This weekend sucked so hard I’m gonna get extremely verbose. I’m diving deep into the noggin for this shit. Need to. Gotta get it out. Dense, sesquipedalian-laden esoterica is to me what dancing in a factory is to Ren McCormack in Footloose. Without further ado, cue up the song ‘Never’ by Moving Pictures and settle in.
The prolonged agony of this stunningly lamentable football weekend unfurled with an ominous synchronicity that beggars belief. As the terminus of a tumultuous campaign descended upon the young Red Devils who compete in the name of my former high school, those erstwhile and valiant gridiron stalwarts were compelled to confront the stark reality of a season that shall be indelibly etched in the annals of our collective memory as one of unparalleled adversity and ignominy (only one win and a 54-7 defeat at the hands of villains most paramount). Paralleling this tragic mise-en-scène, with regard to my venerated Spartan heroes of the collegiate competition, were the barely nascent dreams of in-state usurpation, around which our hearts had so fervently concentered, and which were so rapidly and ruthlessly dashed in an inauspicious disaster of catastrophic proportions. My beloved alma mater suffered an ignoble defeat of colossal magnitude in its most pivotal contest (49-0, and a merciful number that is), casting a shroud of despair that shall shadow our symbolically verdant spirits for ages. And, in the grandest theater of professional pigskin, our squad’s auspicious air of budding renaissance cruelly and quickly metamorphosed into a devastating apotheosis of hopelessness as our cherished Leonid gladiators, on the precipice of resurgence, found themselves inexplicably and inexorably routed with a thorough and complete ferocity, thus calling the prospect of a triumphant culmination to their journey into perilous and tedious jeopardy, leaving us to ponder the capricious whims of the sporting fates with an ineffable sense of despondency. Finally, in the comparatively fickle realm of prognosticative wagers, in which I had envisioned an empyrean success of unerring prescience, my ill-fated selections, beset by a harrowing quagmire of capricious fortunes, oozily materialized as a somber quintessence of disappointment. The late evening hours of Monday saw me crestfallen as my hitherto lofty aspirations dwindled to a disconsolate nadir, registering a dolorous tally of 1-4-0. To be fair, the fair perception of this calamity is not as a meager testament not to the capricious vicissitudes of the gambling domain, but of my own dummy dumb dumbness.
My high school team (I’m “invested” in that I check the score) finished its worst season since before I was in high school, which was almost before high-speed internet was in high school. My college team suffered their worst defeat in decades to our most-hated rivals and we looked eight-ways idiotic in the process. My Leos, our beloved Lions, played their worst game of the season thus far against one of the best opponents they’ll face. And just as it looked as though they may enter a new strata of “good”. For the reverse cherry (use your imagination to conjure your own “reverse cherry”, I don’t have the energy) on top of this fecal sundae, my picks went 1-4 with my only win coming against my boys. If this is a manifestation of luck and its consciousness, I tip my cap to luck and its sharp sense of layered irony. The other games I picked played out about as opposite from how I said they would as possible. I needed only cursory research to confirm what felt like a lock late Sunday afternoon: this was the worst football weekend I’ve ever experienced.
Sharp-eyed MiWriTheLi-headz will notice that there’s not a running diary for the Ravens game. The explanation is simple, albeit humbling: I’m not good enough of a writer to produce good — shit, readable — prose about my team while simultaneously watching their systematic obliteration. I think I can write about it after, but during? I don’t have what it takes. Whatever the accounting department decided we were charging you for that article, be sure to contact customer service and you’ll get a full refund plus a store credit for your inconvenience. Writing about that performance felt like how I imagine it would be trying to do origami in the crow’s nest of a clipper ship. Just too much (seemingly constant) counterproductive chaos to craft anything worth a damn. With hindsight, I should’ve saved what I attempted to write if only to make myself laugh. After the ten minute mark of the game, legitimately 95% of what I’d written was just time stamps and then F-words that kept using larger and larger amounts of the letter “u”. The few bright spots in the game did nothing to assuage the empty, bitter feeling at witnessing your team endure a 60-minute ass-kicking to cap a weekend full of even more profound failures.
(As a programming note, my next Running Diary will be titled with an 8, even though not having one for the Ravens game means it should technically be titled with a 7. We’re skipping seven. It’s our wacky take on that thing where old hotels don’t have a 13th floor. Try not to get too bent out of shape if you’re the type who’s very strict on ordinals.)
Aside from the author’s self-serving catharsis, what is this column that you’re reading? Well, it’s a psych check. As you can likely guess, we’re not feeling quite as great as we were in the recent past. Not all losses are created equal. That loss to Seattle was disappointing, but even before the 4-game win streak that followed it, it felt like a speed bump on a good road. The Baltimore loss was obviously bigger and larger in scope. I’ve been trying to take solace in the fact that both only count for a single tick in the L column. But was it a loss that’ll linger? The historical record offers no definitive clues. There are many examples of teams whose seasons have fallen apart after a loss like we endured this past Sunday. There are also a host of examples of teams who not only performed well after such a debacle, but actually marched their way to a Supe. For practical prediction’s sakes, the best you can do is, “It could go either way.”
The Lions aren’t 6-1, and they’re not as good as a 6-1 team would be. Or is. Obviously not. They’re 5-2. But beyond that, it’s pretty reasonable to say that they’re not as good as the remaining 6-1 teams (Eags, Chiefs). Yes, we beat the Chiefs. But if we had to play them again soon, even in Ford Field, we’d be underdogs. I’m not saying we can’t beat those teams. When these Lions are healthy and firing on all cylinders they can beat — sincerely — every other team in the league. But I think in today’s NFL, that may be true of a lot of teams.
So those are the two main parts of this period of doubtful trepidation: the “it could go either way” part, and the notion that if every team plays to their average level we might not be true contenders. How to feel about a team that feels as though it’s within a ceilinged mystery?
I think you can be pointed towards a correct answer to this question by looking at the core of a team. The core, in my mind: the three main coaches, QB, lines. This is why, despite the recent shellacking, there’s reason for optimism in Detroit Footballville. We have good coaches, we have a good QB, and we have good lines. Those things travel. They endure. Sure, we had a hiccup against Baltimore. A nuclear hiccup. But those happen to almost all NFL teams at one point or another. Sometimes it’s just not your day. I don’t think people make the connection in football as easy as they do in basketball, but you ever see Steph Curry end a game with, like, 9 points? One-for-eleven from beyond the arc? Football players can turn in stinkers like that too. Your O-Tack can’t get a good read on their D-End’s herky-jerky moves and has a hard time keeping penalty-free hands on him. Your middle ‘backer happens to bite on this particular opposing RB’s first step on counters. Little “just can’t get it going” things like that can add up. And as the only correct part of my picks last week stated: getting down early, even a little (let alone the 21 we were down in the first 17 minutes), to a team like Baltimore is essentially a death sentence.
Point is: football teams and players are prone to bad games, and they are arguably more susceptible to stinker games given roster size and the team’s frequent necessity to be in full, 11-man concert. Hell, Baltimore was in 45-man concert and look how well that went. Just imagine the potential for catastrophe if, for example, 40% of your roster was having an average-to-below average game? Wait, don’t imagine it. Just remember it. It’s what we saw on Sunday.
The Lions can absolutely shake this off. They have coaches who’ve seen a lot. They have players who’ve seen a lot. They know how to mentally respond to failure. So that just leaves the question of if they’ve, athletically speaking, got the proverbial horses. I think they do, with the lone caveat being the absence of Davey Monty. Gibbs is going to be stellar in the future, and Craigster Reynolds has picked up the slack very well (though he’s kinda banged-up too), but Davey was more important to this offense than he was being credited for. So, so much of our offensive success comes from avoiding 3rd-and-longs. We can convert those, but we function better when we avoid them. Our best 7+ play drives of the season have had Davey-borne chunk yardage gains on first and second. It serves to open the playbook more for BenJo, and that plays to our greatest advantage — and core competency — on offense: versatility. We should be okay, but if we’re going to have a great season I think we absolutely need Davey.
The defense has its health issues too, but the recipe for their effectiveness is simple: the more QB pressure they get, the likelier they are to win. Hutch, Alim and Biggs playing the way they are, with the athleticism and IQ from our ‘backers; run defense feels like it’s gonna take care of itself. But the pass pressure hasn’t been consistently generated from the front four. Not the end of the world, we have good blitzing guys in the back seven, but it’s in my opinion that Glenn needs to get wackier with ‘em. For a long time, I’ve wanted our defense to feel like a Spagnuolo one. Or a early-2010’s Pat Narduzzi Michigan State one. It’s kinda there, but not quite. I think Glenn’s mentality as a former defensive back influences the defense’s mindset and how he coaches them: keep things in front of you, keep them contained, consistently execute good technique and good things will follow. It’s not bad, he’s not wrong, but I prefer a slightly riskier defense that constantly puts a nervous edge on the offense. More hair on fire. Or, if you want, same amount of hair but more fire. Either way. But to me, making an offense nervous comes from them constantly knowing that there will be at least one blitzer on nearly every play — and a full 99% of passing downs — but not knowing from where they’re attacking. I wanna see that, plus way more stunts and twists and wackiness from the D-Line. I think this approach pays mental dividends too because a defense has more fun playing that way.
I’m confident we’ll get there. And I’m confident that this is the Lions’s rock-bottom. So I expect a rebound. Perhaps a relatively protracted rebound, given our especially unfortunate injuries, but I still think we’re in good shape. A division championship won’t be the cakewalk we might’ve been expecting, and I think a 1-seed is already out of the question, but if we can muster A- or even B+ games the rest of the way, we should be in terrific shape. The Pre-Week Eight Psych Check Number is a 7.9, which a nod to ’79 and Magic Johnson’s championship at MSU. Positive mojo as we say “Land Ho!” to another basketball season. Seeya later this week for a special column of prognostication I’m titling Previews & Picks: Whole-He Redeemer. I hope you have a strong second half of a week. Auf Wiedersehen!
