Lions News

[edindetroit]

I swear, it's like the Chargers want Staley fired. This is like active sabotage.

Wrong thread but I agree.

[CGVT]

I will always insist the two best years in popular music were 1966 and 1984.

I think it is this stretch

70, 71, 72, 73

[froot loops]

A fun little fact about rock music is that of the top 10 most played rock songs on the radio for the decade of 2010-2019 were all released between 1990 and 1994.

[-Deborah-]

I, too, think that 80s music was the worst, but there are some gems in there. And there's nothing wrong with Cruel Summer.

These two songs have been on repeat on Alexa recently lol I was surprised to find this first one wasn't actually an 80s song, but close enough:

[LightninBoy]

A fun little fact about rock music is that of the top 10 most played rock songs on the radio for the decade of 2010-2019 were all released between 1990 and 1994.

90s is my vote for the best music decade. Certainly it was the most diverse - you could find the usual pop plus crossover hits from metal, grunge, rap, indie and country.

[ghandi]

It probably depends on when you grew up as to when the best decade of music was.....Most of our radio music listening probably was in our teenage years so that often is when most people think the music was the best.

[Mainevent]

90s is my vote for the best music decade. Certainly it was the most diverse - you could find the usual pop plus crossover hits from metal, grunge, rap, indie and country.

First half of the 90s, no doubt when grunge, college alternative and hip-hop blew up. Amazing time for music.

[LightninBoy]

It probably depends on when you grew up as to when the best decade of music was.....Most of our radio music listening probably was in our teenage years so that often is when most people think the music was the best.

Agree. Not for me though. I was a teen in the 80s.

[LightninBoy]

First half of the 90s, no doubt when grunge, college alternative and hip-hop blew up. Amazing time for music.

No Doubt broke out in 1996, so technically 2nd half.

(I have no idea if that's true, I just wanted to make a joke about "No Doubt")

[ghandi]

Article on ESPN today says that Teddy Bridgewater plans on retiring after this season....Hopefully Hendon Hooker is ready for next year.

[edindetroit]

It probably depends on when you grew up as to when the best decade of music was.....Most of our radio music listening probably was in our teenage years so that often is when most people think the music was the best.

I think there is good music every year.

[Mainevent]

Article on ESPN today says that Teddy Bridgewater plans on retiring after this season....Hopefully Hendon Hooker is ready for next year.

He better be, since he’s going to start creeping up on retirement age soon too.

[whatever_gong82]

Deb, per our private chat, here's an Lions article from a national perspective. I'm cutting the article into 2, maybe 3 parts. Also Deb, if you want, give me a private message with an email address and I can share the article to you online for free, without any subscription needed.


Detroit Lions fans: The truest in America, long unnoticed by ... America


By Chuck Culpepper

December 16, 2023 at 8:55 a.m. EST

Detroit Lions fans before Turkey Day 2023.jpg

DETROIT — For decades piled upon decades they have dwelled in a desolate vein of fandom unique in its hopelessness and hope while the nation around them has noticed this by barely even noticing. Seldom if ever has such devotion gone so unrewarded and unacknowledged. They’re the truest fans in America by playoff arithmetic, and they seem sorely in need of an ode while loath to crave one.



They’re those fans of the Detroit Lions who never have yielded to an obstinate gloom of scoreboards, whose sustained fervency counts as a marvel, if not a primer on the human condition, and whose downtown passion might startle an outsider. On Thanksgiving morning, amid the tailgate hubbub and the sunny cold just before the very good Lions of 2023 (then 8-2, now 9-4) would lose unexpectedly and yet totally expectedly to the Green Bay Packers (then 4-6), one 74-year-old man stood on a sidewalk. Donald Harper’s Lions days began when Dick “Night Train” Lane visited his fifth-grade class.

“Ah, it’s been miserable,” Harper said later by phone about his 64 years of Lions fandom, but then, of course, it has been also far more intricate than that.



Americans have cuddled up to other non-winners through time, becoming versed in the “Curse of the Billy Goat” in Chicago and the “Curse of the Bambino” in Boston during the much-noted droughts of the Cubs and Red Sox. The New Orleans Saints once felt a curse so profound they christened a 2000 playoff game by summoning, so commendably, a voodoo priestess with a bottle of gin and a boa constrictor. NFL fans near and far know about the old Super Bowl sighs of the Buffalo Bills and Minnesota Vikings and how the Cleveland Browns met slammed doors at Super Bowl doorsteps, but the mention of Detroit’s “Curse of Bobby Layne” would figure to elicit a coast-to-coast huh.

For all those breezing on by the Lions’ entrenched plight, a careful study of the actual numbers can prove jarring. The nation’s truest fans know the following by heart, but you probably don’t: Somehow, Detroit has gone 1-12 in playoff games in the 57-season Super Bowl era, with one nominal berth in an NFC championship game against the unstoppable 1991 Darrell Green-Art Monk Washington team. Detroit’s Super Bowl era home playoff record stands at, gosh, 1-1. The still-beautiful Ford Field, which opened in 2002, has yet to host any playoff game, an arcane dearth only Cleveland can match.



Those who have shared in this avalanche of dreary data bear scars nobody elsewhere much knows or recalls, from Barry Sanders’s retirement by fax in 1999, to the 0-16 record of 2008, to the interference flag dropped and then picked up during a loss to the Dallas Cowboys in the 2014 season’s playoffs, to Aaron Rodgers’s heave through the indoor sky that December night, to, to, to. Seasoned Lions fans know how the 38-6 playoff win over Dallas in a booming Pontiac Silverdome in the 1991 season drowns amid matters such as the 5-0 playoff loss at Dallas in 1970, the 24-23 playoff loss at the San Francisco 49ers in 1983, Brett Favre’s pass to Sterling Sharpe in a first-round game in the 1993 season and the nutty fact that both Tom Dempsey’s 63-yard field goal of 1970 and Justin Tucker’s 66-yard field goal of 2021 ended games at 19-17 and happened with Lions field goal defenders present. They have seen peers hang it up after succumbing to slogans such as “SOL” (Same Old Lions) and “Lions-free.” They have seen — happily — titles in the past half-century for the NBA’s Pistons (three), the NHL’s Red Wings (four), MLB’s Tigers (one) and even the USFL’s Panthers (one), all in a town that would prefer above all the one it lacks.


So these devoted fans often have to cite regular season games among fondest memories, such as when Joe Jaber called the closing win at Green Bay last season, which bounced the Packers from the playoffs, “a top-three Lions win in my lifetime.” Tim Alberta wrote in the Atlantic in September that it was “the gutsiest win I’d ever seen from my team” and “the best moment of my life as a Lions fan.”

It pushed the Lions to 9-8.


continued..

[whatever_gong82]

Detroit Lions fans during Turkey Day 2023.jpg

And while the Lions’ heady 2023 season and the civic belief in General Manager Brad Holmes and Coach Dan Campbell have stirred daydreams of just one actual home playoff game, those who have lived all this both together and alone have developed some distinctive aspects.

Those aspects, tallied up, do seem peerless among fan bases.



A chronic sense of looming dejection has baked itself across generations, to the point that a 47-year-old man’s childhood memories include a disappointment hovering in a living room that preceded his understanding of what the disappointment might have meant. “It was weird because there was always that passion — and hope — and then disappointment,” said Leon Lynn, a fan since birth whose late father, Henry Teachey, would watch the Lions calmly. “Every week that passion and hope would get up there and then go back down.”


The grandparents and great-grandparents of Devan Moosher, 28, imparted quite some message: “The most interesting thing, I think, growing up in a Lions household, you were always told, ‘Don’t get your hopes up,’ ” he said from his Los Angeles base, from which he has traveled to three Lions games this year (one home, two road). And it wasn’t just family: He could be over at a friend’s house, watching a game, lapsing into excitement, “and the dad would come downstairs: ‘Don’t get your hopes up.’ ”


Harper could feel that sense of doom in his section of the stadium on Thanksgiving. “I love my team,” he said, “but I’m not exuberated by it. I’ve still got that thought” — here we go again — “in the back of my head.” And Jaber, 49, a fan with his own spacious, tidy Lions-heavy basement in suburban Novi, who once dated a woman who proclaimed she hoped to find a man who would love her as he loved the Lions, who has recurring, vivid nightmares about missing Lions games, tells of a fresh doom dimension.



He has watched since ninth grade among a caring crowd at the home of his second family, the Beauchamps, whose adored patriarch, David, died in May at 73. His chair is left purposely empty for the gatherings this season. “Every time we jump up with excitement, we’re like, ‘Is there a flag?’ ” Jaber said. “Seriously.” He reels back through an old scar, the famed Calvin Johnson catch ruled a non-catch in 2010 against the Chicago Bears, then continues: “I can’t tell you how many times that we just, we go bonkers, and: ‘Is there a flag? Is there a flag?’ And someone will joke around, ‘Flag!’ And they’re just like messing with you. It’s such a trigger. It such a huge trigger. Huuuuge trigger. … You’re scared to get too excited because you’ve been punched in the face so many times.”

Other fan bases feel that, but life has shepherded Lions fans to a rarer precinct: misery as almost part of anatomy.



“I cannot wait for that moment [of a Super Bowl berth]. It’s going to be the best moment ever; I’m going to be jumping on rooftops. But it’ll be hard for it to ever feel the same,” Jaber said. “It’ll change everything. I feel like of course I’m going to be the same die-hard Lions fan, but it’s like — it’s almost like the yearning will be gone, and maybe we’re attached to the yearning. … I would trade it for it for sure, but at the same time, it would change things for sure.”

“You have that anxiety within you,” said Katrina Jeffreys, a Lansing resident and Lions fan since fourth grade in the 1970s, “and you’re not sure how you’re going to feel when you wake up the next day after [a championship] happens. We’re so used to having [the yearning] there, we don’t know how to act. There’s that part of it: ‘What do we do now?’ ”


She added: “It’s like you get to the top of the peak and there’s not another mountain to climb.”

Detroit Lions fans during Turkey Day 2023_A.jpg

Such remarkable human feelings go tangled with a curious pride often found in English soccer fans whose clubs languish near-eternally in lower divisions. It’s the pride derived from staying true to those losing teams.

“There’s tremendous pride,” Lynn said, soon adding, “There is something to be said for the world to know that, hey, the Detroit Lions. For us to stay in this, stick with it, support them, go to games as if they were winners.”



Moosher has, on occasion, told job interviewers about his Lions fandom because it conveys a loyalty just about otherworldly.

“Easiest way to put this: You’ve got a deer cabin,” said Ron Crachiola, 71, a locally famous fan whose father followed the Lions until his death at 95 after his grandfather did so until his death at 97. “Your ancestors had it, the deer cabin. You hunt for 40 years, and you haven’t got that big buck. No one sells the cabin. No one sells their guns. It’s a family tradition, and it goes on and on and on. It’s like fishing; when a guy don’t catch no fish, does he throw his rods in the water?”


Other fan bases feel that, too, but maybe none include this level of “Detroit vs. Everybody” loneliness, stemming from causes both benign and unkind.

Benign: The Lions have never really alighted at any heightened moment of the national consciousness, never lurked close before human error quashed them, as with the Red Sox of 1986 or the Cubs of 2003 or the Browns of the 1980s. They’re closer to the Chicago White Sox before their great season of 2005, when not even players in the spring training locker room knew how many years the drought had lasted (88).



“I don’t think the nation, really — they see the Lions once a year, usually, and it’s Thanksgiving Day,” said Pete Stewart, who wears a 20-ish-year-old “1957” jersey and arrives from a different angle: moving from Upstate New York to Michigan in 1978. “And they usually lose on Thanksgiving Day the last 10 years. But the country’s starting to catch on.”

Unkind: The nation’s neglect of the Lions has mirrored the nation’s neglect of Detroit, as Lynn explained, which is steeped in the history of the city for which he cares deeply. “I feel like Detroit’s always been underdogs, ever since the riots [of 1967],” he said, “and that’s before I was born.” He outlines the blue-collar prosperity of the 1970s, then businesses moving out, economies drying up, desperation for survival, crime, the maiming recession of 2008, bankruptcy. “Once people [elsewhere] hear that,” Lynn said, “the imagination takes over. You can tend to write it off. ‘That city’s done. That city’s done.’ ”


So as he notes that downtown boasts umpteen more places to go have lunch compared with about a decade ago, he, like others, sees how the Lions can mirror what Jaber calls “a rebirth.” The ending of last season and the bulk of this have reignited good old durable human hope and imagination, getting people envisioning what it might look like if … you know. The people who would feel any title right down to their marrow, more deeply than with marrows elsewhere, struggle to speak of how a championship might look.



“Aw, jeez,” Harper said.

He paused.

“Aw, God.”



He paused.

“Aw, man.

“I’m telling you.”

Detroit Lions fans during Turkey Day 2023_B.jpg

Chuck Culpepper covers national college sports as well as some tennis, golf and international sports for The Washington Post. He wrote previously for Sports On Earth/USA Today, The National (Abu Dhabi), the Los Angeles Times (while London-based), Newsday, the Oregonian, the Lexington Herald-Leader and, from age 14, the Suffolk Sun/Virginian-Pilot.

[-Deborah-]

Thanks for posting!