Lions News

[whatever_gong82]

[jaadam4]

I went to the last one at CoPa and they crushed it

[edindetroit]

CoPa Cabanna?

[jaadam4]

CoPa Cabanna?

Fuckin Right

[whatever_gong82]

[whatever_gong82]

Detroit Lions' Alim McNeill playing best football, doesn't 'ever want to leave' Detroit



Dave Birkett
Detroit Free Press



Alim McNeill walked out of the Detroit Lions' locker room Friday with three footballs in his hand — painted game balls he received for his play in wins over the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Green Bay Packers and Las Vegas Raiders.

"I think I've got a couple more (coming), too," McNeill said.



The way he has played this season, it figures.

A third-round pick out of North Carolina State in 2021, McNeill is second on the team with four sacks and has 16 tackles and one forced fumble through eight games. He has been a force in the Lions' 6-2 start, and he's playing the best football of his career, even if he'd rather not admit it.

Alim McNeill tackles Jimmy Garoppolo_10-30-2023.jpg

"I really don’t feel like I’ve done enough, if we’re talking individually," McNeill said. "I always try to put my best ability and put my best work out there on the field. But me, you can’t ask a question like that. I’m always going to deflect it. I never say I played good."

After showing steady improvement in his first two seasons, McNeill has blossomed this fall into a more consistently disruptive player.



He had two sacks in the Lions' Week 8 win over the Las Vegas Raiders. He already has surpassed his sack total from his first two years combined (three). And he has been a key cog in a run defense that ranks third in the NFL at 76.8 yards per game allowed.

McNeill said his offseason body transformation has contributed to his improved play, but more than that, he has made huge strides in the mental approach to his game.



"I was just doing too much thinking that didn’t even apply to me," McNeill said of the past two seasons. "I was just wondering like, 'What if they do this?' I just need to do my job, worry about what’s in front of me, and that’s what I'm doing now.

"I was making up scenarios in my head, just thinking way too much. But now I’m a lot more comfortable out there, I know what’s going on, I know what I'm doing, I know what they’re doing, stuff like that."



With a strong finish to the season, McNeill could be in line for a contract extension when he first becomes eligible this spring.

He said he's open to that possibility and doesn't "ever want to leave" Detroit, though it's not on his mind now.



"I mean, I would be a fool to say I haven’t thought about it, but, like, am I thinking about it? Nah," he said. "I just want to play ball and win, do my job the best that I can. When I start thinking about stuff like that, that’s kind of like how you’re a junior in college, you start thinking about going to the league, stuff like that. You just don’t think about that stuff, you just play."

Dan Campbell and Alim McNeill.jpg

DPJ delay?


Coach Dan Campbell said he's not sure yet if wide receiver Donovan Peoples-Jones, acquired in a deadline trade with the Cleveland Browns, will make his Lions debut Sunday against the Los Angeles Chargers.

Peoples-Jones was limited in practice this week by a rib injury he suffered in his last game in Cleveland and is officially listed as questionable for Sunday. Campbell said Peoples-Jones "looked pretty good" in practice, but is still getting "up to speed ... with what we're doing offensively."

Donovan Peoples-Jones in Baltimore.jpg

“I think more than anything it’ll be talk to him, talk to (wide receivers coach Antwaan Randle) El, talk to (offensive coordinator) Ben (Johnson) and just kind of gather all the facts and see where we’re at. I want to make sure he’s comfortable, too. I do. We have that luxury right now. We’re pretty good in the receiver room, so we’ll see.


Fade to Black

Campbell said he likely was not going to be able to attend the first night of Metallica's two-night concert in Detroit on Friday, but he said his love for the metal band stems from his days growing up in rural Texas and getting to know their music through a couple of his guitar-playing cousins.


"They’d come see us, I’m out in the middle of nowhere, dirt roads, and here they come with the electric guitar and he — and they loved Metallica," Campbell said. "They played all of them back in the day, so that’s where I began to really love them, and then over time, they just stood the test of time, right? One of these bands that just, they always I guess reinvent themselves. They never get stale, they never get old, they just adapt, adjust and just keep putting out hits. And I love that and respect that."

Along with Friday night's show at Ford Field, Metallica is scheduled to play the stadium again Sunday.


Injury report

Offensive guard Halapoulivaati Vaitai will not play against the Chargers; Campbell said he's not sure when Vaitai will return from the back problems that have limited him for much of the past two seasons. Defensive tackle Levi Onwuzurike is doubtful with a hip injury.

The Lions did not list running back David Montgomery (ribs) or starting offensive linemen Jonah Jackson (ankle) and Frank Ragnow (calf/toe) with injury designations after they practiced in full all week, clearing the way for them to play Sunday.


Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett.

[-Deborah-]

I was scrolling through Facebook and ran across an article where they had six writers pick Super Bowl matchups at mid-season. I saved this image but now I can't find the article to share with you all so, here's the image. The comments under this one were pretty funny. People do not hold Detroit in high regard yet.

FB_IMG_1699629967601.jpg

[jaadam4]

I was scrolling through Facebook and ran across an article where they had six writers pick Super Bowl matchups at mid-season. I saved this image but now I can't find the article to share with you all so, here's the image. The comments under this one were pretty funny. People do not hold Detroit in high regard yet.

FB_IMG_1699629967601.jpg

I saw that too! Love it

[wcfwtf]

At this moment I would chose Ravens and Eagles

[ghandi]

Hope they did a video presentation of some sort with him...that would get the concert rocking

[whatever_gong82]

Jared Goff got closure from Sean McVay, and it helped make him a Detroit Lions hero

Detroit Lions QB Jared Goff before game vs. LA Rams in 2021.jpg

BY SAM FARMER
STAFF WRITER

https://twitter.com/latimesfarmer

NOV. 10, 2023 4:05 AM PT



His father was a fireman and, in a way, Jared Goff is one too.

Consider his career as a quarterback. Time after time, he has gone into a bad situation and ultimately made it better, extinguishing the wrong kind of fire and eventually igniting the right one.


“It’s not the most fun way to do it, I guess,” Goff told the Los Angeles Times in a phone interview this week. “Everyone would love to go and just win, win, win. But it’s a very rewarding and fulfilling way to go about it. Proud of myself, certainly, and all those teammates on those teams for being down in the gutter and being able to come out on top.”


Check the history. At the University of California, his teams went from 1-11 to winning a bowl game. His Rams went from 4-12 his rookie year to the Super Bowl two years later. And now with the Detroit Lions, Goff’s team went from 3-13-1 to now, a season-and-a-half later, 6-2 and one of the NFL’s top franchises.

The Lions, who play at the Chargers on Sunday, have generated at least 325 yards of offense in each of their first eight games, the first time they’ve done that since 1954. From Week 10 of 2022 through Week 6 of this season, they scored at least 20 points a game, establishing a franchise record of 15 such games in a row.



“They really force you to defend everybody on the field,” Chargers coach Brandon Staley said. “They have a lot of different guys who touch the football. Jared has a lot of experience playing that way. That is how he played with Sean [McVay] with the Rams, and that is how he is playing now. He is playing really smart football and he is getting the ball to his play-makers.”


The last eight years have been a winding odyssey for Goff, 29, the No. 1 overall pick in the 2016 draft. The Rams made dramatic moves to get him, then, just five years later, worked just as hard to replace him with Detroit’s Matthew Stafford — even though they had signed Goff to a $110-million deal. just two years earlier.

So two quarterbacks taken first overall swapped cities, and Goff, even though he already had been to a Super Bowl, had huge cleats to fill in Detroit.


Stafford was enormously popular in the Motor City and remains so, and his legend only grew when he went to Los Angeles and won a Super Bowl in his first season. They might as well have been the Detroit Rams with the way those Stafford-loyal Lions fans were pulling for them.

Meanwhile, Goff’s teams were really struggling. In his inaugural season in Detroit, the Lions didn’t win their first game until Week 13. Last season, despite glimmers of promise, they got off to a 1-6 start. The Lions turned a corner last season, winning eight of their final 10 games.

Dan Campbell and Jared Goff.jpg

Initially, there was a strong belief outside the franchise that Goff was merely a placeholder keeping the seat warm for the next great Lions hope but clearly the club’s decision-makers had something else in mind. One of those people was general manager Brad Holmes, who came from the Rams and had been with Goff in L.A.

“The narrative when he got here was a little skewed,” Holmes said. “People thought he was a throw-in because of his contract. That was not the case. There were other quarterbacks who were on the carousel that year, and [Rams GM Les Snead] and I had a conversation specifically of, ‘Do you want Jared in the deal?’ And I was like, `Absolutely.’ ”


That turned out to be a shrewd decision, even though it took patience for coach Dan Campbell and the Lions to stick with Goff through the early turbulence while the foundation was being poured for the ground-up rebuild.



The lanky and laid-back Goff, a California kid out of Central Casting, initially seemed like a mismatch for the hard-edged grit of Detroit. Much of that was based on superficial appearances.

Though he’s 6 feet, 4 inches, Goff doesn’t have that prototypical bulk of the Chargers’ Justin Herbert or Buffalo’s Josh Allen. The Detroit quarterback is deceptively durable, however.



“I remember when Jared came out, and I want to say he was playing versus Washington,” recalled Holmes, director of college scouting for the Rams at the time. “And he takes this shot, this blitzer comes right down the pipe and just smokes him dead in the face. Jared just uncorked this dime deep for a touchdown. I was like, ‘Oh, this kid’s tough.’”

Detroit Lions QB Jared Goff waves at Lions fans.jpg

Goff has made 39 of 42 possible starts with Detroit.

“You’re not going to get me off the field unless I can’t move or can’t function,” he said. “I owe it to my guys. I owe it to my team. We trust each other.”



Of the perception he’s a sleepy-eyed West Coaster who lacks intensity, he said: “I’ve kind of been misperceived my whole life that way. I don’t think I’m much different than a lot of quarterbacks around the league. A lot of us get labeled as some things, certain perceptions.

“It’s a lot easier for someone to create a narrative of you than it is for you to break that narrative of yourself. That’s not ever my goal. I’m not worried what people are writing or whatever. But at some point you’re like, well, that’s not even close to the truth.”



The middle of the country wasn’t an unfamiliar place for the family. Before becoming a fireman, Jerry Goff was a Major League catcher for the Montreal Expos, Pittsburgh Pirates and Houston Astros. He and his wife, Nancy, thought their son had a chance to develop a special connection with fans in Detroit.

“Nancy and I mentioned to him that the Midwest is beautiful,” the elder Goff said. “I lived out there a lot during my playing days and I loved it. That was our focus to him, ‘Fans are unbelievable. Culture is wonderful.’ And he’s really taken that on.”



That’s not to say the transition was easy.



“He went through some real dark times at first in a rebuild,” Jerry Goff said. “He really learned a lot about himself, he and his fiancée being out there by themselves, away from L.A. and really just digging in on the football side.”

For Jared Goff, a key part of moving on to the Lions required getting some closure from the Rams. In the weeks after the Stafford trade was done, instead of walking away without a word, Goff went back to McVay so he could understand the specific reasons why the team parted ways with him — and what Goff could glean from the experience to make himself a better player.



“He wanted the full breakdown of why,” recalled former Rams tackle Andrew Whitworth, a close friend of Goff. “I thought that really showed his toughness.”

Goff showed up at Whitworth’s house in the days after the deal was consummated to get his thoughts. Then the quarterback informed him he was moving on for an exit meeting with McVay.


“I’m like, ‘Wait, what?’ ” Whitworth recalled. “And he’s like, ‘I told Sean I still want to do our exit meeting…’ And I was like, ‘You’re crazy. Why would you want to do an exit?’ And he said, ‘I want him to tell me right to my face what I did wrong. I want to hear it from him. How do I get better?’ He wanted closure.”

Recalling that two years later, Goff didn’t go into details about what was said in his final meeting with McVay, saying only: “I got some answers and gained a lot of closure. He was forthright.”


Clearly, Goff is deep into the next chapter, as are the Rams, who this week signed quarterback Carson Wentz. He was drafted second overall by Philadelphia in 2016. There was much speculation before that draft about whether the Rams would take Goff or Wentz.

“It’s very ironic he’s there,” Goff said of Wentz. “But I’m really happy for him,”



Likewise, Goff and the Lions are gaining fans around the country by the week.

“He’s a winning quarterback who has taken a team to the Super Bowl and has a chance to do it again,” said ESPN’s Joe Buck, who called Detroit’s win over Las Vegas in Week 8. “The Lions are the de facto America’s Team. Everybody roots for Detroit. And I think if you knew Jared Goff, everybody would root for Jared.”


Sam Farmer

https://twitter.com/latimesfarmer

https://www.instagram.com/latimes/

sam.farmer@latimes.com

https://www.facebook.com/latimes

Honored by the Pro Football Hall of Fame in recognition of his “long and distinguished reporting in the field of pro football,” Sam Farmer has covered the NFL for 25 seasons. A graduate of Occidental College, he’s a two-time winner of California Sportswriter of the Year and first place for beat writing by Associated Press Sports Editors.

[-Deborah-]

[-Deborah-]

Readers flooded my email with suggestions on Detroit Lions song (freep.com)
Motown? AC/DC? Queen? Readers flooded my email with suggestions on Detroit Lions song

Jeff Seidel
Detroit Free Press

Today, I’m giving over my column to you, the readers. Because your voice should be heard on this incredibly important, life-changing issue.

OK, maybe, it’s not that vital to society. But it’s a fun topic. Recently, I wrote a column suggesting the Detroit Lions need a theme song, trying to find something that would get both the players and fans riled up, dancing and singing in Ford Field. Which was actually a blast to report. I talked to several players and got their opinions.

“Reaction was amazing,” I told defensive back Chase Lucas on Tuesday. “I got tons of emails.”

“I’d love to see the list of songs,” he said.

It ranged from hard rock to Motown, oldies to remakes, and several readers had a secondary suggestion: Please tell the Lions!

So, here we go:


“Tubthumping!” by Chumbawamba.

Several readers suggested this song and I have to admit I had never heard of it. Then, I played it and realized I knew every word: “I get knocked down, but I get up again, you’re never gonna keep me down.”

Which might be perfect for this team, as well as this city.


"Better find a defibrillator when you play this song, 'Burning Down the House' by the Talking Heads. The percussion would rattle the windows at Ford Field not to mention 120db from amped up fans." — Tim Cluney.


"Here’s the song we need! 'We are Family' by Sister Sledge. This is always a stand up and dance tune AND everyone knows the words AND it’s intergenerational AND the message is PERFECT for the times!!!" — Dave McClary.

And that's a lot of ANDs!


"Drake’s 'Started from the Bottom.' That BASS in Ford Field would be booming! LION4LIFE" — Robert Shaw.

Agree, but, um, not exactly PG-13.


"'Born to Raise Hell' by Motörhead. We are the Motor City and Dan Campbell is a metal head." — Mike Simmons.


"I'd vote for 'Get Ready' by the Temptations. It's got the energy and message to the fans and the Lions are definitely "bringing it" in every game!" — Barb Miller.


"Check out the cover of 'We Will Rock You' by the Struts. Dare I say it tops the original. Play it loud!" — Bob Hahn.


"My suggestion is Peter Gabriel’s song 'Sledgehammer.'… Plus it’s about the players being sledgehammers. All you need to do is summon them and they’ll be there. Almost like our own superheroes of the gridiron." — John Cronyn.

Yes, I love how everybody is running with this.


"'Detroit Rock City' by KISS! Just hearing the guitars at the beginning gets everyone jacked up!" — Brent Smith.


"If you want the fans to go crazy, and electrify the team to Ironman mode, play AC/DC's 'THUNDER STRUCK'! Love my Lions for the last 66 yrs. Let's do this Detroit, all the way!" — Larry Horner.

Totally unrelated point: My (adult) kids got me playing the "Thunderstruck" drinking game at a recent wedding, and I have to give props to the inventiveness of today's youth. Back in the day, we thought shotgunning a beer was edgy.


"Having been a high school head football coach (now retired), a song that I used to hype the team and often quoted to exemplify the struggle to overcome adversity on the field and in life was Linkin Park’s 'New Divide.' If you read the lyrics it is about redemption and the fight to succeed after great suffering. There are two lines that echo a Dan Campbell mantra: “The voice was all I heard/Did I get what I deserve”?” … Listen to this song with a pair of headsets on and envision a packed Ford Field’s reaction to the opening chords, it would be electric."— Mark Tyler


"I am telling you the Lions theme song should be 'When Legends Rise' by Godsmack!!!! Listen to it. Perfect!" — Mark.


Many readers suggested a long list of songs without explanation:

“Let's Get it Started” by The Black Eyed Peas.

“Don't Stop Me Now” by Queen.

“Highway Star” by Deep Purple.

James Brown's “Get Up Off of That Thing."

"Trouble Man" by Marvin Gaye.

“Lose Yourself" by Eminem.

"WELCOME 2 DETROIT " by Trick Trick featuring Eminem.

Ted Nugent's “Stranglehold."

“Uptown Funk” by Mark Ronson featuring Bruno Mars.

And Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger"

Which would be freaky, if you ask me, if they played that while playing the Bears.

Oh my.

"'I Just Want to Celebrate' by Rare Earth. ... It’s funky, powerful, easy to sing and has some very relevant lyrics for the city of Detroit and the state of Michigan." — Cyndee Farlin.

"Should be 'Detroit Breakdown' the live version by the J. Geils Band. Old but good. Party hard." — Andrew.

"I think it should be 'Dancing Queen' by ABBA. Think about it! Everybody knows it, and it's upbeat." — Jeff Feur.

"I thought of the song 'Time Has Come Today' by the Chambers Brothers, because their time has come." — Michael Moore.

"The song HAS to be Motown!! How about 'Get Ready' by the Temptations? Perfect intro, great beat — a classic!" — Morry Bornstein, Lions Fan since 1953!!

"'It’s My Life' by Bon Jovi. It has great lyrics, great beat and a great opening that I could imagine would move the crowd waiting for their team to arrive — Kathi Southfield.

"How about a throwback to the 60s ... the last time we can say that the Lions had great teams. How about 'The Lion Sleeps Tonight' by the Tokens. It talks about how The Lion roams the jungle.
Ford Field is the jungle where the Lion roams." — George Feld.
"I used to be a Pistons season ticket holder at the Palace. I remember this one signature moment when the team had been fighting to get to the top of the Eastern Conference standings ahead of Boston and Chicago. The night before this game they had finally made it and as everyone walked in to the Palace for that next game the Temptations' 'Standing on the Top' with Rick James kicked off, and the crowd went nuts. After all we have been through as Lions fans and to finally be 'Standing on the Top,' I think it would be quite fitting." — Marvin Y. (Lions fan since 1970s)
It's an important point. This has to happen organically. The Lions should play a variety of songs and see which one pops with the fans.

Finally, there is only one proper way to do this. With the Queen of Soul.

Aretha Franklin's "Respect."

Which works on just about every level, especially for a home game.

Just a little bit. Just a little bit.

Amen.

[-Deborah-]

Was this posted before? If so I missed it. Be sure to watch the ending! Ha!!

[whatever_gong82]