The Lions, The Holiday, and The Mirror
The Lions will always belong on Thanksgiving, even if it's for an uncomfortable reason.
The mid-1950s were a golden era for the Detroit Lions. With quarterback Bobby Layne leading the charge, the Lions were among the best teams in the entire league. Between 1951 and 1957, the team won three titles, made a fourth championship game, and finished second place twice. Since the 1957 NFL Championship game, the Lions have won a grand total of one playoff game, in the 1991-92 divisional round, when they beat the newly resurgent Dallas Cowboys at home by a score of 38-6. The Cowboys would go on to win three of the next four titles. The Lions would go on the next week to become sacrificial lambs to the Washington Football Team, en route to that team’s last title to date. Every other season where they were good enough to make the playoffs ended in one game, one loss.
There was 1995, when they ran into a Philadelphia Eagles team that scored an uncharacteristic for their time 58 points, including an end-of-first-half hail Mary pass from former Lion Rodney Peete to never-was wide receiver Rob Carpenter whose name sounds more suited for baseball, to be quite honest. In 1999, the year after Barry Sanders, the greatest player in franchise history, retired surprisingly, they scraped into the playoffs only to have Washington douse their hopes again. Then there was 2014, where the refs earned every single insulting insinuation that they were on Jerry Jones’ payroll, blowing call after call against the Lions, sending their best chance to have a playoff win since the George HW Bush administration down the toilet like a loose bowel movement after an especially delicious and unctuous Detroit-style pizza. These were not the only playoff losses in that time for the Lions, but why would you need every piece of evidence to get the point?
The Lions are a uniquely moribund franchise. Sure, you can point to the Cleveland Browns, but while the daggers thrust through the skin of their oft-scabbed franchise are spectacular in their horror, they have had a modicum of success, between John Elway’s existence and Art Modell’s theft of the original team to Baltimore. There was always the notion that luck just didn’t break for the Browns, the stretch between their re-inception in 1999 and their first playoff win since the original years last year notwithstanding. The Lions may have had that maybe once, and everyone and their mother knew in January of 1992 that unless Sanders could also play defense and perhaps throw himself the ball, they had no chance in hell of beating a once-in-a-decade Washington team riding a unicorn year from otherwise also-ran QB Mark Rypien. The only other team that might come close on a per-year basis is the one that replaced the Oilers in Houston. The Texans have only been around since 2002. The Lions have tormented Detroit for 64 years now. The two are not the same.
The Lions are bad this year again, perhaps historically bad. By winning percentage, this won’t be their worst season ever. They went 0-16 in 2008. Even if they don’t win a game this year, a tie two weeks ago against the Pittsburgh Steelers will ensure a non-zero winning percentage1. However, for a team that has tortured its fanbase for as long as the Lions have, this season almost feels like a backbreaker. The team fired Jim Caldwell, who was the team’s most successful coach since perhaps Buddy Parker of those ‘50s teams but at least Wayne Fontes from the Sanders-led teams. Since then, they wasted three years trying to draw blood from the stone of a Patriots coordinator in Matt Patricia. That move never really works for anyone, but when the coordinator in question got the job days after a backup quarterback shredded his defense to the tune of 41 points in the Super Bowl, you knew the hiring might have been cursed. As an aside, go birds.
They replaced him with Dan Campbell this year, who made waves when he said his team would “bite kneecaps” when asked to describe his coaching style. Whether one found it charming or sociopathic, the soundbite seemed to signal that he might be able to get a product greater than the sum of their parts. That is, until the Eagles came into Ford Field a few weeks ago and hit the team with a dumptruck to the tune of a 44-6 shellacking. Still, that was the only really terrible loss. Every other game saw them competitive and frisky. Still, competitive and frisky will get you highlights on Red Zone, maybe. Fans want more. They want wins. They want playoff runs. They want the team not to run off two of the greatest players at their respective positions of all-time well before they were seemingly ready to give it up. That’s right, not only did they push Sanders into retirement, they sapped Calvin Johnson’s will to play football.
Looking forward doesn’t bode well for not just the Lions or their fans, but America overall. Ever since 1934, the Lions have hosted a home game on Thanksgiving Day. They have America, and for sickos in other countries who love our barbaric guilty pleasure of a sport, the entire world as a captive audience. Some years, that proposition isn’t too ghastly, but this year, they are starting a backup quarterback, Tim Boyle against a Chicago Bears team whose own electric rookie quarterback, Justin Fields, is hurt. They’ll start perennial also-ran Andy Dalton. It’s a matchup that has once again reignited concern trolls from media whose job it is to rouse rabble. “Should the Lions continue to host a Thanksgiving Day game?” I know no one in the league office will probably admit it, but they probably took that question seriously enough to make it at least a partial reason that they added a third, rotating game for prime time on Thanksgiving night.
This year’s game should be the trump card. For zealots, no piece of evidence can dissuade their fervor. Not the infamous 1998 game where the referees botched the overtime coin toss and gave the Steelers the ball when the Lions won the toss. The Lions won the game anyway, but an embarrassment is still an embarrassment. The Lions have won their share of games, even when they’ve been bad. They’ve been exciting games they’ve lost, even when they’ve been bad. It’s not about the games themselves. It’s about the idea that the Lions haven’t really earned being in a game with a captive audience since 1958.
The idea that everything is a meritocracy is both central to the myth of the American dream and complete and utter bullshit. The only real American Dream was Virgil Runnels, aka Dusty Rhodes. What people sell you is a lie. There are haves and have nots, and the number of success stories that exemplify the American dream are rare if any exist at all. The sociopolitical columns that hold whatever twisted roof that shields this country from justice are too complex for me to address here. However, whatever constitutes America right now is the exact reason why the Lions should never lose their Thanksgiving timeslot.
The Lions game, the franchise, it exists as a mirror. However, it’s not just to say that America is shitty all the time. The United States is an imperfect country, but imperfect doesn’t necessarily mean bad all the time. The Lions are a fucked-up franchise, but there are moments of joy, encapsulated in fleeting moments. There was 2015, where the Lions shellacked the Eagles, 45-14, not joyful for Eagles fans, but for Lions fans, it was a happy Turkey Day. Similarly in 2015, the United States Women’s Soccer Team won the World Cup. There are moments where the collective can rally around something tangible, no matter how short the moment to savor is. The suffering, the ugliness, the heartbreak, they’re all necessary. To take the Lions off Thanksgiving is to give into the idea that America is something it’s truly not. To keep the Lions there is to embrace the fact that nothing in this world is perfect. We have to work to change it, and most of the “we” are people who have power that need to share it.
Even if by the slim chance that we can make this country we live in a little less imperfect, the Lions will still belong on Thanksgiving, even if there is a remote chance that franchise doesn’t resemble the country watching them. Whether the country changes or the franchise turns around is irrelevant. They’d represent a journey if that ever were the case. I’d say we should probably focus more on making sure the country that the Lions reflect gets better more than shuttling in some other team into a game one Thursday out of the year, huh.
A tie counts as half a win.