2009 Lions Season Review, Part 1: The Quarterbacks

The Future

Okay, settle in, this post is obscenely long, and I apologize in advance. I wrote it in chunks, here and there, and in retrospect, perhaps I should have broken it up into multiple posts, but fuck all that, it is what it is, which is over 4,000 words of dumb bullshit for your enjoyment and perhaps even edification. The other positional reviews won't be as long - this one kind of serves as a general overview for the season too, in a sense - and I swear I am not some autistic robot, just a damn fool, and well, here we go.

If there was one group of players on this team that caused the most violent and schizophrenic mood swings, it was the quarterbacks. Whether it was celebratory delirium in the wake of Matthew Stafford's Terminator performance against the Browns, or whether it was loping through the streets, angry, afraid and confused, following an apocalyptically bad performance by Daunte Culpepper, the emotions that were inspired by the three dudes who took snaps for the Lions this past season largely set the tone for how we viewed the rest of the team.

That is probably a bit unfair, but it is reflective of two undeniable realities. First, the quarterback is by far the most visible member of the team, and so how he performs stands out a lot more than anyone else. If say, Calvin Johnson has a bad game, he can disappear from the action and while we might notice this, we can't actively say that he is fucking up. He's just not there. A quarterback does not have this luxury. If he's struggling, he still has to take the snaps. There's nowhere for him to hide, nowhere for him to go, no one there to pick up the slack. The quarterback is the one player on the field who, fairly or unfairly, is never allowed to have an off day. And second, because the quarterback is in a unique position to handle the ball on every offensive play, how he plays will inevitably have a much, much more significant impact on the outcome of a game than any other player.

Okay, with that all said, perhaps we can put the schizophrenia of the Lions season in focus. At least a little bit. I mean the kaleidoscopic array of bizarre feelings inspired by this team can never be truly explained - witness this funhouse of a blog - but I suppose we can try. And by examining each quarterback, and how they played this season, we can begin to see how and why this team either made us smile or made us weep tears of blood.

When the season started, there was a lot of controversy regarding who should be the starting quarterback for the Lions. I was in the camp that said we should start Matthew Stafford immediately. I have stated the reasons many times, and in an effort to keep this from ballooning into War and Peace, I'll just refer you to here. The Culpepper backers apparently felt that Daunte gave the Lions the best chance to win immediately, and that Matthew Stafford's development would be hindered by starting right away for such a lousy team. Obviously, I disagreed with both of those assessments.

Unfortunately for me, and everyone else who wanted to put this controversy to bed, Stafford struggled a bit in the first game of the season against the Saints, and that predictably led to indignant howling from the pro-Culpepper contingent of the fanbase. Thankfully, Schwartz stuck with Stafford and as the season progressed, he began to show the signs of a franchise quarterback, piloting the Lions to their first win in a billion years against the Redskins in Week 3. He played efficiently and smartly in that game and for the first time in a long time, it felt like we finally had a quarterback who wouldn't shit all over himself in the clutch. It was a nice feeling. It was like we were a bunch of beleaguered teachers who had spent their lives trying to teach a gaggle of retards how to tie their shoes without pissing their pants and breaking down in tears only to be transferred to a school for the gifted. It was disorienting and kind of confusing, and while we weren't quite sure how to feel yet, and while we weren't quite comfortable, we knew that it was a good thing.

The next week, Stafford came out against the Bears in Chicago and had his best game of his young career to that point. Of course, the game ended with his knee betraying him, which made our fragile sense of happiness and optimism wither away and crumble into dust. All we could do is sit back and watch it blow away on an ill wind and hope that Stafford would be back sooner rather than later.

But, for Culpepper backers, and Culpepper himself, this was the chance to show everyone that he was indeed worthy of a starting job once again in the NFL. It was a strange time, because if I am being honest with myself, I really didn't want Culpepper to do that well. I know, I know, that sounds absolutely horrible, but I am a man of the future, and I believed, with all of my heart that Matthew Stafford needed to be the man now if he was going to be a king of men in the future. The last thing I wanted was for Culpepper to be just competent enough to keep Stafford on the bench for the rest of the season and for next season to start with Stafford a relative unknown quantity while Culpepper fled for a billion dollar contract to quarterback some shithole team to a 6-10 record.

Still, I wanted the team to do well, regardless of the quarterback situation, and that created a sort of weird internal melodrama that had me both rooting for and against Culpepper. I wanted the team to win, but I also wanted it to be clear that they needed Stafford, if that makes any sense. It probably doesn't, but what the hell, this whole season made little sense and so that is probably appropriate.

Culpepper came out against the Steelers and actually played reasonably well - for a while anyway - keeping the Lions close enough that they had the chance to tie the game on a final drive late in the fourth quarter against the defending Super Bowl champs. It was pretty much exactly how I wanted it to go down. Culpepper played well enough that it didn't hurt the team, but not well enough that he was creating any sort of real quarterback controversy. Of course, on that final drive, Culpepper was sacked three times in a row, effectively destroying any chance the Lions had at coming back. It was a stark and brutal reminder of Culpepper's deficiencies - he's not good under pressure, makes terrible decisions, etc. - and I recall being left with the impression that the team was getting better but that Stafford was probably still the man.

Then the Lions took a little trip across Lake Michigan and everything went straight to hell. Culpepper played like a man who would be run off of a sandlot pickup game and the Lions were destroyed. Quarterback controversy? Uh . . . no. Unfortunately, this wasn't because both quarterbacks had played out of their minds and Stafford gave the coaching staff no choice but to anoint him Matthew the Great, King of Detroit, but because Culpepper had played so horrifically that the idea of him as a starting quarterback going forward was so brutally depressing. It was an awful thought, just horrible, and it made us all remember that we were still perilously close to the hellmouth that had swallowed us up the season before.

So, with Culpepper having committed suicide against the Packers, the Lions desperately turned to Stafford even though the poor dude was still probably too banged up to play effectively. I will note that this whole time, Ol' Plucky, Drew Stanton, was still hanging out on the sideline, ready and waiting for his chance to step in and lead the Lions to glory. It says a lot about the coaches' opinion of his abilities that they felt like they had no choice but to either play a physical cripple or a mental cripple.

So, Stafford was back in, and with him, a sense of hope returned. There was the belief that now that Culpepper was dead and buried, we could move forward once and for all. The old was dead and gone, its corpse burned and tossed into the Detroit River, and we could finally celebrate a new age. It was okay that for the first few games back, Stafford struggled. It sucked, we wanted both him and the team to do better, but it was somehow okay because at least they were growing together, and that one day, hopefully soon, they would have that breakout performance and then we would be off and running.

And then Cleveland came to town, and Matthew Stafford became the Terminator. It was the kind of performance that had me rhapsodizing like a love struck retard. It was embarrassing and vaguely pathetic, sad in a kind of pitiful way. It was just such an alien feeling, that feeling of uncontrollable hope, and for once it was nice to babble on about how good it felt to be a Lions fan. I had forgotten that feeling, and while it was disorienting and difficult to really express that feeling without devolving into inane gibberish, it was wonderful and it was because of Stafford.

After throwing for over 400 yards and 5 touchdowns, there was little doubt that this dude could get it done in the NFL. But even more than the gaudy final numbers was the incredible toughness, both physical and mental, that Stafford displayed. Caught in a shootout, the 21 year old whose public persona prior to the season was best captured by the famous shots of him getting shitfaced with coeds, showed that he was a natural leader who could rally and inspire his teammates to keep fighting every time they fell behind. That's a rare gift, and combined with his obvious physical talents, it signaled that the future for both Stafford and the Lions was filled with sunshine and blowjobs.

It almost didn't matter that Stafford's shoulder was ground into hamburger meat on the second to last play of the game. By breaking free of the grasp of the trainers and staggering back onto the field to throw the game winning touchdown with no time left on the clock, Stafford became a hero and provided us all with the one indelible moment that we will always remember from this past season. We knew that he was hurt and that it probably meant that he would miss some time, but fuck it, we got what we wanted, Stafford was the man, totally and completely, without question or reservation, and whatever came next would be worth it.

Unfortunately, we are Lions fans and we should have known better. There was an undeniable sense of pride and giddy happiness when Stafford trotted out onto the field only four days later to start against the Packers on Thanksgiving. Daunte Culpepper threw a hissy fit on the sideline when he was told he wouldn't start, but that was just a shameful sideshow to the main story, which was that Matthew Stafford was tough as nails, and that he was already making himself a legend. Sadly, though, real life intervened, as it often does, and it was clear that Stafford was too hurt to be truly effective. He started one more game, against the Bengals, and after getting smoked once again by a pass rusher, his shoulder cried mercy and that was it for him for the season.

Sadly, and cruelly, there were still four games left to play. And with Stafford stuck inside of a plastic bubble for the rest of the season with a team of Ninja Monks with Bazookas standing guard over him, the Lions had to finish things off with Daunte the Lame. Predictably enough, Culpepper was terrible, just atrocious really, and a sense of ennui settled over Lions fans everywhere. The excitement and promise in the wake of the Browns game was all gone, trapped in that bubble with Stafford. There was the sense that none of it mattered, that the rest of the season was just a cruel death march with no point or reason.

The fanbase perked up a little bit when Culpepper became so bad that the coaches had no choice but to put him down like a lame horse and insert Ol' Plucky into the starting lineup. A fan favorite, both because of his local ties and because there was the perception that he had never been given a fair shot, Drew Stanton finally had his chance to show that he could be a viable NFL quarterback. With every Lions fan but one desperately hoping that he would steal the show, Stanton utterly shit the bed, playing so poorly that Jim Schwartz was forced to drag Culpepper back from the glue factory and stick him back in the game. And with that, the Lions season died an ignoble and cruel death.

Alright, so the season is over, the ugly details have been vomited back up, and now we have to figure out what we're left with. Let's take a closer look at the stats.

Stafford was 201-377 for 2267 yards, with 13 touchdowns and 20 interceptions. That's only a completion percentage of 53.7%, which is not all that good. In fact, the numbers as a whole don't look so hot, but this is partially because Stafford was put in a position where he was forced to throw over and over and over again because the defense was getting destroyed like Germany circa 1945. This meant that he didn't have the luxury of being all that efficient with the ball. He had to throw a lot when everyone in the building knew he was going to throw. That's going to lead to a lot of incomplete passes and a lot of interceptions, especially for a 21 year old who's missed a lot of practice time and whose only playmaker has also been banged up.

Stafford actually threw for 226.7 yards per game, and if you extrapolate that over the whole season, pretend that he was healthy and all that, that means that he would have thrown for north of 3600 yards as a rookie for a shitty football team. That's not bad, right? And we have to take into account the fact that he was hurt for a lot of the games that he ended up playing. I think that the chances are good that he would have thrown for even more yardage had he been healthy for those games. And on top of all that, we have to remember, again, that he was missing practice and couldn't develop a rhythm with any of his receivers, which is paramount for any quarterback. For a 21 year old rookie, it's not just important, it's a requisite for even the barest of competence. The fact that Stafford did what he was able to do given all of the above is pretty astounding when you think about it. If he had been allowed to progress linearly, without interruption, there is a chance he would have made an assault on the 4,000 yard mark. Of course, if we continue to extrapolate the numbers, we see that he would have ended up throwing 32 interceptions, which . . . okay, that shit is bad. But again, there are some extenuating circumstances, and if he was given the ability to regularly practice with his receivers, and given a chance to progress week to week, I think that number would have come down.

Of course, I recognize that I am just reaching for something - anything, really - to make me feel good about this season, and my liberal massaging of the numbers is something you would probably ordinarily only find in a seedy Asian whorehouse, but I really do feel good about Stafford. You have to remember that in the great rookie QB battle, between Stafford and Mark Sanchez, that their final numbers ended up being fairly similar. Then if you take into account the fact that Sanchez was healthy and played six more games for a playoff team that didn't ask him to do anything other than not fuck up too much, it makes Stafford look all the better. If you flipped those two quarterbacks, put Stafford on the Jets and Sanchez on the Lions, I think Stafford would have been the Rookie of the Year without question and we would all be sobbing and comparing Sanchez to Joey Harrington.

Okay, okay, I have contorted myself and the numbers so much that I feel like either a despicable street performer or some Thai whore, although I suppose those two things are fairly synonymous. But I am willing to do just about anything to make Stafford look good in the wake of what was an otherwise disaster of a season, and really, isn't that kind of the point? That for once, there is a player who makes me want to stand up and defend him? Most of the time, as you will see in the rest of this post, I am all too willing to savage and cannibalize some poor fool for the sin of suckage, but with Stafford, I am willing to excuse the mistakes and point a stream of light at the positives because he gives me hope. It's that simple.

Daunte Culpepper, in 8 games this season, completed 89 of 157 passes for 945 yards, with 3 touchdowns and 6 interceptions, further cementing the perception that his future doesn't reside under center, but at the helm of a, uh, let's say a Loveboat. Sure, Culpepper's completion percentage of 56.7% was a bit better than Stafford's, but that is more reflective of Culpepper's devolution into what my man Ty termed a human checkdown. Culpepper didn't throw the ball downfield nearly as much as Stafford, as evidenced by his paltry 118 yards per game, and when he did it often resulted in comical interceptions and badly underthrown balls, which is baffling when you consider that Culpepper's only real asset is his arm strength. It was like someone managed to combine the worst traits of Culpepper and Dan Orlovsky, and, well, there you go.

Of course, Culpepper is delusional enough to believe that he can be a quality starting quarterback in the NFL, something that we had beaten into our brains by idiot announcers week after week after week. Well, let's take a look at just how ridiculous that is, shall we? Culpepper's last good season was in 2004, or five years ago, or in football terms, 50 years ago. Since that Fantasy Football Championship Season of Culpepper's in '04, he has played 31 games, thrown for just over 5,000 yards, 20 touchdowns and 32 interceptions. That, uh, that isn't good, you know? What in any of that mess suggests that Culpepper will ever be a decent NFL quarterback again? It took him FIVE YEARS just to match the yardage total he put up in 2004, and he has thrown for half the amount of touchdowns in FIVE YEARS that he threw for in '04. The dude is done and he's been done for a loooooong time.

But, you say, there is another. Indeed. Ol' Plucky, Drew Stanton, also saw time at quarterback this season, and let's see what he did with that time. In four games, only one of which he started, Stanton completed 26 of 51 passes for 259 yards, along with 0 touchdowns and 6 interceptions. Yikes. Look, my position on Stanton has been beaten into the dirt, exhumed and then defiled way too many times already, so I won't launch into a screed here, and I will just say that the dude isn't a very good quarterback. Do I think he has a chance to be a viable backup somewhere? Maybe. But I still haven't seen anything that shows me even that. Maybe he's a decent third string type, but honestly there really is no such thing. You have your starters, your backups, and your carpet salesmen, and chances are good that Stanton will be doing something other than playing football within the next couple of years.

Okay, okay, so in this fractured season, it's tough to get a sense of how the quarterbacks performed as a whole just from looking at their individual statistics. So, let's look at them all added up. This should be fun(He says as he secures the noose around his neck).

For the season, Lions quarterbacks completed 316 of 585 passes for 3471 yards, along with 16 touchdowns and 32 interceptions. They were also sacked 43 times, and well, uh, there you go. Draw your own conclusions, because I have drawn enough - both obvious and convoluted - in this post, and those numbers really do speak for themselves.

WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN FOR THE FUTURE?

Well, because I am a gentleman and I do not feel like carjacking poor Doc Brown, I can't be entirely sure, but I will do my best to speculate, because if nothing else, that is the essence of blogging in these strange and terrible times.

Anyway, it's clear that Stafford is the man. This point is indisputable. At least I hope. There are always a few blathering idiots out there, so who knows? But what is a bit more hazy is whether or not he will ever amount to, well, the Superman that we so desperately need. I think he will. I have said it multiple times, and I truly believe it, that Stafford is a star. He has all the physical tools and he showed this season that he obviously has the toughness, both mental and physical, to be not only a starting NFL quarterback, but that rare quarterback who can transform an entire team into a winner. That's a hell of a bold statement to make, but I stand by it. Matthew Stafford will be a star in the NFL and I have no doubt about it.

As for what languishes behind him on the bench, well, Daunte the Lame's days in Detroit are thankfully and mercifully almost definitely over. I wouldn't have qualified that with the word 'almost', but Martin Mayhew, in a recent brief comment, terrifyingly said that he wouldn't rule out leaving the door open for Culpepper to return. If this happens I think my face might melt like those Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Hopefully, Culpepper's delusions of grandeur will keep him hunting for a starting job for some other poor team, and we can eventually try to put these trying times behind us.

Stanton, on the other hand, is an interesting case. Not so much because he is any good - obviously, I don't think he is - but because so many fans still see him as a dude who has never been given a fair shot. I think that we'll see a lot of clamor by Lions fans to keep Stanton as the number two behind Stafford, but honestly, I hope this doesn't happen. It says a lot about Stanton's ability that not one but two different coaching staffs and front offices have deemed him unworthy of even a chance despite the dumpster fire going on. I mean, the dude couldn't even see the field when Dan Orlovsky was chasing fireflies or whatever the fuck he was doing in the back of the Metrodome endzone, or when Daunte the Lame waddled onto the field after playing Mr. Mom last year. That's bad. And then this season, he still couldn't see the field, until Culpepper became so bad that I'm pretty sure they would have yanked him even if they didn't have a backup. They would have just stuck Jason Hanson back there and kneeled down the rest of the game. Needless to say, that doesn't exactly speak well for Ol' Plucky. And when he did get his shot, he completely shit the bed. It was horrible.

Basically, what I want to see is this: Stafford stays and starts, obviously. Then I want the Lions to bring in a veteran on the cheap to back up this season - Patrick Ramsey is already hanging around, why not him? - and then bring in a young dude to develop as Stafford's backup for the future. I would advocate spending a late round pick on a dude like Tony Pike out of Cincinnati, but honestly, there are just too many holes to fill already, and so if the Lions can grab some other team's late round castoff off of the waiver wire, then that would be great.

In any event, the future at quarterback is bright for the Lions. That is the first time I have ever been able to say that. Not just in my time writing here, but in my entire life. That is unfathomably sad and kind of obscene in a way. But to hell with all that, the past is the past, and the future is Matthew Stafford, and that's a good thing.

WHAT I SAID BEFORE THE SEASON: Grade: C. I expect a lot of mistakes mixed in with some big plays, some throws from Stafford that make you go HOLY SHIT and get all hot and bothered and then some throws that make you have flashbacks to that smilin' fool tickling the ivories. C for competence, which is a hell of a lot better than we are used to.

FINAL GRADE: Okay, I'm not going to give a final grade here, because really, the season was too fractured. I was impressed with Stafford and I think my assessment above was pretty on target - if anything, I was a bit happier than that with Stafford's performance, but largely because of what it presaged more than what it meant right in the moment, if that makes any sense. It probably doesn't, but what the hell, neither does anything else in this post. Both Culpepper and Stanton get obvious F's, just for you vampires who need to see their failure interpreted in such a way.