The Lions Have Bottomed Out, Now an Intervention Is in Order

The 0-16 Lions have officially done it. This is 0for08, FanHouse's eye on the Detroit Lions and their quest for a winless season.

It had to end this way.

That is, to say, if this is actually the end.

The Lions are addicted to bad football. I've tried coming up with a justification for so many years of substandard play as well as faulty personnel moves on and off the field, and I've come to the conclusion that they're simply addicts. It doesn't make them bad people, it simply means that they've embraced what we deem destructive as suitable to their way of life. They are a gigantic failure of an organization comprised of hundreds of individual enablers.

This isn't to trivialize or poke fun at addictions of a much more serious nature -- addictions come in all shapes and sizes, from manageable to fatal, from heroin to Starbucks. This is a unique variety, and the Lions are deep in it. Those close to the team, as is always the case with addiction, have suffered the most, and they've tried all they could -- walkouts, websites, effigies -- to pull the Lions out of their hole. But the thing about addicts is that they have to recognize their problem, and that only usually comes when they've bottomed out, when they've fallen so far that they have to choose to embrace recovery.

As the first team to finish a season 0-16, it seems obvious that this Lions era has officially bottomed out. But do they think so?


The fact that owner William Clay Ford intends to keep interim general manager Martin Mayhew and COO Tom Lewand, Matt Millen's old right-hand men and the "braintrust" of the organization since Millen's firing, at the top of the hierarchy seems to indicate that the answer is "no." While Rod Marinelli has been fired, he is just a personification of the problem. The only way to fix this organization is to tear it down, and that starts (and almost ends) with the team's decision-makers at the top.

That this isn't apparently an option is the sign of continued denial, not newfound acceptance.

And so the Lions will continue to toil away. They'll continue to promise that they've changed (firing Marinelli, drafting a shiny new toy with their first-overall pick), before stealing your television and pawning it off on the boardwalk for some quick cash. There will be a holding pattern of false hope and disillusionment.

There's another drastic move made by those who love an addict when it becomes obvious that they refuse to help themselves -- an intervention. At this point, it seems the only way the Lions will approach genuine change in William Clay Ford's lifetime. While Ford may sadly not be long for this world, and his son appears to have at least some semblance of common sense about the state of the franchise, the long-suffering beloveds of this franchise shouldn't have to suffer another day pining for a brighter tomorrow.

Roger Goodell has already set a precedent for getting involved in the otherwise in-house matters of another team when he interjected himself into the Jets-Favre-Packers triangle last summer. He did that because he saw a situation that was threatening the integrity of both franchises, one of its most famous players, and the league itself. This situation also threatens the integrity of a franchise (one with a valuable commodity the league has an interest in protecting, in Detroit's annual Thanksgiving game) and the league. The Lions have transcended sports and become a pop culture punchline at large, and it's not good for anyone for the league to have, ostensibly, 31 franchises.


Goodell can't force anything on the Lions, but he can add his weighty opinion and strongarm the team into doing the right thing for the fanbase which has resisted an atrophied economy to continuously (until very recently, that is) show up to support a team that constantly disappoints it. But there's not much give left. If something isn't done soon to remedy the Lions, the addiction will count the Lions, a piece of the league, and the city of Detroit as its ultimate victims.