No. 9
No one was more hyped for Matthew Stafford and the Rams than this die-hard Lions fan
It feels like a distant memory now, but before Josh Allen and Patrick Mahomes duked it on Sunday night, turning the last two minutes of regulation into a brain-frying athletic spectacle only tangentially resembling football, Matthew Stafford and the Los Angeles Rams pulled off a miracle of their own. Granted, they coughed up a 24-point second-half lead to Tom Brady’s Bucs, but with the chips down and the game tied, Stafford came up huge, sending the Rams to the NFC title game and Brady, perhaps, to the big shower in the sky.
Under ordinary circumstances, you would expect Rams fans to go wild. Unfortunately, while the Rams on-field adjustments to La La Land have gone swimmingly, they are still working on the whole “having fans” thing. So the responsibility for going absolutely freaking nuts fell instead to this die-hard Lions fan, who for one brief shining moment of Matthew Stafford mania forgot all about the city of Detroit, Megatron’s retirement, 0-16, Matt Millen, Barry Sanders’ retirement, and temperatures below 72 degrees fahrenheit. Behold:
We don’t usually condone bandwagon fandom, but when you’ve suffered like Lions fans have suffered, exceptions have to be made. Stafford is the franchise’s greatest-ever quarterback. He led the Lions to an unthinkable three postseason berths in the past decade and will never pay for an oil change in the Motor City again. He moved on when it made sense for both parties to move on and, for the first time in his career, has a very real shot at a championship this season. If you’re a Lions fan, it would actually be wrong not to celebrate Stafford’s success as if it were your own.
Unfortunately for this guy, the Rams have restricted NFC Championship ticket sales to Los Angeles residents only in effort to stave off yet another embarrassing road-fan takeover. Perhaps an exception can be made for the world’s new number-one Rams fan … even if he is wearing a Lions jersey.