around ready to tear shit up at camp.  I don’t know, but probably not.  So that leaves us with praying to the Football Gods, to Crom and to The Great Willie Young for Jahvid Best’s brain to be suddenly touched by the Holy Spirit and healed of its sins before week one.  I mean, I’m willing to strangle a goat or two if that’s what it takes and I’ve already started stringing up virgins to trees and lashing them with whips made from the hair of a unicorn in order to curry the gods’ favor but I don’t know if that’s gonna be enough.

Look, I didn’t mean this post to be so HEAD FOR THE HILLS ONLY THE STRONG WILL SURVIVE but even in the afterglow of a playoff season, these are still strange and terrible times and none of us can afford to be naïve, otherwise when the inevitable Doom comes down on Jahvid Best’s withered brain stem, we’ll take to embittered name calling and mud-slinging and then we’ll all make asses of ourselves on MLive and I’ll be forced to call a synod where we’ll elect a new Pope who will have to call a crusade against stupidity and then we’ll all tear each other apart because we didn’t have the balls to stare Truth in the eyes now and accept his wisdom. 

So maybe we should just accept that Jahvid Best’s future lies in the halls of Valhalla and try to make our peace with that.  Or not.  What the fuck do I know?  Oh God, please heal Jahvid Best’s broken brain and also while I have you can you turn Jared Allen into a giant butt, not a metaphorical butt like he is now but like an actual giant butt with a big hole in the middle where poop comes out of because that would be kind of cool and I think we deserve it after the 50 year desert wandering we were subjected to which was worse than what you put Moses through and that motherfucker spent his childhood cavorting with Egyptian whores and his adopted brother, Yul Brynner, who I think you’ll agree was a real dickhead.  Anyway, you let Moses off with 40 years so I think you can give us a little credit and grant us our three wishes like it says you can in the Bible.  I’ve seen Aladdin.  I know how this shit works so I need you and your pet monkey to show up.  But if you sound like Robin Williams, I’m fucking out.  I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.  Forgive me.   I’m even rubbing the shit out of this reading lamp.  See?  See???

This is what it has come to because when it comes to Jahvid Best and his rebellious brain, this is all we have left.  This is the dark heart that lies beneath our outer jubilation.  The Fear is always chasing after us, like some evil assassin in the night and The Fear will reduce us to gibbering ignoramuses (ignoramii?) if we let it.   So, uh, let’s just see what happens?  I don’t know.  I don’t fucking know.  But I’m going to force myself to consider the possibility that this one won’t turn out so well and I’m going to do something that we as a fanbase aren’t very good at – I’m going to try to be reasonable and if it works out, great and if it doesn’t, I’ll only sip from the Drain Cleaner, I won’t chug.  After all, I have matured.

The Weight of Hope

Ndamukong Suh, the Archangel of Death, come to take poor Matt Cassel's soul up to heaven.

I don’t like to think too much about these things before I sit down to write them. (Insert joke of your choice here.) Whenever I do, I only end up getting frustrated because what I write inevitably turns out only to be a shadow of the grandiose symphony I have already conducted in my head. I work better with spontaneity. This is why I tend to go off on tangents and wild flights of fancy, which is either my greatest gift or my greatest liability as a writer, depending on your point of view. But I do like to have at least a general idea of what I’m going to talk about whenever I sit down to write about the Lions and this week I was pretty sure I was going to talk about how good it feels to finally escape the muck and the mire and about how much we deserve this after all we have been through as Lions fans, and while that is all still very, very true, I was struck by one powerful sentiment which seems to have ripped through the fanbase like a supercharged current, and that’s that people are fucking terrified.

That may seem surprising after a triumphant week one victory which did a lot to validate the desperate hope that we all feel, but it’s really not. At least not when you sit back and really think about it. And especially when you consider that that adjective “desperate” kind of stands out in big blinking lights. Because that’s the key here. As much as we have hope as Lions fans, it’s not a cool, calm quiet kind of hope. It’s desperate and wild-eyed and it is just hanging on with bloody fingers to a dream that is the only barrier we have left between our continued existence as fans and the ceaseless horror of oblivion.

We have spent so long on this Trail of Tears that we have expended every last bit of emotional energy we have left. When 0-16 finally drew to its ugly and terrible close, we all took a deep, deep breath, looked at what we had ahead of us, grit our collective teeth and started marching forward. We knew there were a ton of hills to climb and that the road would be brutal and uncompromising. Along the way, some of us would die, some of us would strip our clothes off in a fit of madness and go running into the forest to live out our days hunting wild beaver and fighting bears, and some of us would quietly give into despair and become living zombies, propelled forward by nothing more than sheer momentum and the haunting fear of what lay behind us. But we marched, and we marched and we marched, with reserves we barely knew we had, and then when we came to this season, we all paused and took a deep breath and rested for a moment because this was it. Oh sure, the journey’s not over, but all the horrible hell hills and evil mountains were all behind us. This is what we had steeled ourselves for. This is what had made this journey worth it. It took more out of us than we ever wanted to acknowledge while it was happening because, honestly, acknowledging it while it was happening would have caused us to cave in on ourselves.

But there we were, staring down the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and we’d either die here where we rested or we’d take the next bold step on this journey. There would be no more savage mountains. There was just a long, broad plain left to cross, and while that is fraught with its own difficulties, its own particular challenges and horrors, at least we wouldn’t have to climb anymore. Fuck climbing. But then we beat the Buccaneers and with it we started to move forward and now we’re on that plain and we’re not quite sure what to expect. Where do we go from here?

And that’s the question that is causing so much fear, so much panic. At least when we were climbing, when we were just scaling peak after terrible peak, and crying ourselves to sleep at night in the valleys between, there was a sense of certainty. You woke up, you climbed, it was hard, it sucked, you stumbled and fell, you got back up, you climbed so more, and then you slept for a few hours and then you did it all over again. That was the story of Detroit Lions football over the past couple of seasons. There was nothing to truly fear because we knew what we had to do and we did it because what other choice was there?

But now . . . now, this plain stretches in a million different directions and we’re fucking terrified about taking a fatal misstep, wandering for a while and then finding ourselves at the bottom of yet another hill. We know deep down that we can’t climb anymore hills. We budgeted every last ounce of strength that we had to get ourselves to this point. We knew that the journey here would be hard and cruel and brutal and mean but we did it. We did it. But we can’t do it again and we know it. We know it. And that realization has finally settled in. We have something at stake now. Something real. We can’t fuck this up. And that’s why every game feels stressful as hell right now. Each game is a new step, a step fraught with Hope and Fear and Glee and Terror and everything in between. We are a fanbase which is feeling every emotion right now, both positive and negative and when you combine all of those feelings into one super-emotion, what you’re left with is a sort of manic, wide-eyed terror. And that’s what’s gripped the Lions fanbase this past week.

I don’t mean to make it sound like people aren’t happy, like they aren’t excited. I know they are. I am. I’m fucking elated as a Lions fan right now. I’m proud and I’m happy and . . . look, I don’t have kids, but I imagine this collective feeling is something akin to seeing your child born. We’re so, so happy, but there is a part of ourselves that is also scared as hell, because it isn’t sure if it knows where this is going or if we’re prepared for every eventuality. We love the Lions so much that the idea of something happening to them, of this new hope getting ripped away from us, is so horrible that we’re sure that we won’t be able to take it if it does happen for some improbable or insane reason. And since we’re Lions fans, we have become accustomed to expecting the insane, the improbable, the sheer ridiculousness which has eaten us alive for most of our lives as fans. In short, we can hear the Failure Demons cackling in our heads even though we can’t see them. They might not be here right this moment, but we’re always afraid that they’re lurking around the corner and their memory always remains, clouding everything.

I know that this is hyperbolic as all hell, but hey, have you read anything I’ve written? That is sort of my thing. Comparing the Lions to the birth of a child is insane. I recognize this. But the essence of what I’m saying is true. Recognize that. We are flooded with a billion different emotions right now (I almost said awash, but I thought better of it. You’re welcome, Dustin. You’re welcome.), all of them conflicting, and all we can do to try to make sense of them is to reach out and grab hold of the emotion that is strongest right at this moment and hang onto it with everything that we have. For me, that emotion is hope. Help me God, I have no idea how it happened, but somehow I feel like I have become an avatar for Hope within the Lions fanbase. I have decided to embrace it, to wrap myself in it like it’s a protective cloak, and I’m not taking that fucking thing off until someone rips it from my body and then whips me with it while I whimper and sob in the bloody snow.

I have chosen to hope, but that doesn’t mean it’s blind or that it’s easy. I struggle just like everyone else. You know how easy it is for me to touch the dark side. You’ve seen it splashed all over this blog. You know how easy it is for me to cross between worlds, to sing about the light in dark places and to tell tales about the dark in light places. I have one foot in each world and it’s up to me to choose how to deal with that reality. Like I said, I’ve chosen the light. I’ve chosen Hope. But I always know that there is a part of me that is shaded by the darkness, which is forever touched by the awful and vulgar realities of the past. I am a being of light shaded with shadow, a dark wraith with a sword of fire and a blinding light in my eyes.

Okay, okay, I have gotten out of control again, and I apologize. The point is this: for as much as I hope, for as much as I believe, I still struggle. Hope is a choice, man. And it’s a choice we make over and over and over again. It’s a choice we make throughout the day. That may sound Dr. Phil as fuck and it may sound like I’m tied up in the corner while Deepak Chopra ghostwrites this shit, but it’s true. It’s fucking true. I think about the Lions and my mind soars. It goes places that I never dreamed it could when it comes to this team. It stuns me. But every time I do, my mind starts furiously looking for reasons why it’s all a lie, for reasons why my hopes and dreams are nothing more than fanciful delusions, the fever dreams of the broken and the delirious. And then I have to take those fears, those terrible, terrible fears, and I have to try to put them into perspective. I have to blend them with my football fantasies and I have to trust in my own ability to decide what is real and what is twisted by the ugly wreckage of the past. I find myself doing this over and over and over again. A part of me looks at the Lions, looks at the schedule, looks at the talent, looks at the fact that the Lions have won the game the last nine times they’ve taken the field (yeah, yeah, four of those were preseason games, but they still won, you know?) and thinks why not? Why can’t this team win and win and win and win some more? Why can’t this be a magical season? Why can’t we be “there” – whatever “there” means – yet? And then the other part of me reaches up out of the darkness, hisses with the voices of a choir of Failure Demons and starts whispering about injuries and bad calls and Marinellis and Harringtons and everything else which has plagued us for what feels like a thousand years of madness and despair. And I’m forced to make sense of it all. I’m forced to put all that together and then decide whether or not I want to believe. It’s a choice, backed by legions of conflicting emotions and facts, and it’s one that I have to make all the damn time.

So far, I have chosen Hope. And so far, I have been vindicated. And I see no reason why that should change this week. It is a testament to the power of The Fear that it has grabbed hold so fiercely during a week when the Lions play a team that might be the most disheveled in the entire league. Yes, this week the Lions play the Chiefs, and everyone is screaming with wide-eyed fear about trap games and about making statements and all that jazz, and hey, I’m right there with you. This is not an opportunity that we can afford to fuck up. If we mess this up, suddenly it feels like we’re wandering in the wrong direction and like there are hills popping up in the distance and like I said earlier, fuck hills. But honestly, the Chiefs are fucking terrible. They’re a mess and I don’t honestly see a way the Lions can fuck this up. (Jesus, that is always a terrifying, idiotic thing to say.)

Their offense is in tatters, led by a quarterback who has seemingly imploded, his body going so far as to gnaw on its own ribs, leaving him both physically and mentally vulnerable going up against a defensive line which a few weeks ago made Tom Brady weep bitter, frightened tears. It’s possible that Matt Cassel will end the game hanging from a cross. I’m not saying it’s likely but I won’t rule out the possibility either. If things get wild enough and feelings get caught, I can see The Great Willie Young storming out of the locker room at halftime with two giant pieces of wood under each arm and spikes in his hands, can’t you?

Okay, okay, weird and offensive imagery aside, the underlying truth in all that gibberish is that Matt Cassel might die on Sunday. He is going to get the shit beaten out of him, and for a team and a quarterback which already seem to be hovering on the brink of a mental collapse, this is not a good thing. Well, not for them anyway. For us, this is a recipe for utter glee. Right now, you should be drooling and your eyes should be dancing with little soldiers made of blood and holding tiny hate filled knives. Call this Gunther Cunningham’s revenge. Call it revenge for those fuckers claiming that we tampered with their shitty safety. Call it whatever you want, but this should be a fucking bloodbath.

I’m not discounting the fact that the Chiefs have weapons. Hell, I gibbered on about them in our Chiefs preview and I sprung an unseemly boner for Jamaal Charles but to hell with all that, weapons are great only as long as you know how to use them and the Chiefs, well, the Chiefs have been playing – going all the way back to the end of last season – like they have no living memory of those dudes ever doing anything worth a damn. Right now, The Fear is slithering up and sticking it’s forked hell tongue in my ear and hissing that this could be the week that the Chiefs finally get it back together, that Jamaal Charles might run for 200 yards and Dwayne Bowe could catch 3 touchdown passes, but . . . no. Just no. The Chiefs are a team in utter disarray, one bad play away from a full scale mutiny, from Todd Haley being stripped naked and tied to the back of the Chiefs’ bus by his own players to be dragged back to the hotel like a common horse-rustler. They are a team in free-fall and the Lions are a team that thrives on smelling blood. Our dudes are like sharks with chainsaws for teeth. Ndamukong Suh might literally eat someone on Sunday.

Because make no mistake – the Lions are just as aware as we are that they can’t afford to let down in this game. They understand the stakes. They get it. They know. That is perhaps their greatest strength, the one biggest thing that separates them from other Lions teams of the past, teams that might have had the talent but lacked the will or the attitude. These guys are keenly aware of what’s gone on here and they have a certain sort of pride in the fact that they have been tasked with the deliverance of our wounded souls. I love them for that and it’s for this reason, more than any other, that I trust them.

Besides, even if the Chiefs offense inexplicably comes to life, their defense won’t be able to stop Matthew Stafford and the Lions offense. Not even a little bit. Even if the Chiefs for some unfathomable reason are able to take away the outside of the field from Lions receivers they’ll get killed over the middle. That’s because the Lions have Brandon Pettigrew and Tony Scheffler, while the Chiefs have . . . Jon McGraw? Indeed. Thanks to a season ending injury to Eric Berry, the Chiefs defense is suddenly completely incapable of covering anyone over the middle of the field. There is a very good chance that by the end of the game Jon McGraw will be shaking all over the field like a ruined old junky, weeping and gibbering like a fool, his fractured mind capable of the merest of childish hoots and animalistic grunts.

There is no reason why the Lions shouldn’t beat the shit out of the Chiefs on Sunday, and in an odd way, that’s caused more fear than anything else this week. We’re not used to those kinds of expectations. We’re not used to everything being slanted in our favor. We’re not used to not having anything real to worry about. And so our brains are doing the only thing they can do: they’re making up reasons to be afraid, because that’s how strong The Fear is. The Fear enslaved us long ago, and there is a certain sort of comfort in being a slave (No, Neil! Nooooooo!!! Back away from this subject immediately you dumb son of a bitch!) But we’re free now, free to make our own decisions, to imagine our wildest hopes and dreams and free to either embrace them or deny them. Well, right now, the future we always wanted is staring us right in the face. It’s right here and it’s real and I say we don’t deny it. I say we embrace it. The Lions should beat the Chiefs. The Lions should beat the Chiefs. The Lions should beat the Chiefs. I can find no reason – no reason that is rooted in anything real or logical anyway – why they shouldn’t. And so that’s what I’m going to choose to believe in. Of course, a part of me – a huge part – understands that there is nothing logical about being a Lions fan, but to hell with all that, we do what we can. We do what we can. And all I can do is hang onto Hope and pray that it doesn’t betray me. If it does, I’m dead, but if I don’t hang onto it at all, I’m dead anyway, so fuck everything else, the Detroit Lions will beat the Kansas City Chiefs and that’s that.

FIVE NO DOUBT TERRIBLE PREDICTIONS

1. Matthew Stafford will have another big day, throwing for 335 yards and 3 touchdowns. He won’t throw an interception and his numbers will be slightly deflated when the Lions sit on a lead for much of the fourth quarter, causing me to write another bitchy post next week.

2. St. Calvin will play and will catch 6 passes for 90 yards and a touchdown.

3. Jahvid Best will run the ball 22 times for 96 yards and a touchdown. He’ll also catch 4 passes for 48 yards.

4. Matt Cassel will be found wandering naked and confused after the game, smeared with his own feces outside of Ford Field. He will be taken to a local homeless shelter and then fed to the Coyotes wandering the city streets. The Chiefs will file an official protest with the league but Sheriff Goodell will be too scared to set foot in the streets of Detroit and will be heard muttering nervous gibberish about Robocop. The matter will eventually be forgotten except for by Todd Haley, who will spend the next several months looking for answers. He will be found floating in the Detroit River next May. No one in Kansas City will care.

5. Jamaal Charles will run for 70 yards on only 14 carries as the Lions establish a big lead and then spend the rest of the game parading around Ford Field with a pike up Matt Cassel’s ass. His howls of pain and screams for mercy will cause Fox to be sued for indecency.

Predicted Final Score: Lions 31, Chiefs 17 (And it’s only that close because I figure the Lions will ease off and sit on the lead in the 4^th quarter and the Chiefs will get at least one garbage touchdown.)

On the Edge of Tomorrow

According to the helpful little stats provided by Blogger, there are 330 posts labeled “Detroit Lions” here at Armchair Linebacker. Every single one of them, with two or three exceptions, was written by me. And you all know by now that when I write something, it isn’t one or two quick paragraphs. No, each one is an obscene journey on a rocket ship fueled by nightmares, madness and the howling of the forgotten dead into the heart of darkness known as Detroit Lions fandom. Guessing conservatively, I’d say that each one of these posts averaged anywhere from 2,000 to 3,000 words. Rarely have they been any less that 2,000, but there have been several occasions where they have soared close to 5,000 words. So, I think I can safely say that there is a strong possibility – especially when you consider the 100,000 or so words I’ve written in the last several months about the rest of the NFL – that since I started writing about the Lions here at Armchair Linebacker, I have written one million words.

Now, that’s an obscene number, and if I thought about it for too long it would likely depress me. That’s approximately the equivalent of ten decent sized novels. Oh God . . . I’ve wasted my life, haven’t I? No, but seriously, that’s a lot of fucking writing, a lot of madness, and a lot of traveling through the anarchic halls of my own diseased brain. I say all this not to brag or even to inform. No, I say this as a means of gathering some sort of perspective about our collective journey as Lions fans. Those one million words have been written over a course of three years, from 0-16 to today, and while those three years have been a wild and ridiculous ride, they are only a sliver in time, an almost imperceptible blip in the lifetime of my own fandom.

And those years that I have spent as a fan, wandering in the desert of the damned, wondering if I’ll ever reach the Garden of Eden, are themselves just a sliver in time, a tiny blip compared to the colossal expanse of this Saharan wasteland which has gripped the world of the Detroit Lions for over half a century. Some more perspective: the last time the Lions won anything worth winning my grandfather - MY GRANDFATHER – was 27 years old. 27. That’s younger than I am today. My grandfather died 3 years ago, during the first month of that terrible trail of tears known as 0-16. He was 78. (That’s right, I’m saying that Rod Marinelli killed my grandfather.) That’s a whole lifetime of watching the Lions lose with the same kind of dread horror and outright misery that we bitch about all the time. A whole lifetime. And during that lifetime there was never any real hope, no belief that things as a whole had changed. Oh sure, there were oases in that desert of the damned, small respites named Barry Sanders or . . . or . . . I’m having trouble thinking of another one, but even then, everyone understood that they were nothing more than oases, and that once we started moving forward, the air would dry up again and we would go thirsty and sand blind. I’ve written about this before, but the Lions best decade during that lifetime of despair – the Barry years – was roughly equivalent to the last decade’s worth of football played by the Jacksonville Jaguars. That’s an incredibly depressing – and maddening – thought.

I don’t bring all this up in order to create a trite My Gradfather Never Saw His Beloved Lions Win storyline, a storyline beaten into the ground by countless Red Sox fans over the years, because honestly, my grandfather was never a huge Lions fan or anything. He watched and he followed but his heart was never really in it, and can you blame him given everything that I just wrote? No, I bring all this up to give a sense of perspective to our struggle as fans. It is not something that anyone else can really understand. I wrote a whole piece about this before. So why do I bring all this up again? Well, I’ll tell you. I bring all this up yet again just to set the stage, to give a sense of what this season – and what this game against the Buccaneers – really means to us as Lions fans.

When we look behind us, we see a world of chaos and misery, of blood, sweat, tears and . . . well, even more blood, sweat and tears. There are mangled dragons being tortured by Failure Demons, all the trees are on fire and there is dark and sinister laughter coming from somewhere that we suspect is the heart of hell. It is a world without end, dark and insane, and it is all we know.

The human brain – and more importantly the human spirit – can only take so much of that, though. 0-16 broke us. It dragged us down and stripped our flesh from our bones and then it ignored our simpering cries while it gnawed upon those bones. But it didn’t kill us. Instead, we collectively viewed that catastrophic failure as the bottoming out point, the Marianas Trench of the hell that was our world as fans. That was it. After fifty plus years of swimming in the fire, we had finally sunk as far we ever would. There was a certain sort of comfort in that, I think. As insane as it is to actually write those words, I think it’s true. There was a certain understanding that the worst was behind us and that if we sucked it up one last time, we could still swim back to the surface, through the fire, avoiding the Tridents of the Failure Demons as they tried to spear us along the way, and somehow, someway, it feels like we actually popped our head back above the surface of that ocean of fire and we saw a distant shore, and above that shore were white cliffs, a clear blue sky and something glowing, a shimmer of green and gold and red, of emeralds and rubies, a shimmer alive with promise, with salvation. All we had to do was swim to that shore and climb that cliff. I decided to swim and so did most of you reading this. A lot of our brothers and sisters just wailed and wept and sank back beneath the fire. The Failure Demons had ruined them and that’s a damn shame. But the rest of us had a choice to make and we chose to swim for that shore.

Once we reached that shore, once Jim Schwartz and Martin Mayhew set about trying to make things right, we lay on the beach under a sky that was a mix of the clear blue of the future and the Sulphuric black of the past, exhausted, in pain, and we looked at the cliffs looming above us and realized that they reached miles into the sky and that to climb them would take everything that we had left inside of us. But instead of bitching and moaning – instead of caterwauling like infants and throwing a hissy fit because the world wasn’t perfect – we all smiled at one another and started climbing.

You see, it wasn’t because we wanted to climb. It was because we didn’t have any other choice. This cliff, this daunting journey, was all we had left. It was the only thing that kept our spirit from disintegrating into a billion tiny pieces, into subatomic nothingness. There was nothing else we had to hold onto. There were no fond memories, no glory, no sunny days, just a black and foul past which somehow hadn’t completely ruined us. The climb and its promise was all that was left to us. It was our only escape and so we grinned, manic, almost joyless, desperate grins and we started to scramble our way to the top, holding on to the cliff face with bloodied fingers and to what was left of our tattered spirits as fans. This was it. This was it. This was it.

And then last season, the cliff face started to sprout hand and footholds and it got a little easier to climb and if we looked above us, mingled with the blue sky were those colors of emerald, gold and red, of the promise of rubies and glory and salvation and collectively we went completely mad as we scrambled for the top.

We have fought a savage internal battle between our fears and our wildest dreams and the result over the past couple of seasons has been wild and bipolar, manic and stupid. We have screamed at the losses, gnashed our teeth, beaten each other with whips and clubs and cried and cried, sobbing because we were sure we would never reach the top of that cliff. And we have celebrated like idiot children with every victory – few as they’ve been – lighting fireworks in our hearts and getting drunk on the faintest hint of the promise to come. And on and on and on it’s gone until today we find ourselves scrambling over the edge of that cliff and looking at . . . what?

What do we see? We’re awash in brilliant colors now, in the light and promise of the future, but what is the future? Now that we’re there, what does it really mean? All we know is that somehow we have escaped hell. We never really stopped to consider what this new world would really be like and I think that terrifies people. It does me. I’ll admit it. I’m scared. Because what if this doesn’t really work out? What if this new world we’ve fought so damned hard for really isn’t any better – or worse, any different – than the old world? What if this is just another spectacular oasis and what if once our eyes adjust to this new light we look past it and see that the desert of the damned just goes on and on and on? What if?

I think we know that this is it, that this is our last stand as Lions fans. This new journey has taken everything we have. It has taken all of whatever strength we still had left, whatever belief, whatever hope. It has taken everything human and beautiful, everything that makes us inexplicably love a team of 53 dudes we’ve never met. Our hearts, our souls, our very being as fans are on the line right now, and again, that’s terrifying. Our eyes are wide, our hearts are on fire and beating a thousand times per second and the whole world is alive with infinite possibilities. Anything can happen in this new world. That is both its promise and its threat.

But we’re moving forward anyway, because really, what choice do we have? We can either give our souls away now, our spirits, or we can fight for them. Why not? If we do lose them we might as well lose them in glorious death instead of shameful cowardice.

All that sounds overly fatalistic and vaguely depressing and I apologize. I didn’t mean for it to come across like that. I just wanted to give everyone a sense of the stakes here. I wanted us all to understand what’s on the line. The good news is that we have real, concrete reasons to believe. At every stage, the Lions have gotten better and better. They have bolstered virtually every position group and while there is still work to be done, there are several positions that are legitimately championship level. The Lions have a ferocious defense built on pressure, swagger and grim death, with a defensive line that is as percussive as it is concussive – loud, brash, physical, mean – everything that you want your line to be. They set the tone. Everyone else follows. The linebackers are new, athletic and loaded with promise and the secondary . . . well, while they may still lack that lockdown cornerback, they have several guys who should thrive playing behind a line that creates so much pressure. In the preseason we already saw that all they have to do is be ready for their opportunities. The defensive pressure up front will force turnovers. The cornerbacks just have to be there to finish plays. Meanwhile, Louis Delmas and Amari Spievey give the back end of the defense a swagger and a mentality to match what’s there up front. They’ll hit – and they’ll miss occasionally – and they’ll make sure that the middle of the field is not a place opposing players want to visit.

On offense . . . well, on offense we have Matthew Stafford, who has apparently been reborn as a Terminator, only this Terminator comes complete with the swagger of a fighter pilot. He’ll hunt down Sarah Connor and then he’ll sleep with her, her friends and even that dog who won’t stop barking. They’ll all die with a smile on their face and satisfaction in their hearts – and also in their loins. I’m just going to go ahead and say it – Matthew Stafford looks unstoppable. He has a total command of the offense, he can make every single throw on the field and his traitorous shoulder has been literally reinforced by steel. He is part robot, part man and all warrior.

Meanwhile, he has a host of weapons around him led by Calvin Johnson. St. Calvin has never had a chance to play with a quarterback like Matthew Stafford. Even going back to college, he has always had a collection of Grit Merchants, Noodle Arms and Reggie Balls throwing him shitballs disguised as passes. It is absolutely frightening – and wonderful – to think about what he can do with a real, live quarterback feeding him balls. (No, not feeding him balls like that. Get your minds out of the gutter, you degenerates. Stafford and St. Calvin are just friends. JUST FRIENDS DAMN IT.) But it’s not just Calvin Johnson. Stafford has shown unbelievable chemistry with Nate Burleson this preseason and Brandon Pettigrew and Tony Scheffler are both prime receiving threats at tight end. Add in Jahvid Best swinging out of the backfield and Titus Young developing as a receiver and Matthew Stafford has an embarrassment of riches with which to buy glory and honor this season.

Of course, there are still questions about the running game – serious questions – and no one knows if the offensive line as it is currently constituted will ever be able to provide any sort of push up front, but I have tackled that issue elsewhere and since this is technically a game preview, we should probably actually get to that, huh?

So what can we expect from the Lions game against the Buccaneers this week? Well, remember, the Lions beat the Bucs in Tampa Bay last season. Prior to that game, I pointed out that the Buccaneers seemed scared of Ndamukong Suh and the Lions defensive line even though the Lions hadn’t won on the road since the Jesus administration (You all remember that. He was elected on a tide of populist sentiment and then was impeached because the do nothing Congress back then, led by Speaker of the House Pilate, deemed that his policies were too radical and Socialist in nature. I still can’t belief Vice President Iscariot rolled over on him like that. Shameful.)

The Lions then went out and beat the Buccaneers. So . . . why in the hell would it be any different now that the game is in Detroit, the Lions have improved significantly and Matthew Stafford is running things instead of the limp-wristed Grit Farming duo of Shaun Hill and Drew Stanton? What did the Buccaneers honestly do in the offseason to make anyone think that they would win this game?

There seems to be a lot of optimism surrounding the Buccaneers these days and while I can understand that – they’re young, they think they have a franchise quarterback, they’ve got a bunch of money to work with under the cap – I don’t necessarily agree. There is an aroma of fraudulence to the Bucs. I discussed this in their team preview. It’s not that I don’t think that Josh Freeman isn’t a franchise quarterback, it’s just that I see him as a second tier franchise quarterback if that makes any sense. He’s not Matthew Stafford. And while he may lead the league in Intangibles and there’s a good chance that he’s going to be riding off into the sunset in Brett Favre’s old Wranglers strapped into John Madden’s sidecar of love, I have a hard time believing in those things. I’ll take Matthew Stafford over a rich man’s Drew Stanton any day of the week and especially on Sundays. But honestly, what Josh Freeman is good at – scrambling around, making something out of nothing – might play right into the hands of the Lions defensive line, which sadly for Josh Freeman are hands made of hate and claws. Freeman scrambling around trying to make plays means that he’s going to be hanging onto the ball for an extra second or two, and an extra second or two versus the Lions defensive line isn’t so much the difference between success and failure as it is the difference between survival and ritual disembowelment. If Josh Freeman doesn’t get rid of the ball ASAP, he’s going to find his head mounted in Ndamukong Suh’s House of Spears.

Look, I understand that the Bucs overachieved last season, but to me that just means that they’re due to fall back to Earth. Meanwhile, last season the Lions were beset by injuries, penalties, a plague of locusts, alien invasions, rivers of blood and anything else you can imagine. If it could go wrong, it did go wrong. And still – STILL – the Lions beat the Buccaneers in Tampa Bay. You’ll forgive me if I’m not seeing a reason why the Lions shouldn’t win – and win convincingly – this time around.

I suppose, in the end, the only reason that people can really come up with is because the Lions are, well, the Lions, which is something that will only go away if the Lions can actually win games like this. I can’t fault people for being clouded by The Fear. After all, I’ve already explained how frightened I am. We need to win this game. If we don’t, The Fear is going to become crippling and ugly. It will override our intellects and turn us into a gang of grunting baboons, flinging our shit at one another. It will be vile and horrible. As much as we’ll try to tell ourselves that it’s only one game, we’ve completely lost the ability to put things into their proper perspective. That’s what 0-16 did. It stripped away our reason and it pointed us towards this shore, this cliff, and a brave new world and we are hanging on so tightly, scrambling for salvation, that anything other than a victory right now feels inconceivable. We have peaked over the horizon at this new world and now we need a sign. We need something to show us that we made the right choice, that swimming for these strange shores and climbing this brutal cliff was worth it. And right now, I can’t think of a better sign than ripping the Buccaneers hearts out and eating them while Ford Field goes wild. Lions win.

FIVE PREDICTIONS TO MAKE ME LOOK STUPID

1. Matthew Stafford goes full Terminator, completing 30 of 38 passes for 350 yards and 4 touchdowns. He won’t throw an interception and after the game, he’ll seduce Sarah Connor following an epic beatdown of her killjoy boyfriend, Kyle. John Connor, meet your new daddy.

2. The Lions running game will struggle. Jahvid Best will only run for 46 yards on 14 carries, and the Lions will quickly abandon the traditional run game and resort to a heavy screen game instead. Best will catch 7 passes for 87 yards and 1 touchdown.

3. St. Calvin will catch 7 passes for 98 yards and 1 touchdown but the real story will be Nate Burleson, who will catch 9 passes for 125 yards and 2 touchdowns.

4. Josh Freeman will have a decent day, throwing for 265 yards on 22-34 passing. He’ll throw 2 touchdowns . . . but he’ll also get sacked 5 times and lose one fumble. By the end of the game, he’ll look like an extra from one of the Saw movies.

5. LeGarrette Blount will run for 85 yards on 19 carries and after the game people will grumble a bit about the Lions run defense. He won’t score though, and after the game The Great Willie Young will be seen riding around town on a motorcycle with Blount’s head stuck on a spear.

Predicted Final Score: Lions 34, Buccaneers 17.