Detroit Lions Head Coach Have Fired Due To…
At present, a football season of profound change for the way better stands poised to further prove the S.O.L. days of the Detroit Lions are dead and gone. Last year, despite all the good run vibrations and reasons this organization gave us to cheer again, that 9-8 team concluded its annual campaign within regular season constraints, after sending Green Bay’s playoff hopes and Aaron Rodgers’ era of division domination packing during a Lambeau field statement game that said something. As to what, we weren’t quite sure; accustomed as we’d become to fleeting little lifts of Lions’ good fortunes, ever only briefly relieving long, hard stretches of mediocrity and worse that made sticking with our home team year after year feel like progressive punishments reserved for repeat offenders.
Fair to say, we Lions’ followers have likely taken more than our share of lumps with this star-crossed team over time, and for a half-dozen-plus decades to be specific. In spots, it seems as though the fates themselves have lined-up against this football franchise. Show me an hour of all-time NFL highlights and I’ll show you twenty minutes or so of clips in which the Lions got posterized for posterity, losing big on record-breaking, last-minute field goals, last-ditch, Packer desperation passes, and an all-around lousy litany of assorted, Motor City low points in recorded NFL history, including plenty of conspiracy-questioning calls on the field that altered outcomes in critical game situations and the complexion of entire seasons in a precious few, contending season cases. From Tom Dempsey’s then-record 63-yard, game-winning field goal in 1970 to Justin Tucker’s 66-yard record-breaker more than 50 years later, two of the game’s crowning achievements in kicking saw Detroit taking it in the shorts as a result. From Bret Favre’s scrambling heave to Sterling Sharpe running free deep down the sideline at the sad ending of 1993’s Wild Card tilt, to Aaron Rodgers’s 2015 oh-hell-no Hail Mary to some no-name tight end with no time on the clock (after a Lions face-masking penalty allowed that play to happen), we’ve watched long odds against last-second comebacks by opponents appear more like sure things in cynical retrospect. And need I mention anything more than the “failure to report” fiasco in Dallas or Calvin Johnson’s not “maintaining control” call playing Chicago in 2010 to re-stir feelings that the fix has been in at times, too (although Karma, perhaps, saw fit to restore that second home playoff game we were robbed of by the obviously missed tackle-eligible report, after the Cowboys crapped their chaps against the Pack last Sunday). Yee-haw!
