How About Them Lions?

I have six team that I root for. The pro teams of Detroit: Tigers, Lions, Pistons and Red Wings, and the University of Michigan football and basketball teams. Of those six teams, all of them have won at least one championship during my lifetime, except for one. The Lions. I'm not old enough to go back to the glory days of Bobby Layne and Doak Walker, no, I have memories of names like Greg Landry and Billy Sims. Since the Lions last won a championship in the 1950s, they have won exactly one playoff game (a beat-down against Jimmy Johnson's Cowboys, which led to an NFC championship game against the Redskins. Remember Erik Kramer?)

That's a pretty futile record, although it hasn't been all bad. During the Barry Sanders years the Lions were always getting a sniff of the playoffs, of course going out in the first game except for that one time. Since Sanders left, though, the bottom fell out, coinciding with the inexplicable tenure of general manager Matt Millen, who has managed to put this team into complete disarray. Only an ownership as strange as the Ford family would manage to hang onto a guy who has consistently won only a few games each season, but the Fords have a history of misplaced loyalty, such as hanging on to a fair-to-middlin' coach like Wayne Fontes for so long (fun fact: since the Super Bowl era, the Lions have never employed a head coach who went on to coach another pro team after the Lions, not even Steve Mariucci).

So this year's team is a pleasant surprise, currently at 5-2 and only one game back of the division leading Packers. I'm not sure they're for real--they've swept last year's NFC champ the Bears, but that team is clearly down, and in the Lions two losses they've been pasted. The schedule has been pretty soft, and that will change, as they have two games against the Packers, the Chargers, and the Cowboys coming up. Still, though, this has got to be seen as a breakthrough. Perhaps it is the doing of offensive coordinator Mike Martz, who is using an old pro, Jon Kitna, to quarterback, or maybe it's just a little bit of luck. The downside of this is that it will mean Millen isn't leaving any time soon.