There are lots of contenders for the worst part of the Detroit Lions miserable 2008 NFL season, starting with the jokes. How do you keep a Detroit Lion out of your backyard? Put up goalposts. There are the utter on-field embarrassments: a 47-10 nationally televised loss to the Tennessee Titans on Thanksgiving, or last week's 42-7 home defeat at the hands of New Orleans, in which Saints receiver Devery Henderson, on one play, caught a pass with no Lions defender in sight, then scampered across the field for another 23 yards, while cowardly Lions tried to tackle him like a bunch of sorry Pop Warner players. If that's not humiliating enough, how about the fact that the Motor City's floundering auto industry is actually performing better than the Lions right now?
Or our personal favorite: it's gotten so bad that during Sunday's game against the Saints, Ford Field fans started chanting "We Want Joey" at New Orleans third string quaterback Joey Harrington, who frustrated hoards of Lions faithful during his four year train wreck as Detroit's starter from 2002 to 2005. Now, even Detroit's former whipping can boy poke fun at his ex-team. "It's weird to think I was here in the heyday," deadpanned Harrington, who finished with a sickly 18-37 record as the Lions' quarterback.
But when it really comes down to it, the team's record says it all. The Lions are the first in NFL history to start a season 0-15, and if the they lose in Green Bay on Sunday, they'll go down as the worst NFL team ever. Only the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers have finished a year without a win, but they did it in an era when teams played just 14, not 16, regular season games. Plus, those Bucs were an expansion team in their first year of existence: the Lions have been around since the Great Depression, which hasn't really ended for their fans. In fact the Lions, who haven't had a winning season since 2000, are about to finish off the NFL's worst eight-year run of losing since 1950. "It's pretty sad that it's come to this," said Detroit center Dominic Raiola.
Another word would be shocking. Football experts all agree that in today's "any given Sunday" NFL — where every team seems to have a decent shot to win, where a salary cap structure, and a draft that gives the worst teams access to the best young talent in a young man's game, creates league-wide parity — going winless is awfully hard to do. "It's mind boggling to me," says Troy Aikman, the Hall of Fame ex-quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys and Fox Sports analyst, who lived through a nightmarish 1-15 season himself as a rookie back in 1989. Several teams, in fact, have only managed to put together one victory in a season, including the 2007 Miami Dolphins and the 2000 San Diego Chargers . But failing to eke out one win in a league built on mediocrity takes a certain stunning level of ineptitude.
And more than anything, terrible management is to blame. Former president Matt Millen, an ex-NFL linebacker who joined the team in 2001 and was finally fired this season after a multitude of public fan protests, strung together years of failed draft picks to dig Detroit into it current hole. Although every armchair football aficionado knows that defensive and offensive line play wins championships (or at least a game or two), Millen repeatedly spent top draft choices on low-impact wide receivers, despite not having a good quarterback to throw them the ball. The low point: in 2003 Millen used the second overall pick on Michigan State wideout Charles Rogers, who was recently sentenced to nine months of drug counseling following an assault and battery arrest involving his fianc�e. Among the top players Millen passed over for wide receivers: Pittsburgh Steeler quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, a Super Bowl winner, five-time Pro Bowl defensive back Troy Polamalu, also a Super Bowl-winning Steeler, and San Diego Chargers linebacker Shawne Merriman, a three-time Pro Bowler. "If you can't evaluate talent, if you can't draft talent, nothing else matters," says Aikman. "Your team is built on a house of cards."
Lions owner William Clay Ford Sr., 83, the grandson of Henry Ford, has only added to the hopelessness. Since Ford acquired the Lions in 1964, the team has won just a single playoff game. Millen, for example, was given an inexplicable five-year contract extension before the 2005 season, so he's still being paid for destroying the team. Ford has promised to bring Martin Mayhew and Tom Lewland, two Millen-era execs who helped assemble the '08 disaster, back for another year. Their coach, Rod Marinelli, hired his son-in-law Joe Barry to be his defensive coordinator. How has that worked out? The Lions have been the NFL's worst defense since Barry took over two years ago.
"You don't have a page long enough to list all their problems," says former New York Giants quarterback Phil Simms, who had the great pleasure of analyzing the Tennessee-Detroit game on Thanksgiving for CBS. "Their free agent signings have been flawed, their drafts have been flawed, the organizational philosophy is flawed. As a coach said to me, 'wow, they're small, they're not fast, and they're old.' It's unbelievable."
But you can't just point the fingers at management. Detroit's players have their fair share of responsibility for the Lions' failures. Richard "Batman" Wood, a linebacker on the 1976 Buccaneers team that finished 0-14 (he used to wear Batman logos on his arm pads and socks), says he wouldn't wish the ignominy of a winless season on any other player. Still, he's angry at the Lions. "In today's game, with free agency and everything else, don't tell me you can't win one game," says Wood, who was a defensive assistant coach for the Bucs in the 90s and recently coached in the NFL's now defunct European league. "Uh, uh, that's not acceptable. C'mon."
How can a season spiral so out of control? For one, as the losses start piling up, the locker room becomes a toxic place. "The offense starts blaming the defense," says Greg Camarillo, a wide receiver on the 2007 Miami Dolphins team that flirted with infamy by starting 0-13 (his Dolphins finished 1-15, but will make the playoffs this season if they beat the New York Jets on Sunday). "The defense starts blaming the offense. You get that 'every man for himself feeling.' In the NFL [the ultimate team game] that's the last thing you want to happen.'" If the Lions want to beat Green Bay, Camarillo says, they need to get off to a fast start. At this point, the team is likely too fragile to pull off any kind of comeback. "You start to think 'aw s—t,' here we go again," says Camarillo.
The losing takes its psychological toll. "The greatest job in the world is playing in the NFL for a winning team," says Aikman. "At the same time, the worst job in the world is being an NFL player on a losing team. No amount money in the world will change that." If you're on a bad team in pro baseball and basketball, at least the frequent games can keep your mind occupied. In the NFL, the failures fester all week. During his tumultuous rookie year, Aikman stayed cooped up in his home between games. "You don't want to go to the grocery stores, you don't want to go to the restaurants, because nobody wants to be around you," says Aikman. Last season Camarillo could wander around Miami unrecognized, and just hear fans rip the Fins. "I would hear discussions about how the Dolphins were just terrible, how they sucked. It made you feel that much worse."
If Detroit does drop its last game, "Batman" Wood insists the Lions players will carry a scar for the rest of their lives. "It's embarrassing to me, my family, the city of Tampa, everyone involved," he says of playing for the '76 Buccaneers. "It's a glum, glum feeling, I mean, just an empty feeling." Last week Wood got a call from his brother, who said he just saw the Bucs named the worst NFL team in history on some television program. Thanks bro. "How do you think that made me feel?" Wood asks. "It's hard to take."
Yes, Detroit's players could face a lifelong pall if they fall to the Packers. Or they could steal a page out of Steve Spurrier's playbook, and laugh about their dubious place in history. Spurrier, the head coach at the University of South Carolina, who won a national title at Florida and also coached the Washington Redskins from 2002 through 2003, was the quarterback on that winless '76 Buccaneers team. He's a bit more lighthearted about the whole experience, and enjoys being remembered for something.
"Yeah, I'll tell ya' what, I hope Detroit wins," he says. "We would like to keep our record, us Buc guys. If they don't win they're going to forget about us." While members of the '72 Miami Dolphins, who finished 17-0, arrogantly sip champagne each year when the last undefeated team drops a game (as the New England Patriots did in losing to the Giants in the Superbowl last year), Spurrier breaks open a cold beer with an assistant coach when the last "defeated" team finally gets a win. "Plus, I've gotten plenty of corny banquet jokes out of it," Spurrier says.
So in that spirit, here's one for the Lions' players just in case. Where do you go in Detroit in case of a tornado? To Ford Field — they never get a touchdown there. Yeah, it's not really that funny, is it? When you can't win one single game in today's NFL, it doesn't really feel like a laughing matter.
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