I don’t date/time stamp my posts. I would, and I mostly like it when other websites do it. As long as I’ve been on the internet, I know stuff is archived permanently in one form or another, but hard-dating something can contribute to it feeling ephemeral, like a day’s newspaper. And I wanted this blog to feel more akin to a chronicle of a football team and read like the journey one gets taken on in a good book. I want our Lions Fan posterity to read this in the autumn of 2103 and understand what it really felt like 80 years prior. So time is a little more pliable here. Such is also the case with parts of football. Time on a football team isn’t often noted by dates and times, it’s noted by more timeless-feeling numbers and words. Week One, Week Eleven, the afternoon kick, the Monday Nighter, halftime; time notation is less tied to our usual chronologic measuring and more referenced in a form that contextualizes that instance relative to the other times around it.
I bring this up because time feels weird right now in Michigan. It’s the first week of October. By the meteorologic calendar, we’re well over a month into autumn. Celestial body-wise, we’re well past the autumnal equinox and we’ve already enjoyed our Harvest Moon. But practically speaking, we’re still in a long summer. Today is the last day of summer. The daytime high is going to be 85ºF today. Tomorrow’s is 71º, the day after is only supposed to approach 60º. Weather is catching up to the calendar. We’re really rounding a corner up here in America’s High Five. This feels like the right time for a Lions and Lions Fan Psych Check.
I’m going to convey the mentality of a Lions fan and how it relates to our current (very nice) position using the song ‘These Days’, performed by under-celebrated ’60s siren Nico and written by the slightly-under-celebrated Jackson Browne. For one, it’s a beautiful song. For two, it exudes autumness even though Nico’s biggest hit away from The Velvet Underground was a different song called ‘The Fairest of the Seasons’. For three, maybe open up a new tab and listen along as you read the rest. It will be of great assistance to your understanding of the current Psych Check. Let’s begin. (‘Let’s Begin’ is also a song title. A silly ditty by Bad Ronald. Don’t listen to ‘Let’s Begin’ by Bad Ronald now. Polar opposite vibe.) I present Jackson Browne’s lyrics, periodically interrupted by the correlating upshot.
I’ve been out walking. I don’t do too much talking these days. These days, I seem to think a lot about the things that I forgot to do, and all the times I had the chance to.
We’re nearly a quarter of the way through the season. We haven’t figured everything out yet (see my picks from last week — yikes) but we’ve got a decent handle on how things seem most likely to shake out for all but a couple divisions. Us Lions fans, we’ve been out walking but we’re not doing too much talking. We’re proud of our wins this year and lament the winnability of our sole defeat. And we think we’ve got us a good team. But we’re not talking a bunch of shit. The NFC North Meme War on Reddit is largely cooled, there aren’t a bunch of Lions openly telling the rest of the NFL that we’re the team to beat. Campbell is surly and not averse to embracing challenges, but he’s not cocky about it. I’ll paraphrase something he said last week with, “If we’re no longer the hunters and have become the hunted, you other teams need not bother hunting: we’re already on your front lawn.” I love this attitude, but I want to stress that it isn’t boisterous and arrogant. It’s just embracing (and then charging at) a challenge. It’s looking a daunting task in the eye and saying, “OK, best of luck to ya. I’m coming with my haymakers. We’ll see how it goes.” And WHY is Detroit Liondom behaving in this chesty-yet-undemonstrative way? Because we’ve thought we’ve been good in the past and we were way too cocky about it. You should’ve seen how sure we were that an offense of Charles Rogers, Roy Williams and Mike Williams The Lesser was going to revolutionize football. Or how sure we were that Ernie Sims was, at worst, Lance Briggs 2.0. Or how sure we were that Matt Patricia was some sort of “Dan Harmon of Football” curmudgeonly gruff genius. We forgot to check ourselves and be humble back then, despite all the chances we had.
I stopped my rambling. I don’t do too much gambling these days. These days, I seem to think about how all the changes came about my ways. And I wonder if I’d see another highway.
Our past two games against decent teams — teams we respected but reasonably expected to be better than — offer evidence that we’re a focused, determined, no-weeks-off team. There is an effervescence in feeling, almost knowing, that the Lions are not gonna come out and play like turds for a whole game. Maybe they’ll come out flat and start the game with some big mistakes, maybe the 3rd quarters will look a little sloppy, but this team can reliably shake off badness, reset and begin to play well again quickly. They remind me of the 2013 MSU Spartans in this way. They seem like they can embrace and acknowledge mistakes with the purpose of quickly moving on. “Well, that went bad. Nothing you can do about it now, though. Bring your best on this play coming up, keep fighting hard.” Let’s give props to the, historically speaking, least-props-deserving aspect of the entire Detroit Lions organization: ownership. Sheila Ford Hamp hired Holmes, Campbell, Spielman et al. and those guys, along with our terrific scouts and assistants, have drafted solid players and reliably developed them into good/great players. Three years ago, turning the Lions into a winner seemed close to impossible. All highways to competitiveness were hard to locate, let alone navigate. But ownership brought change to the Lions when they hired guys who simplified things; who distilled success’s requirements down to one basic principle: never stop playing smart and tough.
I had a lover, I don’t think I’ll risk another these days. And if I seem to be afraid to live the life that I have made in song, it’s just that I’ve been losing so long.
In years past, a Lions season was effectively over by mid-October, any faint hope of the playoffs truly dead before Halloween. In years like this, many Lions fan would adopt what we’d affectionately refer to as a “Team B”. Adopting a Team B came with 1% guilt, but it was worth it to feel passionate about a football game. A lot of Lions fans picked the Steelers because of city similarities and an assured competitiveness. I’ll admit I had a dalliance with Steeler Team B-ing. I also would favor the Jets and the Raiders. I’d bet today that younger fans would pick the Bills for similar reasons if they had to. But there’s the rub. They don’t have to now! For the (barring unspeakable catastrophe) foreseeable future, Team B is no longer necessary. It’s like ’90s/’00s hockey. Nobody in Detroit was like, “I love the Wings but I have a small soft spot for the L.A. Kings.” Nonsense! We had all the consistent excellence we needed right at home. Such is the case now in football. That’s a profound way this Lions regime team has altered our fandom: none of us entertain the notion of a Team B anymore. That’s enormous progress. This passage also deals with the infinitesimally-small-but-still-somehow-there feeling of fear that a Lions fan has when things are going well. I alluded to this feeling and clumsily dubbed it Doomism when we were rolling the Packers in Week Four. This isn’t new territory, Bill Simmons has talked about it with regard to the Red Sox and in other contexts ad nauseam. We’ve been losing so long, we’re reticent to quickly shove all our emotional chips to the center of the table. In current practice, we keep ourselves from dreaming of a Woodward Avenue parade in February by accepting the greatness of our potential future adversaries. Even if we dare to dream about a high playoff seed, we have to temper those high hopes by acknowledging that the Niners, Eagles, Cowboys and maybe even the Bucs would be very difficult playoff opponents. We’re going to slowly allow for higher hopes, but not at the expense of our feet leaving the ground.
I’d stopped my dreaming. I won’t do too much scheming these days. These days I sit on cornerstones and count the time in quarter tones to ten. Please don’t confront me with my failures. I had not forgotten them.
If you hear these lyrics in Nico’s hauntingly serene voice, you can feel what she wants for you coming through the speakers: presence. Not doing “remember when”, not future tripping, just being here and now. That’s the ultimate salve in the current Psych Check. We have Carolina this week. Our previous game results, any thoughts about playoff positioning and getting off the postseason schneid, checking on how other NFC contenders are looking; none of these matter here and now. What matters is this week’s Panthers game. They’re not looking so hot, but they’re still an NFL team. An NFL team with some talented players and an underrated, truly good coach. If we don’t turn in a solid performance, there are a lot of accomplished and focused professionals on the other sideline who can easily take a win if enough opportunities are given. It’s simple but it’s true: we gotta be sharp all the time, because as clichéd as it is, “any given sunday…”. The Lions and Lions fan haven’t forgotten our failures (in the historical sense and specifically re: last year’s Carolina game debacle), so we need not be reminded of them. We just acknowledge them and move on, focusing on how we achieve success in the here and now.
The results this season haven’t been perfect, but the team looks really good. Campbell teams generally see noticeable improvement as their seasons proceed into winter, but what we know now is that the Detroit Lions have an aura of tough focus and challenge-embracing. This knowledge, combined with serene, focused presence is the reason behind this Psych Check’s high number. We’re at a 9.
Thank you very much for reading. I hope you enjoyed ‘These Days’ and this cusp-of-autumn journey into the Detroit Lions Psych Check. Peep the picks and reviews later this week. Auf Wiedersehen!
