“So, how are we feeling about this?”
I don’t like when the question “How are you feeling?” is expressed with this syntax. It seems like it’s a tactic, and one frequently deployed by people in sales. “How are we feeling about the 3-piece contemporary?” is how a furniture salesperson would ask you if you liked a 3-piece living room sofa set. “How we feeling about it?” It smacks of faux-folksiness and grossly drips with unearned familiarity. My cynicism towards and half-understanding of the extreme mundanity that is the business world makes me imagine some vaunted sales “guru” in 2005 selling this idea as a central tenet in his sales keynote. Something about how the pronoun “we” in the question subtly implies an allegiance between the salesperson and the mark customer; “You’re not demanding answers about them, you’re giving them authorship of a new, you-and-me team.” If it’s not obvious, I can’t stand business jargon and I find the cottage industry built around it slightly nauseating.
But that doesn’t mean I’m not trying to use it here. I’m not above minimum-effort sales tactics. I want people to read my blog. If I have to sound like I’m talking you into a 2017 Altima to minutely increase the chances of you bringing my blog up to a person at work, so be it. Just wanted to be above board. My sincere question to the Lions and our glorious fandom: how are we feeling about this?
Superficially, obviously, we’re feeling pretty solid. We’re 1-0, which is the best record possible right now. We beat the champs! And, importantly, we’ve formulated good mental comebacks for the talking heads who scorch-takedly suggested that defeating the champs in their house on banner-unveiling Kickoff Night comes with an asterisk. That win was solid no matter what. We left meat on the bone, made a few silly errors, had inconsistent blips from whole position groups at times and we still eked out a close one against a team that never fails in close ones. That win has us feeling good.
As does the aforementioned meat left on the bone. Though we played well, we didn’t play this team’s A+ game by any stretch. We played a B- game, B if you’re generous. This is a cause for optimism because one group who’ve really proven themselves over the past 2 seasons are the coaches, so we can expect an increasing number of B+/A- games than we’ve seen thus far. The quality of football played under this regime hasn’t increased at supersonic speed, but it’s been drumbeat steady. Rarely has the Dan Campbell era felt like one step forward, two steps back. That steady pace is part of the charm that keeps his mania from getting stale. The mania is the fuel of progress’s fire. And said mania seems to be genuinely informed by his methodical approach to toughness, discipline and relentlessness. You need to be wakcy to be that obsessed with small details, and have to be equally wacky to have the trust and patience that your ways will work when the results don’t come right away. But Dan Campbell is the best kind of wacky: low and slow. So presently we’re good and we’re hopeful as well.
Once we’ve fully accepted the fine start and bid farewell to the afterglow, focus shifts to what else we discovered in Week One. Speaking personally, some of those results put a slight damper on my “can we win the whole damn conference?” enthusiasm. Dallas’s defense looked completely monstrous. Their front seven against the Giants was like a bunch of berserkers tearing apart a scared village. Is it dumb to make a viking simile for the Cowboy defense when there’s a team called the Vikings? I don’t care. Ce sont mes mots. The Niners entire team might better than I expected them to be, which was already really good. The Packers looked really solid as well. I am not doubting that the Lions could — at the very least — hang with these teams, all I’m saying is all three looked considerably better than I thought they would. So our optimism carries a little more caution pending the coming month’s results.
With the understanding that even a short amount of time will inevitably help clarify our place in the pecking order, we can turn to how we’re feeling about this week. The Lions host the Seahawks, in a game that has interesting similarities to last year’s excellent Lions almost-comeback. There’s a lot of arguable prognosticator standbys for why the Hawks feel dangerous. First, the Rams smacked ’em around. The Seahawks got unexpectedly pummeled by an opponent they thought they were head-and-shoulders above. So the up/down theorists and regression-to-the-meanies will favor them rebounding in Motown this week. And I think over the years Pete Carroll has proven he’s quite good at getting teams to feel the exact strain of urgency that makes them perform better. They also have some matchups that’ll fall in their favor (more on that later this week, MiWriTheLi-heads).
(Might as well check this box since I mentioned it: “MiWriTheLi-heads” is the official nickname of anyone who likes or is even slightly amused by this website for any reason even if it’s just once.)
So the Seahawks will be a challenging game. Ostensibly, the game we just won at Arrowhead looks tougher than this game will be. Our home crowd will be its loudest since the 2011 Monday Nighter against the Cutler Bears, we’re facing a much shakier QB, they’ll be on an early body-clock, it just feels like the Chiefs should be much better than the Seahawks, we gave them an early-season W last year (!) in our place so we should have an additional, special chip on our shoulders. But I don’t know. They’ve got outstanding receivers, a smart defense, they might be able to run on us a bit; they can, at times, be cleverly coached. We should feel justified in expecting a win, but almost every NFL team is good enough to advantage of their opponent’s bad mistakes. So to guarantee yourself a good chance to win, mistakes need to be limited. And the Lions played far from mistake-free last Thursday. So, how are we feeling about this?
At the end of each Psych Check we’re gonna assign a numerical value that answers the above question. Zero-10, with decimals. If it’s zero the feeling is “I don’t know why I spend my time being a fan of this franchise”, while 10 is “we’ve got a pretty good chance at repeating as champs”. Why not go zero-100 and just use integers? Honest answer: giving an answer with a decimal gives me a positive feeling, like I’m being more precise, which I can’t explain why I enjoy. Just shut up. The number this week is: 8.4, and that’s reflective of a cautious optimism for our division titles hopes, and some broad-view hope for our place among our conference’s clear heavyweights.
Come back Friday for a Lions v. Hawks & Week Two preview and then get ready for another raucous Running Diary after the tilt against Seattle. Have a great week. Auf Wiedersehen!
