You know Chicago isn’t a favorite place of mine, but with the Lions, a parallel of sorts can be drawn.

Look at a list of the Cubs misery: a team without a championship in 101 years, 64 years haunted by “the Curse of the Billy Goat”, held without a World Series appearance since 1908 (their last World Series title), all while being predominantly known as a baseball city.

Now, compare it to the Lions on the other hand: haven’t won a championship since 1957, never have made a Super Bowl appearance, “the Curse of Bobby Layne” since his departure in 1958 where he proclaimed the Lions “wouldn’t win for 50 years”, all while being predominantly known as a football city.

Detroit is most definitely a football city, and to take it a step further, Michigan is a football state. The national media fails to realize what an absolutely monumental disaster the 2000’s were for the Lions with how little attention was paid. ESPN glosses over the team unless Stephen Peterman starts leaking tears of joy over a single victory. Every loss is handled on the network with a forty-five second clip of the other team breaking arm tackles and scaring the backup quarterback for two points, all while is Stuart Scott spewing “wha’ had happen, what had happened was” over video montages of Lions’ turnovers and miscues. WJBK Fox 2 in Detroit – which dishes out news coverage to southeastern Michigan – has a roundtable every Sunday night that routinely makes the Lions first order of business from early August through April’s draft. The media can’t be blamed because there’s ALWAYS a story to run with. Whether they’re blacked out because fans could care less about showing up for a three hour boo-fest, or the starting center would rather make an ass of himself than to keep his cool, or that they’ve managed to win a second game on the tattered shoulder of golden-boy Matthew Stafford (with the help of a yellow hanky from the refs), the Lions are under a magnifying glass week in, week out in the Detroit Metropolitan area.

Considering there are fans still holding out hope that someone can turn this franchise around – when you have some Lions’ fans go to Ford Field simply to get loaded – who else has hope or “respect” for this football team other than the media? And face it; the media are obligated to do this for the Lions since it is embedded in such tragedy and habitual losing. Google Rob Parker, I dare you, you’ll be red flagged by the Ford’s internet department. They have to desperately try and spin every piece of Lions’ news into something positive. Even hosts on 97.1 FM the Ticket in Detroit (Pat Caputo in particular) tried to sell that Grady Jackson’s doughy cohesion was going to be a contributor and factor in this past year’s defense. I digress…

Why, though? We have the Wings that we take for granted (since 96-97 and counting!) and don’t back them until they make an appearance in at least the Western Conference Finals. And we did the same with the Pistons for their six straight Eastern Conference Finals appearances. Baseball was put back to the forefront in 2006 with the Tigers making the World Series for the first time in twenty-two years, but they didn’t quite drown out the Lions because as quickly as they made into an overnight sensation, they blew it. But when the Lions manage to fart, sniffle, sneeze, cough, or in Stephen Peterman’s case, cry, they’re the talk of the town, and on front of the sports section with everyone in Detroit wondering, “Where do we begin with this mess?”

The answer is never clear because there is always a carousel of blame revolving week to week, while the same ol’ tune just keeps on playing. “Ford needs to do this, coach ‘X’ needs to do that, Millen is drafting another receiver, Mayhew can’t right the ship, and he’s a descendant of Millen’s tyranny!” Everything is everyone’s fault in this organization, and it often overlaps with the names aforementioned over these past ten years.

However, where does all this pessimism lend itself to a new generation of Lions’ fans? People born after 1986 don’t have an appreciative recollection of a winning season, and can only rely on disgruntled family members to let them know two things:

1. “Barry Sanders was the greatest running back of all-time. His teams sucked, and he was still rushing for at least 1,300 yards every season. As a matter of fact, he was the reason we watched the Lions, and Bobby Ross can go to hell.”
2. “The Lions have always sucked and will always suck until Bill Ford Sr. sells the team.”

People held out hope that Barry would return to no avail, and the second one isn’t happening anytime soon because Ford makes money when the team loses. (If someone offered you $25 bucks to eat a pizza, you’d do it until the day you died too.) With so many Millen-generation “fans” (I guess that’s what you call it, whatever…), and people relying on stories of yesteryear, you’re left with people who just missed out on the Sanders era, only to arrive during the worst stretch in professional football history.

A friend of mine, Lippy (a wonderful nickname; combination of last name and personal attitude which is just uncanny), is one of those “fans”. He has a complete hard-on for Sanders which includes a framed poster above his bed (the kid turns nineteen this year), a recollection of stats he can assertively spit at you on demand (both collegiate and pro), and he is already developing a bromance for his son, Barry Sanders Jr. Let the record show his father did a great job of introducing him to number one on my list (but he took it to another level). Instead of Sanders, he finds players like Calvin Johnson, or the preseason sensation Aaron Brown, to be players to just watch on Sundays for entertainment purposes. Whether it is only two or three spectacular plays during a three hour game, he’ll always text me about what play CJ just made. And it happens more often than you’d think.

During the 90’s, it wasn’t “oh man, I can’t wait for Barry to rush for 125 yards, make four or five jaw-dropping plays, and ultimately know we have no chance week to week.” (Although it turned into just that during Barry’s 2,053 yard season.) Fan’s and journalists alike believed “we have an offense that can compete with any other team’s offense (they scored the second most points in ’95 with 436); hopefully the defense can show up week to week.” And it did, and the Lions were a somewhat respectable team. Now, the Lions can spell respect about as effectively as Eddie Murphy’s drunken father.

The perfect foil for Lippy is a buddy of mine named Cam. He’s not only the most unprecedented kind of Lions’ fan you’d meet in your life, but the man could sell a republican nun a box of contraceptives. Every year he has a theory revolving around the NFC North’s lack of competiveness, or that the Lions have distinct role players to create a winning formula in such a weak division. It all makes sense, and I’ll nod my head in approval until I get dizzy. It’s not until I walk away every year from the conversation feeling like Joe Cullen at the Wendy’s drive-thru, “It seemed a fool-proof idea at the time to bite for the nuggets considering my attire situation…”

All the negativity you see at those roundtable discussions Sunday nights on WJBK Fox 2 in Detroit is perpetual. (You have to say the full station name because if you don’t, you seem like a pompous idiot who thinks everyone should know where you’re coming from. You can think of it like taking Mike Williams 10th overall over DeMarcus Ware and Shawne Merriman!) All the negativity spread by fans from bars and grilles to Sundays crowded around a T.V. isn’t going to change until the team puts a respectable product on the field and starts winning games.

And you’re thinking, “Brilliant, winning is going to change the fan bases perception, this Ryan is going to go places with his reasoning capabilities.”

But it’s more than just the wins; it’s about the respect. The fans play witness to Ford firing Millen in September of that winless ‘08-‘09 season in hopes of bringing back interest by giving in to the popular decision of what the fans wanted (and deserved). The organization then drafts a quarterback number one last season, the new “face of the franchise” in Stafford to partly make a viable decision, but also to market these Lions as a “new” team that famously “works as hard on Sundays as you do all week long”. The Lions could have just as easily selected Aaron Curry last year, but to keep a hold of the skeptical season ticket holders and attract new ones, they took the quarterback, and it immediately changed the season’s outlook and expectations.

Do these decisions and proclamations harvest respect? Have these decisions produced winning products? No, and no. Nobody can make this team better than the players already there. They’ll continue to be the league’s doormat until they play with one purpose in mind; to gain respect. Stafford isn’t respected because he’s a first overall pick; he only earned a bulls-eye. Schwartz isn’t respected because he became a head coach; he won two games this season. Respect is earned, and winning, (more than the four game norm in this team’s case), is the key to “cleaning up this mess.”

- Ryan Mathews

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Tags | Chicago Cubs, Detroit Lions, espn, The curse of the Billy Goat