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Old 01-12-2015, 02:51 PM   #1
Brian Swartz
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Join Date: May 2006
Finding a Way to Lose(Detroit Lions Replay, SAT X)

With the recent unpleasantness combined with my ongoing issues with my primary computer, I decided to start this up as a slow-burning side project. It's been a long-running goal of mine and will serve to satisfy my 'sports fix'.

Really the title of this thread ought to be 'The Torture Chamber', but nevertheless it is the reason I got back into SAT. As we are all aware the Lions in this year's NFL playoffs did what they do best -- find a way to lose. It has been said chess is mental torture, and that phrase could be applied to being a fan of the Detroit Lions. This project will be a march back through time. From the promising start in the early years of the NFL to the last several decades which have been nigh-disastrous in their entirety, the famous players and coaches who largely had their careers destroyed by being in any way associated with the Lions will be remembered as horrifically as they deserve. For the purposes of this thread I will divide the Lions' history into two sections:


The Championship Era(1933-1965)

In 1932, the first NFL 'playoff game' was contested and effectively sounded the death knell for over a decade of disputed championships in the NFL's formative years. The Chicago Bears, on the strength of a 4th-quarter pass from Red Grange to Bronko Nagurski(best football name ever nominee!!), defeated the Portsmouth Spartans 9-0. From the following year on the league was split into two conferences and a championship game played between the winners of each to determine the NFL crown. In 1934 the Spartans, under new ownership, moved to Detroit as the Lions. And so it was that the Lions lost the first playoff game ever contested before they even became the Lions.

Overall though the Championship Era was a time of success for Detroit. They posted a very respectable mark of 191-175-13 over those years. Only Chicago(254), New York(235), and Green Bay(208) posted more regular-season victories. It must be noted here that Cleveland(131-54-3 after the AAFC merger) and Baltimore(80-70-2) had better winning percentages as well, but certainly the Detroit Lions were a franchise one could take pride in. This was particularly true during the 50s, when they won three titles in a six-year span. Overall, four NFL championships were equal to Cleveland's tally and trailed only Green Bay and Chicago(6 each). Additionally, they were highly impressive overall in post-season play, sporting a stellar 9-1 record, by far the best over this era! Objectively we might place them as the fourth-most successful franchise in the championship era, with Chicago, Green Bay, and Cleveland as the top three, and Detroit and New York each having their plusses in that fourth spot. While the league suffered through many growing pains and the disruption of World War II hit the league as hard as one would expect, the Lions were one of the core franchises keeping things going. They had their bad times as well(a terrible 40s including a winless 0-11 campaign) but were worthy of respect on the whole.


Super Bowl Era(1966-Present)

Unfortunately, the franchise was far less successful in the modern era. This in fact is an understatement deserving a trophy. If one looks purely at winning pct. as a starting point, we see that Detroit's 308-434-10 mark(.410) is second-worst in the NFL. Only Tampa Bay, partially excused as an expansion team, is worse at .384. Atlanta, Arizona, New Orleans, and Houston are close(.420-.431 range). But when it comes playoff time ... well, that's where we separate the men from the girls. There is a huge divide, and the Detroit Lions stand alone. 30 of the 32 NFL franchises have won at least five playoff games. The most recent expansion franchise, the Houston Texans, are one exception and they have a respectable 2-2 mark. The Lions, at a hideous 1-11, are the other. To consider just how bad that is, we might reflect on the fact that the second-worst playoff mark belongs to the Kansas City Chiefs(6-15). They might well have reason to be disgusted as they haven't won a playoff game in decades. But even at a paltry .286 winning rate in the post-season they are light years ahead of Detroit's .083. Tampa Bay is 6-10 here. They've won fewer regular-season games but six times the post-season wins while losing one fewer.

Finally, the ultimate prize is of course getting to and winning the Super Bowl. More than half the league, 19 franchises to be exact, have won it at least once. Tampa Bay is among them so that pretty much elevates them above Detroit if they weren't there already. 29 have at least gotten there once. Cleveland, Detroit, Houston, and Jacksonville are the only ones who haven't. Houston's been in the league 13 years now and already has a better regular and post-season win pct. Jacksonville and Cleveland have been vastly better over the course of their histories(5-6 and 6-13 in the playoffs respectively, multiple trips to the conference championships for both).

The Detroit Lions stand alone as a monument to failure. There have been cases(Billy Sims) where they have been simply unlucky, but they also been a death trap. They have the lone 0-16 season in NFL history in 2008. They have destroyed or traded away countless talented players(esp. quarterbacks) and also finished the careers of successful coaches and executives in disturbing numbers. Consider that Barry Sanders left the team blaming the 'culture of losing' after the team's finest run of seasons in decades(six playoff appearances during the 1990s). In 1971, receiver Chuck Hughes was, to my knowledge, the only NFL player to ever actually die on the field. On and on it goes.

One might reasonably accuse me of sadism merely for attempting this project . Lions fans, this is your pain. To quote Brad Pitt's Billy Beane character from the movie 'Moneyball', 'there are rich teams and there are poor teams. Then there's fifty feet of crap, and then there's us.' Except in this case, it's not a matter of money. It's a matter of being better at and more used to losing than anybody else. Institutionalized failure. Self-inflicted wounds. Some organizations are more than the sum of their parts, getting the most out of what they have. Detroit is a case study in the opposite. But I also have hope that Detroit will do better in the SAT retelling of this story. There have been so many times when they were in a position to do something and failed. The law of averages would seem to indicate that they can't do that badly again, can they? Well, we will find out.

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