There was no mistaking the message Detroit center Dominic Raiola sent Lions fans as he walked off the field after yet another loss Sunday with a finger thrust in the air. The only thing more insulting would have been for Raiola to wave his index finger instead of the middle one, yelling “We’re No. 1!” all the while.
The Lions last claimed an NFL title in 1957 and have won exactly one playoff game since. Reporters who cover them think this year’s edition might be the worst pro sports team ever – and they just might be right.
A loss next week at Indianapolis would tie the NFL record of 0-14 set by Tampa Bay in 1976, the Bucs’ first year of existence, and give Detroit a chance to go where no team has gone since the regular season was extended to 16 games.
But that only hints at how bad the Lions have become.
in a 12-10 decision.
More than half the opposing quarterbacks the Lions have faced so far posted career-best passer ratings that day. On the flip side, despite having the 10th overall pick or better in the draft for six of the last seven years, Detroit has only one player, receiver Calvin Johnson, who is good enough to earn a spot on the roster of a contending team.
“I’m tired of being a doormat for people to just talk to us how they want to talk to us. I’m just not going to put up with that anymore,” Raiola said Monday.
He arrived in Detroit in 2001 as part of since-fired general manager Matt Millen’s first draft class, just as the Lions’ latest tailspin was picking up speed. He’s lasted long enough to see the fans’ anger turn to apathy. Cavernous Ford Field is so empty at the end of some games that each and every taunt echoes throughout the building until it finds the intended target.
Raiola, the Lions captain, is just as fed up with losing as the faithful are. But he’s been the bullseye so often for so long that he’s considered giving some of those fans his home address.
“I’d do that, but you can’t,” he said. “Nobody plays with fists. Everybody wants to play with metal.”
t 24 straight.
Convinced that an era of wide-open offenses was always about to dawn in the NFL, Millen forgot about his own hard-nosed past and drafted offensive eye candy like someone in charge of a fantasy football team.
All those busts – Joey Harrington, Charles Rogers and Mike Williams, to name three of the most memorable – might have been the biggest factor in turning a mediocre franchise into a historically bad one. But even Millen couldn’t have accomplished it without a lot of help.
His enabler was Lions owner William Clay Ford.
Hiring an outsider made sense at the time, since Ford had packed the Lions administration for years with his cronies – and without much success. When one of his coaches, Darryl Rogers, tired of both the infighting and the losing, was told by Ford at the end of the 1987 season that he would be coming back, Rogers famously griped to reporters, “What does a guy have to do around here to get fired?”
It’s still a fair question.
Millen was a Super Bowl-winning linebacker with San Francisco who hadn’t worked in a league front office for even one day when Ford coaxed him out of the broadcast booth and handed over total control of the franchise. Why the owner didn’t can him sooner – at one point, he actually extended Millen’s contract – remains anyone guess.
He never had a day’s experience on the job, either, when Millen anointed him his fourth, and possibly worst, coach in seven years.
He was a defensive line coach in Tampa Bay before getting the Lions’ job. Last offseason, Millen helped him bring a few of those players – nearly all past their prime – to Detroit. Throw in the fact Marinelli’s son-in-law, Joe Barry, remains the team’s woeful defensive coordinator, and all those opposing QBs having career days against Lions begins to make sense.
“It’s on me,” Marinelli said. “(When) something’s not working, I take it really personal. I don’t look for excuses and I don’t put it on somebody else’s shoulders.”
Of course, that’s exactly where the mess will land soon enough. Ford has promised a sweeping review at season’s end and under a best-case scenario, he could persuade someone like former Tennessee Titans GM Floyd Reese to run the front office, then bring in former Steelers coach Bill Cowher to straighten out matters on the field.
No matter who winds up in those jobs, this much is certain: They won’t be sending fans any signals, since cleaning up a mess this big is going to require both hands.
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Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitkeap.org
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