That's What You Get For Falling in Love

Lions fans, after the game

Shortly after the Lions lost in the 11,689^th performance of The Passion of the Roary, I did the idiotic thing and headed to Twitter where of course everyone was freaking out and beating each other about the heads with spiked bats laced with the tears of the fallen.  While I was there, I noticed this tweet from Jim Schwartz earlier in the day:

@jschwartzlions: Some Bon Jovi on the way to Ford Field: " In and Out of Love", "Bad Medicine".

Indeed.

Hey, that’s what you get for falling in love.

It’s hard to know what else to say in the wake of that fiasco, which somehow made the previous fiascos this year look like orderly and happy parades through the streets, with children laughing and waving from high atop floats rather than the screaming firetrucks down a burning main street with half-naked firemen hanging off the back wailing and telling everyone to run for their lives that they have felt like.  No, somehow this one managed to be even worse, which is a hell of a trick to pull off and yet here we are.  I guess in this scenario the firetruck also blew up right in front of a school and all those laughing and waving children are on fire and hey look, now they’re dead.

Right now, all anyone wants to do is parse through the rubble, the broken bodies, the ashes of the dead and look for clues and evidence and argue and argue and argue and ARGLE BARGLE ARGLE BARGLE!  The camps have armed themselves and are going to war and now I find myself galloping away back into the woods where I once roamed in solitude, alone with my own insanity, leaving behind the cookfires and both the happy people with their grand dreams and the sad people with their hairshirts and prayers to the drowned god, where I will live in a shack and shoot anyone who trespasses on my land.

The Lions are 4-8 and they have gotten to that point in ways both awful and hilarious.  In other words they are not just 4-8 but a true Lions 4-8.  Our good pal @Geekized tweeted me after the game and asked me what the hell happened and I told her the only thing I could: at the end of the game the Lions went Full Lion.  She understood exactly what that meant and I’m sure all you do too.  The Lions went Full Lion.  What else can you say?

Look, it doesn’t really matter why the Lions are 4-8.  They just are.  There is no one who deserves to be saved from the rabid scorn of Lions fans right now.  But everybody has their reasons.  Everybody thinks everyone else is an idiot or a charlatan and the tribe has been torn asunder, with one side saying we should string up Jim Schwartz and the boys and let the crows eat their entrails and the sun bake whatever’s left-over of their clearly shrunken brains while the other has taken up arms to defend poor King James and his court, patting him on the back and saying Buck Up There, Lil’ Camper and telling the others that they should be ashamed for speaking against their Lord and Savior and this is why I have retreated to the woods, to this safe-haven known as Armchair Linebacker, where I can sit in my shack and shave my head and beat myself with a club in peace.

I am done arguing and I am done because what the fuck is there to argue about?  The Lions are 4-8.  Nothing else really matters.  I sort of just want to take Calvin Johnson and The Great Willie Young fishing for a weekend where we can sit in peace and quiet in a tiny boat while a giant bulldozer plows over Ford Field and everybody inside and the zombie hordes stalk the streets eating each other’s brains.  And then we can come back and make a better world together.

I’m going to say something really awful here but when the Colts were driving at the end and were down to their final handful of plays, a sick, masochistic part of me actually wanted them to score, I think.  That is a horrible thing to admit but I think my disdain for this team has gone that far.  A part of me – not a big part but it’s there – takes a perverse sort of satisfaction in watching them suffer, because then at least they will have no excuses.  At least then they will have to take to their quiet places, where they are alone with their own hearts and souls and admit to themselves that goddammit, they need to change.  The horrible truth though is that they won’t do this and instead they will find some crack to squeeze through, some shell-game of the mind that they will play that will make it all okay, that will make it not their fault but the result of some ineffable THAT’S JUST THE WAY IT GOES SOMETIMES madness.

And while yes, that is just the way it goes sometimes, sometimes should not equal fifty years and to just blithely accept that crosses the line from wise serenity to depraved madness.  It’s exactly the sort of willful denial I was talking about in my last piece, when I went nuclear on everybody and felt like I needed a cigarette or perhaps a nice fine shot of China White after I was done writing it.  But I don’t want to do that again.

Look, I feel horrible and ashamed that even a tiny part of me felt like that, that even a single molecule of my body wished for bad things to happen, but I suppose it’s no different than a beat up woman, aged beyond her years, sitting in a run-down apartment complex secretly hoping that her man gets knifed on the way to the horsetrack by a gang of lowly muggers.  This is what it has come to.  I don’t have the strength to leave him myself and so I hope Fate will somehow figure my shit out for me.

It’s vaguely cowardly and definitely tragic and yet it is all too real.  All too real.  I was all set to show up here after the game and sing psalms about the glory of St. Calvin.  I even had a title picked out and everything: “Divine Intervention”.  Yes, I planned to spend roughly eight billion words fellating St. Calvin but then everyone else went and fucked it all up and, well, here we are, sitting in a run-down apartment complex wondering whether or not we should blame ourselves because our man got knifed by some street thugs who stole his wallet.

The truly tragic part of all this though is that after getting knifed and robbed, that son of a bitch is just going to stagger home and beat our ass and in the end we’ll be lying in the bathtub again, bleeding, eyes swollen shut wondering if that support beam can hold the weight of a body.  And meanwhile that son of a bitch is just sitting in the living room, drinking his own pain away, having sloppily stitched himself up, and he’s shouting at us and telling us it’s our own damn fault, that we should’ve done this or done that and that if we only loved him better, loved him harder, that he wouldn’t have to do things like this to us.

But we’ll crawl out of that bathtub and start cooking him his two dollar steak on the hot plate because that is just what we do, and we’ll snuggle up next to him tonight on the pull-out couch with the cigarette burns in it and we’ll feel glad and thankful that at least we have someone and don’t have to wither away all alone like that old biddy who lives next door and smells like cat piss.  This is what being a fan of the Detroit Lions means and I have no room to judge anyone because I’m frantically flipping that steak, trying to tell if it’s done or not through these swollen eyes and hoping that he’ll give me a kiss on the cheek and a slap on the ass when I’m done just like everybody else.

This has been a dark and fucked up post but this has been a dark and fucked up season.  Don’t blame me, I am but a humble chronicler of the times, just a poor fool living in a shack in the woods, trying to drown out the horrible noises made by the warring tribes with the click-clacking of a keyboard and the screaming of my own shattered soul.  The Lions lost today and they lost in a way that was horrible and yet somehow perfect, and I have become death, the destroyer of worlds and one day, a thousand years from now, some poor fool will find these words in a cave and his people will know the faces of both True Evil and True Pain.  And somewhere, my soul will still roam the cosmos, desperately awaiting that moment when the Lions, my Lions, fulfill that soul’s long-suffering hopes.  This is the sort of thing that religions are founded upon, epic tragedies and wandering souls, and today’s game is but a chapter, a sliver in time, a single stanza in that great dirge, and one day in that far off future people will kill each other over those words found in a cave, shields brandished with Lions logos and old priests will carry wooden crucifixes with a bearded idiot name Neil hanging from them and I can only hope that Pope Willie Young will find a way to end the madness before it consumes us all.  But don’t cry for me, friends, for I am already dead.  Go Lions.

A Culture of Denial is a Culture of Failure

Jim Schwartz addressing the media about Matthew Stafford's "outstanding" mechanics.

It occurred to me earlier that I had yet to even think about the Lions game this weekend against the Colts.  These are the things that happen when your season degenerates into a forced death march through the desert of the damned back to the hell fires that have slow roasted our souls for far too long.  I haven’t really thought much about the game against the Colts because I simply don’t want to.  My brain is in revolt.  When it comes to the Lions, it has gone on strike.  Solidarity, brother.

Earlier today, though, the name Titus Young started being thrown around again and at least a few synapses of my brain decided to cross the picket line and so here we are.  I wish it was a better place, a place where Titus Young didn’t get suspended for acting like a passive-aggressive five year old, but well… yeah.

Just in case you haven’t heard the rumors, here’s how it basically breaks down: against the Packers, Titus decided to throw a petulant little shit-fit because he didn’t think he was getting the ball enough, so, naturally, he did what all rational adults do and intentionally lined up wrong multiple times because, uh, that’ll show ‘em I guess.  Of course, this then led to Jim Schwartz basically exiling Titus from the team for a while (and if this is true then “for a while” probably should have been “permanently”) only to welcome him back to the fold this past week.  And now practice observers report a sullen Titus Young roaming the sidelines of the practice field, picking up trash like he’s been sentenced to community service or some shit.  No word on whether or not he’s been wearing an orange vest.

I don’t really have anything to add to that.  The inanity of it speaks for itself.  It practically screams out LIONS DISEASE in big, flashy neon lights for the whole world to see.  It is the Lions equivalent of the infamous SPARTY NOOOOOOO, which if you don’t know is a reference to Michigan State’s almost supernatural propensity for fucking up at exactly the worst possible moment in the worst possible way.  It is a well-known phenomenon in this here state of mine, and while those on my side of the aisle laugh uproariously and use it as a punch-line, I can understand how my Spartan friends feel about it because goddammit, that’s how shit like this Titus Young news feels to me as a Lions fan.  It is just so quintessentially LIONS, you know?  In that strange and terrible way we are all too familiar with.  ROARY NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!  Indeed.

It is with that crawling its way laboriously through the halls of my shattered mind that I sit down to write about this weekend’s game and while parts of me are trying desperately to cling to shreds of whatever leftover enthusiasm is still littering those weird halls (at least the ones that Titus Young hasn’t metaphorically scraped up along with his literal janitorial duties – and by the way, I think I’m going to nickname Titus Young “The Janitor” from now on.) other parts of me – and if I’m being honest, the more dominant parts of me – have simply ceased to care.  At least in a way that doesn’t feel like some false put-on, some forced attempt to throw up shredded pom-poms and lead some sort of perverse spirit rally for the congregation.  This season has sucked, yo.  Actually, it hasn’t just sucked, it has suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked, and I will not pay fealty to it out of some misplaced sense of loyalty and honor.  Fuck it and fuck this team.

I’ll still watch – why not? – but I’m not going to pretend that I’m into it just to placate some foolish juvenile need to engage in some sort of dumb tribalism.  I have been through too much, I have seen too much, and goddammit, I will not put myself through this just to prove a point.  I have too many scars, too many old wounds that never quite healed.  I walk with a permanent limp, my face is disfigured and I drool when I talk.  I have been beaten upside the head too many goddamn times and people look away when they see me because I make them uncomfortable.  I go to support groups and am surrounded by people who tell me to love myself and that everything will be alright but goddammit, I can’t even feed myself without making a mess and I have to wear a diaper and sometimes the diaper leaks.  Things are not alright and I’m not going to lie to myself.  I am a Lions fan, and that is a truth that is filled with stark, naked horror, a truth that cannot be spruced up or made into an inspirational holiday story for the kids.  My team’s mascot is Titus “the Janitor” Young and nothing I gibber on about is going to change that.

The thing is – the singular macabre piece of tragicomic horror that drives this whole absurd thing – is that I can’t help it.  I can’t look away.  I can’t turn away.  I can’t abandon the idiot’s carnival that is the Detroit Lions because it is a part of me, they are a part of me.  They are the scars, the wounds, the limp, the drool, the shit-filled diaper.  I can’t abandon the Lions because abandoning the Lions would be abandoning myself.  You can’t choose who you love, even if who you love is a crackhead family member who keeps stealing your shit and ruining your life.  It is part of your DNA, encoded into your being and to try to extract it is a fool’s endeavor, like medieval charlatans trying to turn lead into gold.

I’m still here and I will be here until the end of time, just a ragged and broken skeleton, rotting under a hell-sun, wearing Honolulu Blue and setting fire to my eye-sockets and screaming a horrible death wail, a banshee scream that never ends, that just circles through time, frightening those in the past and those in the future, wrapping us all in one big goddamn horror show that is eternal.

Jesus Christ, this is maudlin and bleak, even for me.  But this is where I am as a fan and I’m not going to lie about it.  But what the hell, a new week is a new week and like they say in the support groups, we just have to take it one day at a time, or in this case one game at a time.  The good news – if you can call anything “good news” in this season of the damned – is that this one particular week has the chance to be not a total and complete butt.  And by that, I mean I actually expect the Lions to win.  This is not that farfetched – I mean, let’s be honest here, for all the woe is me stuff above the Lions are not a horrible football team, they’re just a horribly dysfunctional football team which is a fatal flaw I have become completely convinced they will be unable to overcome anytime soon.  This means that they will still win games, just like the Wayne Fontes era Lions won some games.  If that’s good enough for you, then what the hell, have fun.  I just wanted more.  Fuck that, I needed more.  But if Jim Schwartz channeling Wayne Fontes and coddling Matthew Stafford while he Scott Mitchells his way down the field and our one transcendent superstar, St. Calvin, takes the sins of the world upon his shoulders a la Barry Sanders is what works for you, then by all means, enjoy.  It’s just that you and I remember that time very, very differently.

I should have mentioned this earlier when I was discussing the Janitor Young incident but I forgot and hey, these things happen when you sit down to write and have no idea what to say – you just free-write and hope that you make sense somewhere along the way.  But yeah, anyway, that quick mention of Schwartz coddling Stafford reminded me of something I saw a couple of days ago.  It was a headline on MLive that said “Matthew Stafford’s mechanics ‘outstanding’ according to coach Jim Schwartz.”

Yeah.  What in the hell do you even say to something like that?  That level of denial is so deeply ingrained that the only thing you can do is sort of shrug your shoulders and then collapse into a heap of tears, muttering “Oh God” over and over again and then writing maudlin suicide notes like this infernal post.  That, coupled with the Titus Young story, is everything that is wrong, everything that has ever been wrong, with the Detroit Lions.  It is exactly that sort of ridiculous Baghdad Bob bullshit that turns hard times into a culture of losing, into the culture of Lions Disease.  It is a culture born of denial and passive-aggressive dickery.  You can read the failed wailing and idiot epitaphs of a dozen catastrophic Lions head coaches in Jim Schwartz’s words.  You can hear their ghostly whispers dancing around the word “outstanding.”  Jesus, they have poisoned his mind and oh, the horror, the horror . . .

Look, I have kinda gotten carried away here the last few paragraphs.  I meant to segue into a discussion about why I think the Lions will beat the Colts on Sunday – and I think they will – but there are more important things to discuss here.  I am sick and goddamned tired of the willful denial which props up our fanbase.  When things are going well  (I know, I know, this occurs at roughly the same rate as the appearance of Halley’s Comet)  the fear-mongers refuse to embrace it because they don’t want to be hurt again.  They deny reality in order to save themselves.  But when things take a turn for the Millen, people deny that shit too and claim all is well like Kevin Bacon screaming his ass off in the street in Animal House while anarchy reigns because they need to believe in order to protect themselves.  It’s two sides of the same miserable coin and I’m fucking sick of it.  This is not okay and if you say that it is, then right now you’re part of the problem and you’re just helping to perpetuate this miserable cycle of denial.  You are feeding Lions Disease.  You are making it strong.  Congratulations.

It’s time to take a goddamn Big Boy Pill.  It’s time for Jim Schwartz to walk up to Matthew Stafford and say “Yo, your mechanics are kinda fucked up so let’s fix this shit before it gets even worse.”  It’s time for everyone involved to take a look at the situation and admit to themselves that what they’re doing isn’t working.  You can cherry pick stats all you want and tell me that this is the same team that went 10-6 last year but they’re 4-7 and that’s all that matters.  And honestly, even while you’re over there gibbering about them being an 8-3 team that’s just had some bad breaks I can point out that they could just as easily be 1-10 right now so let’s just split the difference which puts them at, well, it puts them at 4-7.  You know who does that whole WELL WE COULD HAVE WON THIS GAME AND THIS GAME AND THAT ONE AND IF THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN THEN WE COULD HAVE TOTALLY WON THAT ONE???  Losers.  That’s who.  Denial worshipping losers. 

I know these are incredibly harsh words and I am basically standing alone yelling at literally everyone else who calls themselves a Lions fan, and hell, I’m even yelling at myself because I’ve done that too, but goddammit guys, at some point you have to stop whining and playing the victim and denying that real, substantive problems exist.  The simple fact is that the Lions didn’t win those games.  They lost them and you’re right, they lost them because they didn’t get the miracles that they got last season.  But what’s so fucked up is that so many people don’t seem to realize is that that’s the problem right there.  If you’re relying on miracles to be the foundation of your team’s winning strategy then you’re not just up shit-creek without a paddle, you’re drowning in that foul son of a bitch.

I don’t want to be writing these words right now.  I want to be praising Glorious Leader Schwartz and writing odes to The Great Willie Young but enough’s enough.  Things are not right, Matthew Stafford’s mechanics are not outstanding, the Lions don’t somehow deserve to be 7-4 or 8-3 or whatever fantasy land scenario y’all have concocted in order to call a temporary truce with the horrors of your own heart, and this is not a good football team, or even anything approaching a good football team.  This has nothing to do with offseason arrests or any red-herring bullshit like that and everything to do with the fact that this football team is fucking failing before our eyes.  No one is out to get them.  No one is unfairly persecuting them.  STOP MAKING EXCUSES.  THE LIONS ARE NOT A GOOD FOOTBALL TEAM AND THEY’RE NOT A GOOD FOOTBALL TEAM BECAUSE THEY WON’T TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR BEING ONE.

Sorry about the all-caps meltdown there but I’m sick of this shit.  I’m sick of the excuses and all the mewling bullshit that accompanies it.  Just stop it already.  Christ. 

Okay Neil, deep breath, we’ll get through this.  You’re right, other Neil.  You’re right.

Anyway . . . sorry, but a man needed to say some things and a man has said them.  I wish I had talked more about the actual game against the Colts this week – I certainly intended to – but Great Truths got in the way and when Great Truths decide to speak, you just have to get out of the way and let them.  The Lions should beat the Colts and, well, honestly that kind of says it all right there.  The Lions should beat the Colts because they are just objectively a better, more talented football team.  And yet the Colts are 7-4 and the Lions are 4-7.  This is not a mistake, or a fluke or any other excusatory bullshit you want to throw out there.  The Lions come into this game with a shittier record because they have earned that shitty record.  If they stop reveling in their own denial and coddling those parts of themselves which tell them that it’s okay to be a 4-7 team because it’s not their fault but everybody else’s then they will beat the Colts.  It’s as simple as that.  If they stand up and take responsibility for themselves, for their record, for who they are and who they want to be as a team then goddammit, there’s no reason they shouldn’t win this game against a rookie quarterback leading a team without a head coach a year after that same talent-deficient team went to zombie town.  If you can’t beat a team like that without making love to excuses then goddammit, just get the hell out of the way and let somebody else take a shot because I have no time for that weak shit anymore.

Lions win and if they don’t, it’s their own goddamn fault.  It’s time to grow up.

Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

Somewhere, in the midst of the broken place that is my idiot fan heart, there still lives that thunderous whatever the hell that was I wrote only a couple of days ago, when I dragged myself off of my little corner stool, mouth filling with blood, spinal fluid pouring out of my nose and I challenged the whole world to a fight.  The problem with doing that is sometimes the world answers the bell too and when it does it is often hideous and gruesome and, well . . . you saw what happened.

It is fitting and terrible and gross and maddening and all too preciously perfect that the game turned on a play so heinous, so absolutely and slavishly devoted to the worship of the Necronomicon the NFL calls a rulebook, that 9,000 pound leviathan that hill trolls bring out of storage, rampaging orcs riding them and whipping their backs as they trudge and drag that monstrosity to the field anytime there’s a replay or a challenge or any other decision a referee has to make besides whether or not he is confident that he can make it to his car before he’s lynched by outraged fans.  And it was appropriate because after all that blathering I did about the New Americanism, there could be no more perfect moment to illustrate that the NFL, with all its corporatized double speak and Orwellian “No, the sky is not blue, it is electric green just like we tell you it is and no that knee was not down even though it was and everybody knows it was but argle bargle argle bargle and so on and so forth” inane bullshit, is the ultimate league of the New Americanism.  It embodies everything gross and stupid and asinine about that world, and that play and the hideous aftermath, itself gross and stupid and asinine, drove that point home more clearly than just about anything else I can imagine.  And in the end, it made me feel stupid for tricking myself into believing that real things matter, that what actually happens matters, that when a dude’s knee touches the ground and everyone sees it and knows that he’s fucking down that it matters.  My mistake, I guess.

Of course, it wasn’t just that.  The entire game felt like one that the Lions should have won, and for the second straight week they had the game pretty well in hand and then pissed it away in the final minutes, which is a new and oh so precious wrinkle that Fate and the Failure Demons have decided to send our way in this, the year of our great cornholing at the hands of the universe.  Like last week, the Lions had a chance to go up by ten points with only minutes left in the game, and just like last week they failed in that way that is far too familiar to all of us by now.  Last week, they settled for a field goal when a touchdown would have put the game out of reach.  This time, Matthew Stafford took a bad sack to take them out of field goal position and keep the game in reach for the Texans.  (God, I hate that senseless name.)

What followed probably deserves its own chapter in the long book of shame that is the story of the Detroit Lions.  Nick Harris managed to pin the Texans deep in their own end (something he managed to do a few times in this game so, uh, yay Nick I guess.) and then, naturally, the Texans drove the length of the field to tie the game at 31.  By the time they scored I was actually relieved that they did it fast enough so that Matthew “Sidewinder” Stafford could lead the Lions down the field and kick the game winning field goal because goddammit, in a just and fair world that is what is supposed to happen.

But this isn’t a just and fair world and you would think that I would have learned that terrible lesson by now.  No, instead the Lions drive stalled out and they were forced to take the game to overtime.  But, lo!  What’s this?  The Lions won the toss and continued to taunt my idiot heart and make me believe that they were going to finish what they started and finally win a goddamn Thanksgiving game.  They moved the ball with ease, taking it into Texans territory and . . . and then Brandon Pettigrew remembered he was Brandon Pettigrew and decided to reenact the heinous week 3 fumble against the Titans. 

And so it goes.  But Fate wasn’t done with us.  No, not by a long shot.  The Texans painfully and depressingly moved the ball into field goal territory of their own but the Lions defensive wall stiffened and drove those sons of bitches back just the extra yard necessary to force Shane Graham to put one just wide of the uprights.  And in that moment, despite the years of failure, the incessant misery, the constant pain, the misguided Charlie Brown optimism, I lined up, smiled at Lucy, got ready to kick that fucking ball one more time, more sure than ever that the Lions were going to win the game.  Again, it was the only just and fair outcome, and besides, a way of life, proud and hard Detroit vs. soft, carpet-bagging New America Houston, was at stake.

And then Jason Hanson did what Jason Hanson never does and missed the game winning field goal.  Dom Raiola was the picture of perfect failure on the sideline, squeezing every last drop of hope he had left in his idiot body into a desperate prayer, a prayer that fell deaf and dumb on whatever football gods were hanging out at Ford Field, ready to bend us over and break one off in our fool asses.  The ball went up and it hit the upright.  It hit the goddamn upright.  One inch to the left and we’d all be celebrating the Lions triumph – and Detroit’s – over the Texans and the scions of the New Americanism.  But it didn’t go one inch to the left and Dom Raiola winced and felt the gods slap him upside the head just as they have for more than a decade and in that moment the Lions and their fans and everything about us was utterly broken.

Predictably, the Texans cruised right on down the field and Shane Graham kicked the game winning field goal while Ford Field turned into a half-living tomb, a sarcophagus filled with slack-jawed zombies stumbling aimlessly towards the exits while the players and coaches milled about the field like lobotomized cattle, lowing at the fates, tongues lolling idiotically out of their mouths, and in that moment the Failure Demons all laughed and if there was any justice in the world, the giant foot from Monty Python would have taken that moment to make its triumphant return to pop culture.

But it didn’t and so everyone in that goddamn stadium, zombie and cattle alike, were forced to try to come up with something, anything, that would both explain just what in the fuck just happened and give them all a reason to believe there was a point in continuing on with this mad charade, this chimera of the soul masquerading as belief.

And that’s where we find ourselves right now, looking for answers, for people to blame, for something, anything, that we can do to justify the heinous bullshit we had to experience today.  And the truth is, is that you can blame everybody and everything.  It was just that kind of a game, a hideous amalgamation of everything that we have come to fear as Lions fans.  The refs boned us and didn’t even bother to lube up or wear a goddamn rubber (let’s not forget that aside from that horrendous non-review was the earlier review in which they refused to acknowledge what was a clear fumble by the Texans – or rather a ball that bounced off of a Texan knee on a kickoff and into the hands of a waiting Lion), Matthew Stafford continued his decline into outright boobery, throwing damn near every pass with that side-armed, back-footed DON’T MIND ME I’M JUST SKIPPIN’ ROCKS FELLAS way of his, missing open receiver after open receiver, there were the ill-timed fumbles, the lead-blowing, the coaching nincompoopery, and the beating of the hideous heart.

But Edgar Allan Poe references aside, let’s talk about that coaching nincompoopery for a moment, okay?  Coach bashing is a sacred rite of passage for all Lions fans and God only knows that I have wielded a bloody club myself from time to time but for the most part – certain misgivings aside – I have stuck with Jim Schwartz and the general gameplan even as others began to turn on him like a savage cannibal army.  But today was unforgivable.  It just was.  It was the sort of bullshit we’ve come to loathe about this team all wrapped up in one petulant idiotic gesture.  And what’s worse is that Schwartz knew it and did it anyway.  This wasn’t a case of a dude who simply didn’t know any better and threw the damn flag anyway.  No, he knew what he was doing but he did it anyway because he was pissed off.  Hell, he even admitted it in his press conference after the game!  He knew and he did it anyway, just like his goddamn team has done time after time after time the last couple of seasons.

I mean, what can you say to that?  What can you say that will make that okay?  This was his moment, that one horrible, shameful, clownish moment that strikes every man who dares to try to coach this insipid franchise.  This was the moment that Jim Schwartz went from embattled savior to just another punchline.  This was the moment he lost Lions fans, the moment that he became Wayne Fontes, Darryl Rodgers, Rod Marinelli, Marty “Take the Goddamn Wind” Mornhinweg.  This was the moment he was struck down fatally by Lions Disease, and it happened on national TV with every Lions fan – even the casual, casual ones who only watch on Thanksgiving – watching.  This was the moment that crystalized who he was, for better or worse, in the minds of all of those fans and naturally, it was for worse, and when I say worse I mean it was about as worse as worse can get.  He could have shit his pants, sat down and started weeping and his reputation wouldn’t have suffered as much as it did following that descent into petulance and madness.  When people talk about him years from now, this is what they’ll talk about.  This was his Take the Wind moment and hey, that might not be fair – it almost certainly isn’t given how damn miraculous is was that he dragged us from 0-16 to 10-6 – but that’s just the way this turd disguised as a cookie crumbles.

That sucks but it is what it is.  It is what it goddamn is.  And while that was just one moment in an admittedly exciting game, a game the Lions should have won a thousand times over and a game the Lions managed to lose a thousand and one times over and in a thousand and one different ways, that’s the one that everyone will remember.

There is a lot that people can be happy with in this game – the Lions led the whole way against a 10-1 team, they were physical, they broke out the big plays, St. Calvin nearly rose to heaven, and when Matthew Stafford wasn’t flipping it underhand while falling backwards to a wide open expanse of nothingness he was making the plays that make people coddle him and overlook and enable all of the aforementioned bullshit.  Everything that we love – or want to love anyway – about this team was on display.  But everything that we hate was there too and in the end, that outweighed everything else – yet again.

People will nitpick this shit to death, because that’s just what fans do, especially hyper-obsessive internet fans, but really what’s the point?  We all know what the problems are, they’re pretty damn obvious by now, and now it’s just a matter of whether or not you have faith in the dudes in charge to fix it.  Unfortunately the dude we’re supposed to have faith in just entered the Mornhinweg Zone and shit, that’s almost an impossible place to come back from, you know?

In the end, I’m just sort of sad, not necessarily because the Lions lost (after all, what’s one more loss in this lost world of a season?) but because this felt like the type of game that represented a tipping point, a “there’s no coming back from this” point, because the symbolism was just too perfect, the fuck-ups crystalized in a way that will hang over this team’s head until they either obliterate them in a way we’ve never seen a Lions team do or until somebody else comes along and fools our idiot hearts into believing in something better one more time.  This was the type of game that defines a team, not just in the present but for the future as well.  This is the type of game that becomes a ghost and follows the team around, a ghost that howls and whispers terrible things in their ears at the worst possible times, a ghost that ultimately breaks them and us and everything and everyone involved with this accursed franchise.

It’s been a hard season, a miserable season, the sort of season that puts fans down for good, but on Thanksgiving, one more time, I dragged myself out of the corner, mouth filled with blood, spinal fluid pouring out of my nose, and I dared the world to knock me out.  And the world rose up before me, toyed with me for a while, and then it did.