The Loop
How'd Your Team Do, Twitter Edition: Lions make the worst kind of NFL history with loss to lowly Redskins
As a self-proclaimed Matthew Stafford stan, I've watched a LOT of Detroit Lions football over the last decade. I don't really believe in having "second teams" as a fan in any sport, but if I had to have a second favorite team to the New York Giants, it'd be the Lions.
The problem with that is that the Lions actually stink more than the Giants, both historically and in the present. They are the ultimate "almost" team. They almost win big games. They almost get to the playoffs. They almost make Thanksgiving at your great aunt's house bearable. But at the end of the day, they end up reverting to being the same old Lions, the same Lions that wasted the careers of Barry Sanders (arguably the GOAT running back) and Calvin Johnson (arguably the GOAT wide receiver). Now, they're wasting the career of Stafford, who is not a "GOAT" by any stretch, but is by far the most underrated franchise quarterback in the NFL. He will more than likely go down in history just like Sanders and Johnson did, as the franchise's greatest player at his position who possesses eye-popping numbers and has zero postseason success to show for it. It's legitimately sad to type words about the Lions.
No stat has ever embodied the Lions as a franchise than the one you're about to see below. This season, the Lions have, at times, looked like a competent team. If you just checked in on their games here and there but never saw the final result, you'd probably guess they were at or over .500 and in the playoff hunt. Instead, following Sunday's 19-16 loss to the lowly Washington Redskins, they've fallen to 3-7-1 and became just the third team EVER to do this in the process:
That is as depressing as it gets. And these aren't 3-0 leads where the Lions end up losing 42-10. If you've followed this team closely, you know they've been in every single game they've lost until the very end, including all three games Stafford has missed with a back injury. The Chiefs beat them on a last-minute drive, the Vikings pulled away late, the Raiders stopped them near the goal line on the final play of the game, the Redskins needed a last-minute field goal, and who could forget the Packers game on Monday night, one that the refs quite literally stole from Detroit. Each defeat is somehow more crushing than the last when you're dealing with the LLLLLLLions (1 L per loss).
As you could imagine, Lions Twitter is a sad place. Let's see just how sad it got after Sunday's loss.
We'll leave with this A+ rant from Chris Castellani, who is known on Twitter for his rants on the Detroit Tigers and the Michigan Wolverines, his two favorite teams. Every now and then he does check in on the Lions or the Pistons, and when he does he still manages to sum up whatever he just witnessed perfectly (NSFW for language):