some people are fans of the detroit lions. But many, many more people are not fans of the Detroit Lions. This preview of the 2022 NFL dropout team is for those in the latter group. read all the previews so far here.
your team: detroit lions.
your 2021 record: an uplifting 3-13-1, as long as you don’t count the fact that they lost the first eight games of the season or didn’t win their first game until December, or that justin tucker kicked them back across 8 mile road, or that they finished dfl in their division for the fourth year in a row (that number seems low, actually), or that their miraculous victory against minnesota came only after minnesota staged a win miraculous against them first, or they hit two fake punts in one game against the rams and still lost, or they benched their starting quarterback, or they still haven’t had a 1,000-yard rusher since reggie bush, or that their final victory of the season came against a Packers team that was resting their starters, or that they lost no. 1 overall pick because of that win, or that they didn’t win a single road game, or that they tied the steelers thanks in part to losing an extra point in regulation, or that their mental confidence (word loosely used) may not Haven knew that ties still existed, or that his old starting quarterback went to sunny la and immediately won a super bowl without them.
other than that, I see a lot of promises.
Your Coach: Gentlemen, I’ll say this about a 3-13-1 team: They may not look like much, but they’re always hungry. people see a guy coming up who is hungry and they start thinking to themselves, oh my god, this guy is looking to eat whatever he can get his hands on. he will eat grass. he will eat earth. he will eat my family. I better get away from this guy before he bites my dick! a man who is hungry is a man who fears nothing. no one with a full belly wants to see these spider ants coming from a football team!
Your coach is the very hungry Dan Campbell, who isn’t afraid to cry after a tough loss. that’s a lot of crying.
Not too long ago, I saw rex ryan get a few more years out of employment thanks to his ability to give the local press decent copy to work with. same deal with dan campbell. I spent most of last year subjected to too much breathless praise for the beefy Ted Lasso here. he cries! the players of him love him! it will be so much fun with the hard hits! He is so loyal! He turns around every time you offer him a gift! Let’s adopt it!
all that nonsense deliberately skirted the fact that a) the lions chose professor patella here to manage their team instead of someone who would have been much more qualified, and b) dan campbell is a fucking coach. he handled his qb situation with all the skill of a mall orthopedist. He and his staff lost their first game against Green Bay, the Packers game he counted on, because they refused to throw the ball down the field. he tried it on fourth down many times, even deep in his own territory, when his offense sucked. Do you think I like to criticize a coach for doing it? I do not. I wish every other coach had Dan Campbell’s iron balls right now. But what all the other coaches have, unlike Campbell, is a working brain. You know who else was a nice guy? Norv Turner. he sucks too.
your quarterback: you don’t have one. you got this guy.
That’s Jared Goff, last seen working as Ryan Gosling’s stunt double on the set of the new Barbie movie. You might remember Goff from last season when the Lions benched him, only to realize that all of their other quarterbacks were somehow even worse. You can also remember the moment when Goff didn’t realize the ball was about to break. or you may remember that goff is a system qb who wasn’t even good when he was in a good system. The Lions don’t seem to remember any of that, because they had the entire offseason filling in for Goff and they didn’t do a thing. They could have recruited someone, or traded for a veteran, or even hired your cousin Fred to do the job. they did none of that, therefore nothing else about this team matters at this point. a headless chicken in iron man armor is still headless.
your backups are still tim boyle and the immortal david “mister” blough. Ten years from now, one of these men will be hired as the Falcons’ offensive coordinator and fired a year later.
The new thing that sucks: Jacksonville’s shit at the top of the draft was Detroit’s windfall as they snatched god Aidan Hutchinson at No. 2 overall, then used his other first round in the Stafford deal to trick Minnesota into trading his no. 12 selection. The Lions quickly used that pick on a wide receiver who probably won’t be able to play until November.
Because this is the off-season, you can tell the Lions have a plan. I’ve heard that so many times, from credible football people, that I’ve bought it myself on occasion. wow man, maybe this team of lions won’t finish last! They already have a base! they have parts! Ah, but lions have had pieces before. many, in fact. never mattered in the least. one of those pieces was removed before playing for them again. another piece still wants the $1.6 million this team owes him. and another piece just won a super bowl for a team that has exactly three fans. Talent is worth nothing in Detroit, and there is less on this list than many sensible people realize. aidan hutchinson’s sister won miss michigan and will probably win more than him here. the rest of the lions’ defense is just lazy.
Elsewhere, nose tackle john penini retired after just two years on the job, depriving me of easy dick jokes. DJ Chark, used to performing well on horrible teams, signed here in the offseason. The Lions also hired Devin Funchess to play tight end and eat the pizza crusts you’re about to throw away. and mike hughes arrives from kansas city to reinforce a secondary that will always need to be reinforced. wow. what a booty the road to 4-12-1 starts here.
what’s always sucked: the same shit you’ve always had. You’ll see Penei Sewell among the league leaders in false start penalties again. You’ll recruit tj hockenson into your fantasy league thinking you’ve got a bargain, only to see him miss all five or seven games with a strained collarbone. the only lions you’ll be able to name are the ones that play for other teams now. you will marvel at amon-ra st. Brown’s ability to rush for 150 yards and two touchdowns in a 20-point loss. You’ll recall that Campbell is the only marketable employee on this team. And you will be reminded that the Michigan accent is still the worst of all Midwestern accents. people from michigan heard the wisconsin accent and said, “hmm, not nasal enough.” I went to Michigan 28 years ago and I still can’t get that soooooooo accent out of my head.
and michigan people aren’t even nice. they’re idiots they don’t bother with the veneer of friendliness that makes so many other midwesterners at least tolerable. instead you end up with a bunch of shitty brayers pretending they’re from the east coast while sounding like they grew up in a fucking haystack. no wonder matthew stafford left with a wink and a smile :
Do you know how many times I’ve been the subject of this fucking ad? i have all his beats memorized down to stafford smiling at the camera after telling the at&t lady “oh so buying a new phone is like getting rid of my old hometown shit i still have a thing for Serious, am I serious?”
listen to me michigan. every night matthew stafford and his wife sit on their lanai in manhattan beach, watch the sun set over the pacific and laugh at you. They laugh until they vomit. you all know it. You’ve lived in Michigan for decades. you know your life is just as horrible as your football team. you know no one regrets fleeing your state. he watches, year after year, as his friends and acquaintances move to greener pastures and discover the joys of living in a more functional and beautiful world. and yet look at you. still in Michigan. still rooting for this team. still miserable. a whole life waiting to die. no group of fans deserves such a wasted life more than you. be fucked.
and, as always, fuck bob seger.
but he drew, bob seger is a…
no, it is not. fuck bob seger.
ratto says: Having given up any pretense of getting really good, the Lions just have to defend the Thanksgiving game, and despite complaints from viewers who think they deserve Featured matchups in each of the 272 three-hour entertainment slots the NFL shoves into your chest, they’re right to hold onto. For one thing, they were one of the original Thanksgiving games in 1920 when the league was born, and the only one to shine when they lost 28-0 to the Dayton Triangles. The Heralds folded at the end of the year, as did three other Detroit-based teams before the city stole the Portsmouth Spartans and renamed them. it is a monument to the irrelevance-failure that the lions have maintained for the last 55 years, and a statement about our future as a culture that must be taken into account in all the festivities. “Sure you want bucs-bosses or bill-loaders, but this is your life in a pandemic/recession. shut up and look.” and you will because you see the logic in deshaun watson being suspended for a quarter for every masseur he assaulted. send a greeting card to your soul in hell.
what might not suck: d’andre swift is one of those lion backs where you see him make a good run and you go, “damn, they have to give the ball to that guy!” and then they don’t.
Hear it from Lions fans!
jaime:
Last year was the best season in Lions history.
alexander:
Lions alone have kept me from enjoying sports unless my team is up 20 with 10 seconds remaining.
know:
It got to the point where I can’t figure out if goff can’t read in general, let alone a defense.
joseph:
the tampa bay buccaneers have won the lions division more recently than the lions.
ronaldo:
my hopes always die around columbus day.
andrew:
my wife just gave birth to our second daughter at henry ford hospital. As a gesture that I can only imagine is a cruel joke, we were given a pink hat with the detroit lions logo on it. I threw that damn hat in the trash.
ryan:
Stafford has 400% more career playoff wins in a year away from Detroit than he did in Detroit in the Super Bowl era. I really want that commercial to go away.
travis:
nate burleson broke his arm trying to pick up a pizza. stephen tulloch tore his anterior cruciate ligament double checking off. punter john jett suffered a season-ending injury playing safety in practice. Mike Utley was paralyzed on the field, Chuck Hughes was killed on the field, and Eric Andolsek was killed by a drunk driver while mowing his lawn. i predict that amon-ra st. Brown will somehow sustain a career-ending injury to him from an errant crew member.
margot:
As an adult, I’ve taken my barry sanders jumper around the world, and wherever I go I’m met with overflowing enthusiasm. I have come to resent this. I wish that, just once, someone else would tell me to fuck off.
tonio:
if you ever want to see a perfect example of why it’s wrong for cities to give sports teams hundreds of millions of dollars to build a new stadium, go to detroit sometime to catch a game. You’ll see parking lots, parking garages, and police officers enforcing parking violations. You’ll see acres and acres of vacant lots fenced off from no one, because no one actually lives near Ford Field. The only type of development you’ll see on these lots are fire hydrants: little red specks that dot frozen or muddy ground every 200 yards or so, per Wayne County regulations.
mark:
detroit rams. how fucking pathetic that the fans are rallying behind.
(I was rooting for stafford too)
john:
the last pro football game i attended was a lions vs. packers matchup on thanksgiving day at the new ford dome. my only memories of the game are (1) watching brett favre warm up with all the seriousness of a day drinker at the beach, and (2) having an asshole in a scott mitchell t-shirt spill an entire beer down my back. we leave at halftime to get home in time for the “good games”. (dad quote)
caress:
A team beat us in the category of “longest playoff win drought.” now we don’t even have that anymore.
nathan:
Las Vegas sportsbooks are accepting a large number of bets that the Lions will finish above the predicted six win total. This is what a young, enthusiastic and eager coach will get: the faith of the masses that their favorite team will have a Jeff Fisher-style 7-10 season. at least the coach has not yet proudly announced his belief in forced childbirth.
vernon:
watching barry sanders race through the 2000 in ’97 was a lot of fun but this was during blackout days if the game didn’t die. every week it was an “OMG I hope I get to see this!” adventure during the week. We couldn’t even sell ourselves with Barry Sanders on the list.
my dad got season tickets for the lions in 2008 when they went 0-16. he renewed for several more years after that. I never questioned it and sometimes I supported it. “It’s a fun outing.” “You’ll want to be there when they win.” why is it fun to see them win every week and they will never be good?
the green bay packers once beat us twice in the same season when official records say the packers lead by 0:00 of any of those games.
Russian:
dateline 1979: I had just gotten a job at the pontiac airport. It was my first real job. one of my coworkers asked me if i wanted to go with him to a preseason game at the new silverdome. He had seen them build the thing from the air, but he had never been inside it, nor had he ever been to a Detroit Lions game. there was no infrastructure to get to the place and park a car, so we had to take a bus from some shopping center on telegraph road. it was inconvenient, but the lions played well. at halftime, my friend asked me to join his family tradition and attend the thanksgiving game with them. he bought 10 tickets at the box office at halftime for $10 each. Gary Danielson proceeds to break his leg. lions go into thanksgiving 1-11. my friend’s own family won’t buy the tickets for him. We arrived with two extra tickets to sell, which normally wouldn’t be a problem, except the Lions have passed a city ordinance that week that prohibits ticket sales on Silverdome property. the public address system is playing this news and the fact that there are undercover cops enforcing this. we had to go out to featherstone road to sell our extra tickets and were lucky enough to get $8 for a $10 ticket. that’s how lions management treats people. this was the last penny the bastards got from me. fuck martha firestone with a hankook tire.
jeff:
On local sports radio today, the hosts discussed what it would take to have a “good season.” they first proceeded to enumerate half a dozen conditions; “if [player] steps forward”, “if [player] can stay healthy”, and so on. It was like a rube goldberg word machine. and the definition of a “good season”? not a playoff win, not even a playoff appearance. just a winning record. and the fans called and agreed. That’s how low the bar is in Detroit. the lions are so abjectly terrible that they have conditioned their fans to be people who are satisfied with getting back the dollar they spent on a lottery scratcher.
brian:
I have a real grain of hope for a somewhat entertaining and improved team this season. This now means Dan Campbell will be caught on a hot mic saying the N-word and Deandre Swift will be squashed by a lighting crew.
sarah:
They’ll inexplicably beat the Packers at home and then, just as inexplicably, completely shit the Giants two weeks later.
I’m a fan out of the market, so I buy a Sunday ticket to see the lions every week. Every year, my husband asks me with a hint of hope in his voice if I want to renew it for another season. when I answer in the affirmative, I can always hear the soft sigh he gives. I know he’s thinking of all the cool photography things he could buy with that money, instead of spending it on a service that will inevitably make his wife cranky every Sunday. however, he faithfully renews it, every year. That’s how I know he loves me: He allows me to make these mistakes on my own, continually, with only the softest judgment.
Oscar:
With the way other teams’ writers and fans talk about the Lions this offseason, you’d think they actually won something big. Apparently, all you need to be Favorite Coach of the Year is to not be Matt Patricia. “Hard Knocks” will continue that narrative until the wheels fall off, trying to make Dan Campbell look like Bill Plots when in fact he’s nothing more than Bowflex Rex Ryan.
i moved to rural thailand two years ago and now teach english in a school full of kids who wouldn’t recognize a soccer ball if i brought one to class with me. my girlfriend is from the area and so far we have lived together for an entire nfl season. I guess my initial explanation of why I keep seeing the lions sounded to you like a recently freed former cult member now struggling to assimilate after being freed.
tim:
was unable to make it to the last game of the season due to a covid scare so had to watch from home as the lions beat the packers for what i could have sworn was three tds but what the internet tells me it was only one. anyway, I got so high on the resulting hopium fumes that somehow I’m now convinced we have an outside chance at the third wild card and a summary execution in the first round.
deidra:
jim caldwell was fired and replaced by a shaggy willy for reasons I still can’t understand or accept.
kiah:
Last time these assholes won a championship, Nancy Pelosi was still in high school.
ty:
just coming off a 3-13-1 year, they have $31 million man jared goff under center, they traded to draft a wr who won’t play more than eight games this season and they have a new oc. And this is the most hyped Lions season since 2012, the season after their first playoff appearance in 12 years. they finished that year 4-12.
bradley:
dan campbell is still destined for the fate of almost every lion trainer that came before him:
1. their teams will be tremendous
2. you will get a vote of confidence and/or contract extension
3. will be fired
4. And like every Lions head coach since 1964, he will never be a HC in the NFL again.
New principal owner, Sheila Ford Hamp, is the latest in the Ford dynasty to inherit the franchise without ever having a real job.
todd:
I grew up in michigan, so my lion fanaticism came from growing up there, but now I live on the east coast. One day, while I was waiting to pick up my son from kindergarten, I noticed that one of the other dads was wearing flip-flops with a lions logo. I asked him how he became a lions fan: did he or his parents grow up in michigan?
“No, I was born and raised here,” he answered.
“so how did you become a fan of the lions, with much better options here?”
didn’t expect your answer. “I was a kid when they lost all their games and went 0-16. I started following them after that.”
Needless to say, I don’t trust this guy’s judgment and will refrain from having conversations with him at all costs.
doug:
the first nfl season i can remember was 1991. the lions made the nfc championship game. my six-year-old self just assumed that winning a lot of games and almost making it to the super bowl would be semi-regular. Fast forward 31 years and I’m 100% convinced the Lions won’t even win a four-team division before I die.
The late Gary Moeller is the second best coach we’ve had in the last thirty years.
henry:
as recent immigrants to michigan in the late 80’s, we gravitated towards all things american, like football. including lions. Little did I know that our 1991 playoff run would be my last. i’m 45 now i should have moved to windsor.
jose:
matt stafford’s fat smug face in at&t commercials makes me want to throw up. you can drown in a bucket of vaccines.
tom:
my first memory of the detroit lions is that reggie rogers killed three teenagers while driving drunk. one of the children was the son of a good friend of my dad. he was the first “cool kid” i met when he was a little kid. the other two teenagers in the car with him were his cousins in town for a family funeral. my most recent memory of lions is sitting in my little sister’s hospital room last fall. It was a few days after she underwent brain surgery to remove a growth in her frontal lobe. after her surgery, she didn’t recognize anyone, and would only remember her family and friends asking us questions and slowly figuring things out. she still didn’t recognize anything, it was more that things seemed vaguely familiar. the only reason she sat down to chat with me is that I seemed like a pretty nice guy, I looked a bit like her, I had my college badge, the same as the one from the hospital she was in, and she recognized my last name like single. name.during one of our chats, her neighbor on the other side of the curtain was watching the lions lose to the rams. my sister was still beside herself, and things like the television were too much to process and she complained that the sound of it made her head hurt. she must have caught a bit of the announcers on TV saying that the lions were losing because she said, “it looks like the lions are losing. They always lose, right? that’s his thing. I remember.” my sister didn’t even recognize the pictures of her son and her husband and she would look at me sideways every time she walked into her room until she showed her my work ID with a picture of me and a last name that it looked familiar. to her. but she knew deep down in her fractured memories that detroit lions suck. She eventually regained her memories and is currently much better! oh blah blah blah barry sanders and calvin johnson etc etc….
chris:
September 12, 2010. The first Sunday of a new NFL season.
my grandfather (“pa”, as we called him), had been living with Parkinson’s disease for a decade and the end was near. So, a dozen members of my family (aunts, uncles, cousins) had traveled from various points in the Midwest to my grandparents’ house in central Michigan to say goodbye. But as anyone who has lost a loved one to degenerative disease understands, the family had been saying goodbye for a long time. watching pa’s slow transformation into a living memory had been an agonizing experience, for his grandchildren, definitely for his children, but especially for my grandmother (“na”), who had spent every day of the past 10 years caring for him like him. rejected.
My grandparents met while serving in World War II. pa’s leg had been blown off by a land mine, and na was his nurse during the recovery. They fell in love, got married and had children. and now, 65 years later, here she was watching over him once more, their relationship coming full circle. in a sentimental, writing way, it was a fitting and moving end to her love story. but na wasn’t a writer, she was a nurse, and in real life, in a human way, the previous decade she had taken a huge toll on him. so, in the midst of the sadness of the day, there was also a sense of impending relief.
And for the lions, there was hope. Matthew Stafford was entering his second season. His rookie year (particularly the now-infamous Browns game with a microphone) had done enough to convince us that he was the promised quarterback. the lions had just written ndamukong suh; calvin johnson was calvin johnson; jim schwartz tweeted about listening to iron maiden on the way to the games. 24-year-old me couldn’t have been on a Lions team more.
pa was a lions fan of the greatest generation and, like many men his age, his fanaticism was anchored in two unshakable principles: an undying love for bobby layne and an undying hatred for the chicago bears. How fitting, then, that the family’s last game with Dad could be this: the birth of a new era of lion soccer, heralded through the destruction of the franchise he hated. what a way to go.
And for a while, we really believed things would work that way. the lions came out swinging. After an early second touchdown that put them up 14-3, my older brother walked across the living room to Dad’s bed to tell him the good news: Not only were the Lions beating the Bears on Opening Day, they were. doing behind a bobby layne high school quarterback! my brother swears to this day that when he delivered the message, dad’s eyes lit up with a faint gleam of recognition, even happiness. he choose to believe him. here, at the end of this endless march to death, there was a brief moment of joy.
but lions fans rarely have that privilege.
The Bears scored a 79-yard touchdown on the next play from scrimmage. Just before the half, Stafford took a hit from Julius Peppers and was sprawled on the grass, grabbing his shoulder. Shaun Hill closed out the first half, and as the second began, the hole in our stomachs widened into an abyss. Late in the fourth quarter, the Bears scored a touchdown to take the lead.
every Lions fan knows what happened next. Calvin Johnson, like the walking demigod that he was, tried to save us. But as the umpires continued to debate his game-winning catch, as more time passed without touchdown confirmation, we all knew where things were headed.
When the latch was finally lifted, everyone reacted in their own way: the younger generation with anger and profanity, the older generation with incredulous giggles. but if anyone had taken a moment to look at dad in his bed, I like to imagine he would have seen a second flash of recognition in his eyes: an exhausted disappointment when this damned team let him down one last time. /p>
died the next day. My brothers and I still see every Sunday.
registrations for nfl dropout previews are closed. next: houston texans.