The Detroit Lions, Champions Of My Heart

Maybe I should grow a beard like that.

In the wake of the delirium following the Lions victory over the Redskins, in which I ranted and raved like a mental patient and chased invisible butterflies while people who are actually allowed to exist outside of the bubble of lunacy that is Lions fandom all looked on in a combination of fear, wonder and amusement, it is time to settle down a bit and take a look at how closely I managed to call the game. And, for once, I feel like I actually nailed this shit pretty well. Of course, that could still be an aftereffect of the delirium, which has yet to fully leave my system (Which, by the way, is my excuse when the neighbors see me naked in the street, waving glow sticks and dancing like Axl Rose. At least this week.) But, I feel like I did pretty well this time around. I wasn’t perfect, but fuck it, other than The Great Willie Young, who is these days?

PREDICTION THE FIRST: Stafford starts slow but ends up completing 22 of 36 passes for 258 yards and 3 touchdowns with 1 interception.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED: Stafford started slow, but ended up completing 26 of 45 passes for 212 yards and 4 touchdowns with 1 interception.

Okay, I feel like I nailed this one. Maybe I was a little off with the numbers, but in spirit, I feel like I called this. Maybe Stafford wasn’t quite as efficient as I had hoped for, and maybe that slow start - which I anticipated lasting the first couple of drives of the first quarter - lasted the entire first half, but fuck, at the end of the day the dude threw 4 touchdown passes and won the game, so . . . yeah.

But it wasn’t that pretty. The 4-1 ratio and the 90.2 QB rating look nice and shiny and a dude or lady dude looking at the stats for the first time would say that Stafford had a damn fine game, but, well . . . no, not really. The truth is that Stafford – and with him the Lions offense – bogged down terribly for much of the game on Sunday, reminding me throughout the first half – and at times in the second half – of the offense we watched with horror and sadness during the Bears game in Week 1. 212 yards on 45 attempts is actually pretty damn shitty. It’s only an average of 4.7 yards per pass, which is pretty close to what Stafford and Shaun Hill put up against the Bears in that first week debacle. I said it then and I’ll say it again here – those are Michigan QB’s in 2008 kind of numbers. Those are Nick Sheridan kind of numbers for fuck’s sake. If you can’t climb above 5 yards per pass, you’re passing game is abysmal.

But, at the end of the day, Matthew Stafford isn’t Nick Sheridan, walk-on with an invalid’s arm. He’s Matthew Stafford, number one overall draft pick with an arm created by a team of scientists led by Oppenheimer and his assistant, Tila Tequila’s grandmother, to destroy the Nazis. And no matter how much he struggled throughout most of the game, when the time came for him to throw a laser beam to the endzone on 4^th and 1 with his team down 5 late in the 4^th quarter, Matthew Stafford turned into a robot and killed Hitler.

So I’m not really all that concerned with Stafford’s play. I think he was obviously rusty – more so than we probably thought, but really, in retrospect, it would have been a miracle if he wasn’t that bad for most of the game – but he’s still a high caliber playmaker, and he did some things at the end of the game that Shaun Hill or the Ol’ Grit Merchant just couldn’t do. And that’s all there is to it.

But what made me antsy and angry and what made me curse Scott Linehan’s ancestors and call upon the forces of Valhalla to sweep down and eat his bones in a fit of righteous rage was the fact that the offense as a whole looked like shit. Where were the quick passes to the tight ends that I had grown to love? Where was the ball control offense which had seen the Lions obliterate the Rams and almost pull off miracles against the Packers and Giants?

Brandon Pettigrew only saw a couple of passes come his way against the Redskins and he was well covered each time. Meanwhile, Tony Scheffler never even sniffed the ball. A lot of people have actually celebrated this, saying that it was about time that the Lions targeted their wide receivers rather than their tight ends. My own opinion on this matter has evolved tremendously since the season started. Hopefully, you know this. I don’t want to have to restate my thoughts every time I talk about this, so all I’ll say is that I grew to understand and love the Lions offensive philosophy. And I was dismayed to see them change it on Sunday.

But I think there’s a reason for it that goes beyond offensive philosophy. In order to effectively run that sort of system – the sort that sees quick passes, and establishes a ball control offense predicated on those quick timing passes – your quarterback has to be sharp. He has to be accurate and he has to be in a rhythm. He has to know where all of his receivers are, down to the inch, and he needs to be able to throw them the ball almost without thinking about it. It needs to be second nature, something that has come from constant repetition. It is almost muscle memory. That’s why Shaun Hill struggled so badly in the opener against the Bears and why it took a few weeks for it all to finally click in. He needed time to get the reps with his receivers that are so, so necessary for it to become second nature.

Meanwhile, Matthew Stafford was playing in a game for the first time in almost two months and for the majority of that time he hadn’t so much as soft tossed a ball to one of his receivers. So, to expect him to efficiently direct an offense predicated on timing and throws that can only come with constant repetition was ridiculous. On those short routes, you have to place the ball with pinpoint accuracy and hit the receiver in stride. If you don’t, the receiver has to come to a stop and the play is going to get blown up. So he had to throw the ball on deeper routes because on those routes you have time to think, to process what is happening before firing. You just need to get the ball in the general area so that the receiver can catch it. They were routes that allowed him to take advantage of his natural talent even if the mental part of the game wasn’t all there. He wasn’t going to march the team down the field because he couldn’t. He couldn’t consistently hit his receivers enough for that to work. There would be too many drops, too many misfires, too many mistakes. And that’s exactly what we saw when they did try that. But when it came time to make a play, there was no real offensive philosophy other than “Matthew, you drop back to pass and for the love of God, try to get the ball to Calvin.” And it worked. In the end, he did get the ball to Calvin when it mattered the most, and I suppose that’s all that counts.

Really, it was perhaps the finest example we have seen yet of how important it is to have players like Stafford and St. Calvin, singular talents who can rise above all of the mistakes, all of the inconsistencies and just make a play when it matters the most. The Lions didn’t have any rhythm. They didn’t have any sort of consistency to their play. The offense was largely broken against the Redskins. But when nothing else worked, they just had their rocket armed quarterback drop back and throw the ball to their superfreak wide receiver. That’s the ultimate back up plan. It was ugly as hell. It was disjointed. And I screamed at fate and wondered about the hilarious unfairness of it all, that we could struggle so much on offense with our star quarterback finally back on the same day that our defense came of age. But it was still enough and the Lions still won.

I am still hopeful that we can see Stafford run the same sort of offense that Shaun Hill was running. I think with him at the controls that it could be unstoppable. You work underneath to Pettigrew and Scheffler, which moves the ball safely and effectively, basically acting as your running game, and then when teams adjust to stop that, you murder them over the top with St. Calvin. And if they try to take both of those away, you hit Nate Burleson. Matthew Stafford can make every throw in every situation. And so the sky is the limit for this offense. It just needs timing and repetition to work, and in a few weeks, I think we’ll finally see Matthew Stafford be explosive and efficient, and that’s when the fun will really start.

PREDICTION THE SECOND: Best finds enough room to pick up 70 yards on 16 carries. He also catches 6 passes for 55 yards. He accounts for 1 touchdown.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED: Best ran for 48 yards on 12 carries. He caught 5 passes for 31 yards and failed to score a touchdown.

Obviously, I was a little off on this one, but you know what? I don’t really think that I was. And that’s because for some reason, Best didn’t play much in the 4^th quarter. If we look at the actual numbers versus what I predicted, we see that had Best gotten to 16 carries, he would have been on pace to hit 64 yards, so . . . yeah, I think that I kinda got this one right in spirit. Best found enough running room to be occasionally effective, but not enough room to consistently move the ball down the field. That’s basically what I was getting at with that prediction.

If anything, I may have actually ended up slightly underselling the effectiveness of the Lions running game, as Kevin Smith finally showed up and added 51 yards on 12 carries, many of them coming during the 4^th quarter when the Lions had to move the ball. It’s possible that he was allowed to pick up some decent yardage because the Redskins were guarding so heavily against the pass since they knew the Lions had to get the ball down the field and score, but still, Smith’s general effectiveness was a good sign. Most encouraging was that he seemed to have good agility on several of those runs, cutting to the outside and picking up extra yardage after it appeared the Redskins had him stuffed. As I’ve said before, when your knee explodes into a million pieces like Smith’s did, the thing that is most often taken away after it’s put back together is that lateral agility, that wiggle, that ability to make guys miss. So, obviously, I was delighted to see Smith run the ball effectively because of those things, not in spite of them. It gave me hope that he can be an effective complement to Best going forward, and if he keeps it up then the Lions offense becomes even more dangerous.

Combined, Best and Smith picked up 99 yards on 24 carries, which is just north of 4 yards a carry, which is almost astonishing when you consider how impossibly bad it felt like both the offense and the running game were throughout much of the game. The key, I think, is that the Lions effectively picked their spots late in the game. They ran the ball when they knew it would be the most effective. It wasn’t done just to run it for its own sake, which is the idiotic mistake most proponents of a strong running game make. They were runs with a purpose, and they ended up being an underrated factor in the Lions surviving long enough on offense to put the game away late in the fourth quarter.

PREDICTION THE THIRD: St. Calvin catches 7 passes for 123 yards and 1 touchdown and I start to break out with the weird Dr. Manhattan shit that I did last season.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED: Excuse me, I need to go change my panties.

Ahem. I apologize. The truth is that I am not wearing any panties. Or underwear of any kind. Or pants. And why would I be, when St. Calvin exploded for 9 catches for 101 yards and 3 touchdowns, leaving me with an erection that could be seen from space – without a satellite. That’s right, you fucking ET sons of bitches, behold this monolithic obelisk of granite and fire and tremble in fear, for upon it sits the throne of God himself.

Jesus. I’m not sure what that was. I’m sorry for making you contemplate my erection, even if it is capable of bringing world peace. You should not be thinking of my dick when there is a Saint to celebrate. Indeed. Today, we officially put to rest any lingering fears, any doubts about the sainthood of this remarkable being. St. Calvin has performed many miracles over the past month, perhaps none so impressive as catching 7 touchdown passes in October, which broke the team record for touchdown passes in a single month. Or maybe nothing was as impressive as this most recent performance, the apex of that wonderful month, a performance in which he caught big pass after big pass, finishing with three touchdown catches, including the game winner which came on a 4^th and 1 play late in the 4^th quarter in which he was surrounded by several Redskins defenders. Truly, he has earned his place aside St. Francis of Assisi and St. Patrick and St. John and St. Barry and St. McQueen (the patron saint of badasses) and of course, St. Ides.

Even better than the numbers – and damn, they were pretty great on their own – is that when the Lions needed him the most, St. Calvin came through. He rose above all the petty bullshit, all the Lions Disease blather, and he won us the damn game. Go to hell, Roy Williams. Whoa, I’m not entirely sure where that came from, but obviously it needed to be said. St. Calvin is the one we’ve all been waiting for. Roy Williams, Charles Rogers, Mike Williams – they were all pretenders, failed prototypes before we finally got it right. And we got it so right that right now, I don’t even care that all those prototypes exploded in a mess of hollowed out collar bones and failure. St. Calvin is our man and nothing that came before him matters. He is the present and he is the future and the future is filled with sunshine and blowjobs, with rainbows and candy. Fuck Dr. Manhattan. We have St. Calvin Johnson.

PREDICTION THE FOURTH: McNabb will complete 25-39 passes for 265 yards and 1 touchdown, but he’ll be picked off 2 times, and each one will be a killer. This will be the difference in the game.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED: McNabb completed 17-30 passes for 210 yards and 1 touchdown. He was picked off only once, but it was a killer and was the turning point in the game.

I was a little off here on the actual numbers, but that was because I was unprepared for just how thorough an ass kicking Donovan McNabb was about to face. I mean, goddamn, the Lions defensive line just beat that man’s ass. It didn’t matter if he was tripping over the feet of his own linemen or getting clubbed to death by an angry Ndamukong Suh or running from his life from Kyle Vanden Bosch for the 19^th time or getting impaled by Cliff Avril, because the simple fact was that Donovan McNabb had no choice. He was going to die no matter which direction he turned.

I cannot tell you how gratifying it was to so thoroughly demolish McNabb that by the end of the game he was pulled for Rex fucking Grossman. I can’t tell you how gratifying it was to beat that man’s ass so badly that it ruined his relationship with his head coach. I can’t tell you how gratifying it was to wreck McNabb’s shit so much so that Eagles fans were nodding their heads and pointing to it as the final proof needed to write McNabb off as a fraud. I mean, holy shit! The Lions beat on that son of a bitch so badly that not only did it result in an appearance of the Sex Cannon, but it also potentially destroyed his relationship with his coach, his team’s season, and the man’s legacy. Good Lord!

Of course that is hyperbolic as all hell, but shit, those kinds of things just don’t happen to the Lions defense, you know? That is the sort of shit that other teams do to us. The Redskins walked into Detroit with Donovan McNabb, respected vet, potential Hall of Famer and unquestioned starting quarterback, and walked out with madness and chaos, with a coach and a quarterback who hate each other, a QB controversy involving Rex Grossman and with Eagles fans laughing and pointing and saying “See? I told you so.” That came after they played the Detroit Lions. That came after the Detroit Lions beat the holy hell out of McNabb. We helped ruin a dude! And we helped ruin a whole team! No one else will dare celebrate that fact, but fuck it, I am not above such petty joys.

I feel for my boy Raven, and I feel for the other Redskins fans who are good dudes who hang out here, but fuck, this is an important moment for my dudes here, you know? This is something I have to be proud of. This is the sort of feral, primal bloodthirsty joy that I never get to feel as a Lions fan. But I get to feel it now and I won’t apologize for it.

PREDICTION THE FIFTH: Torain will run for 78 yards on 22 carries, as the run defense finally stiffens with the return of DeAndre Levy to the lineup. After the game, The Great Willie Young will ceremonially scalp Torain for being a Redskin and will have to be restrained by his teammates and the ghost of Andrew Jackson when he gets carried away with flashbacks to his days as a warrior during the Indian Wars.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED: Torain ran for only 10 yards on 9 carries before leaving the game with an injury. 10 yards! 10 fucking yards! Goddamn. I know I am behaving like a damn fool in this post, but that is because I am still in wide eyed awe of what the Lions did on defense. I hope for this shit – or hell, even for a sliver of it – each week, but it never really happens. This week it happened and it happened even better than I imagined.

Hell, I just hoped that the Lions would slow down Torain and the Redskins running game enough so that there was evident progress. But goddamn, they smashed that son of a bitch into the dirt. And while all this was going on, they were also slaughtering poor, dumb Donovan McNabb. WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!! I think I need to go run around outside for a while and scare the shit out of all the old people and small animals or small people and old animals. I don’t know. Who cares? I don’t even give a shit. I am delirious with joy and this is deteriorating into utter gibberish, but it is a gibberish born of happiness and that is a rare thing for us as Lions fans so I won’t apologize for it.

The Lions defense was thoroughly dominating against the Redskins and I am in shock as I confront that wonderful reality. Will it continue? Probably not to this extent, but fuck it, we have seen signs that the defense was finally, miraculously coming together over the last few weeks, and this week it crescendoed into something spectacular and good and real, like a great and powerful wave, and all I can do is try to hold on and ride it to its beautiful end. Are there holes and problems left to fix? Of course, but right now I don’t even care. I just want to celebrate because . . . Jesus, I just never expected this, you know? Pleasant surprises do not belong to us as Lions fans. But this one does. This one does.