The murky, shallow, greenish-blue waters of Lake Erie have special properties. In some cases, like with walleye or perch or tubing off the back of your friend’s dad’s boat, they enhance. They augment a greatness that was already there. But as it relates to professional football success, Lake Erie is an aquatic black hole. There are three NFL teams whose cities lie close to Lake Erie: the Buffalo Bills, the Cleveland Browns, and our beloved Detroit Lions. You could put the words “hapless” or “perpetually cursed” or “goddamn” before each of these teams names and most people wouldn’t bat an eye. They’re cities that are similar beyond their geographic proximity to the shores of the second-smallest Great Lake. They’re Rust Belt, they’re frequently joke fodder for cosmopolitan city douchebags, they have a lovable loser-ness that used to belong exclusively to the Chicago Cubs, and they’re home to truly die-hard fanbases.
Like children in a large family, there are levels of achievement and status that differentiate them. The Bills are the (relatively) golden child. They’ve had slip-ups here and there but usually field a competitive, if not undeniably good, team. They went to four straight Supes. The Browns are the bi-polar ones with tremendous potential. It’s (again, relatively) feast or famine with the Browns. They either look like a division favorite or a division doormat, rarely anything between. The Lions — I pause as I type this with a sigh of deep lament that actually makes me shudder — are the problem child. To the casual fan of the league in general, the Detroit Lions are best known for 1) ignominiously wasting the careers of superlatively excellent skill players, 2) decade-long stretches of record-breaking ineptitude and 3) being the butt of jokes in Jay Leno monologues. If the three teams of Lake Erie were to get together on the holidays, the Bills would be in charge of the main course and two appetizers, the Browns would bring a chip/dip plate and a middling dessert and the Lions would bring a six-pack of canned beer. Of which they would drink five, crack open the sixth and then irresponsibly leave it out for the minors to sneakily take ill-advised sips.
In the Super Bowl era, there’ve been blips of genuinely terrific football from the Erie Three. There were fleeting instances wherein a Lake Erie team could actually see the stairway to heaven only to have a team or player with posh, coastal and/or historically great DNA ruthlessly detonate their path to greatness. The ’80s saw the Browns get agonizingly close to a Super Bowl until a Stanford-bred quarterback completely ripped their guts out. The Bills and the Lions both had truly excellent teams in the late ’80s and early ’90s. But the Giants, Cowboys (twice) and Redskins (also twice) obliterated those collective hopes, adding more and more Lombardi Trophies to the arrogantly preening asshouse that is the NFC East. The collective hangover from those almost-glory days lasted nearly three decades. It got so bad for the Browns they stopped existing for a few years, the Erie Child equivalent of ghosting. Two distinct and shameful winless (winless!) seasons, innumerable losses that still seem impossible, Nathan Michael Peterman; the horror went on for so long that anger and frustration eventually gave way to just sadness. Sadness abound.
But this year, the perennial autumnal football hopes of the Upper Midwest are filled with something unfamiliar: reasonable justification. The Golden Child Bills have shown the family The Way. The Way seems simple, but evidence would suggest that for the Erie Three it’s decidedly not: draft really good players, cut bad players, keep excellent players, don’t hire terrible coaches. In following this blueprint (too high-falutin a word for something so obvious), each of the seemingly cursed Lake Erie Three is poised for… let’s not say greatness, but certainly non-badness. The Bills are truly a contender and, like their ’80s-’90s heyday, have gotten about as close as you can get without getting there. The Browns have bounced back from famine and look like dark horse feasters in a very competitive division. And as for the Leos… well, they might be foundationally good, which evokes profoundly weird feelings of, like, cautious optimism mixed with jarring pleasantness.
This blog provides the definitive fan take on the problem child Detroit Lions. A team that, no matter what anyone ever tells you, is the most tortured franchise in modern American professional sports. We (yes, this is a “we” publication) ended last season well, the strengths of our team are reliable with consistency and our coach keeps our guys present, focused and hard-hitting. The league has taken notice, so much so that the national media joke “Lions fans are already booking Super Bowl hotels” (not true in the slightest) is itself tired and dumb. The cycle of underdog to lovable to tiresome to overrated happens so fast these days, for the Lions it didn’t even last a full off-season. Underneath that suddenly hack-ass joke is a bedrock of undeniable truth: we’re not bad. We’re NOT bad! Nobody from Detroit is booking Vegas hotels for Supe 58, but there’s reasonable expectations that we will compete for the NFC North title, which they’ve never won.
The hopes could collapse. It’s possible. No matter how much these teams improve, their fans are conditioned to steel themselves against catastrophe. But we’d survive. Frankly, we’re used to it. The 2005 edition of the Detroit Lions came into the season with high hopes. Same for 2015. Both of those seasons’s respective hopes quickly became covered in poop. But right now, in this moment, for this season, the hopes are pristine. And for the first time in a long time for the Detroit Lions, the hopes feel truly galvanized. Lake Erie is so football-disaster-dense that, for a long time, not even hope could escape its gravity. But maybe the tide is changing.
