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There’s something wrong with the world in which I now live. Since when did they change slapstick and make it into refined theater?

The Arizona Cardinals? Winners, two years in succession? About to wrap up another divisional title?

It’s like the Marx Brothers playing Shakespeare. Buddy Hackett reading Hemingway on stage. The Keystone Kops getting their man.

Maybe I woke up in one of those parallel universes. The kind where the sun rises in the West and human beings answer the phones at the utility company and the Arizona Cardinals are (gulp) good.

The Cardinals, who visit the Lions on Sunday and who will most likely leave Detroit 9-5 and in tune for the playoffs, used to be lockstep with all the inglorious losers in professional sports.

You could break up a room at just about any comedy club with the mere mention of their name.

The Lions have kept their losing confined to one city; the Cardinals have traveled the country, dropping turds from Chicago to Phoenix.

The Cardinals used to be the Los Angeles Clippers of the NFL when they played in Chicago. They shared a big city with a legitimate team, the Bears, and provided comic relief. And financial turmoil.

Here’s Pat Summerall, who was a Chicago Cardinal before he made it big with the New York Giants and CBS television.

“We used to get paid and run to the bank immediately,” Summerall once told NFL Films. “There’d be fights in the locker room. They’d dump our paychecks on the floor and make us fight for them. Then it was a race to the bank, to cash them before they bounced.”

The Cardinals got nudged out of Chicago and took their vaudeville act to St. Louis in 1960.

The Cardinals passed through the Gateway to the West and were semi-transformed. An occasional winning season would break out. Then, as if they’d signed a one-year pact with the Devil, the following campaign would be a return to fumbling, bumbling, and stumbling.

St. Louis wasn’t westward enough, though. The Cardinals pressed on in 1988, taking their sideshow all the way to Phoenix.

Phoenix! How fitting; the Cardinals move to a city named after a bird that rose from ashes.

But the losing followed them, like that annoying neighbor kid who won’t leave you alone.

The Cardinals even tried changing their affiliation. After six years of being known as the Phoenix Cardinals, they decided that one city’s reputation wasn’t enough to sully, so they indicted the entire state; they became the Arizona Cardinals in 1994.

The Cardinals, until last year, were among those sitting at the table at the back of the room—filled with those who’d never played in a Super Bowl.

The Lions, Cleveland Browns, New Orleans Saints, Jacksonville Jaguars, and Houston Texans lost a member, when the Cardinals plowed their way through the 2008 playoffs and made it all the way to the Big One.

Bill Bidwill, 78, has been the sole owner since 1972, after sharing the honor with his brother Charlie for 11 years. Other than his signature bow tie, the only thing Bill Bidwill was known for was losing. And being clue-free about how to win. Sound familiar?

Bidwill also has a kid named Bill. The comparisons to the Lions would be spooky, if not for one thing—the Cardinals are actually winning football games.

The Arizona Cardinals can’t be winners. This might be one of the first signs of the Apocalypse. Maybe that stuff about 2012 is true, after all.

They have an aging quarterback, Kurt Warner, who’s trying to recover from a concussion. But they also have a young, gun slinging lefty named Matt Leinart who’s stepped in and the Cardinals haven’t really missed a beat with the USC grad at the helm.

Leinart is young, good-looking, and from California. Which means he’s hated by every defensive lineman in the league and by sports writers in their mid-40s.

The Cardinals have a superstar wide receiver, Larry Fitzgerald, whose name sounds like he should be a friend of Beaver Cleaver’s. The have a running back named Beanie Wells, and I’m back to the Cleaver thing.

The offensive line actually blocks. The defense is capable. The Cardinals are, you know, a real football team.

It should bring hope to Lions fans everywhere. If the Cardinals can do it, then…

The Cardinals are winners. Two years in a row. The clock broke at 11:59. Ice crystals are forming in Hades. I hear Steven Seagal is up for a Golden Globe.

My call to the cable company really is very important to them. The check really is in the mail. Comcast must be done buying things.

Matthew Stafford: He’s Proven His Toughness, Now Get Him Out of There!

OK, I get it—this kid, Matthew Stafford, is tough. So I wish the Lions would quit forcing him to prove it every week.

Actually, it’s the Lions’ offensive line—feel free to put the accent on the second syllable—that’s putting QB Stafford in peril every Sunday. Just as I feared, way back in training camp.

Stafford winced and grimaced and grunted and groaned his way through another football game yesterday, picking himself off the turf in Cincinnati slower than molasses running uphill at times.

It’s his non-throwing shoulder that is a mess, with the emphasis being on “non-throwing.” In football, if what’s hurting you isn’t threatening your life—or keeping you from throwing the ball— you’re expected to be out there.

But Stafford has proven himself. Now it’s time to think about getting him out of there before he gets waylaid and we see his helmet rolling away—not empty.

Stafford was 11-for-26 with a touchdown and two interceptions in the Lions’ 23-13 loss to the Bengals. That’s two awful games in a row following his storybook win over the Browns. Two awful games since his left shoulder got jackhammered into the faux turf at Ford Field against Cleveland.

Stafford is playing behind a line made of balsa wood. He has a pocket as claustrophobic as a phone booth. Unlike the other team’s quarterback, who, with the Lions’ pass rush, has time to not only read defenses but War and Peace , Stafford must make decisions in the blink of an eye, if not sooner.

That might be a cause for the low completion percentages. And for needing an ambulance on the sidelines, the engine running.

But not only is Stafford a work in progress, so is the entire team. The kid QB’s maturation is whipped into the Lions’ makeup like cake batter. You can’t separate it from the other ingredients, no matter how distasteful they may be.

Should Stafford be out there now, working with one good shoulder? How much longer before he’s operating on one good leg? No good heads?

We’ve seen how tough he is. I’m convinced. The Lions are 2-10. They’re going nowhere. But they’ll be going worse than nowhere without the franchise quarterback on board. Is it mathematically or physically possible to go nowhere to the minus nth degree?

I’m afraid we’re going to find out, the longer an injured Stafford plays behind this house of cards of an offensive line.

Hey NFL! Leave Detroit’s Thanksgiving Day Game Alone

I’m going to make a preemptive strike here. An end-around, if you will, to head them off at the pass.

I’m getting my own iron hot. Not enough time to wait for others to reach the proper temp.

This is for NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell and those who would petition him on their behalf.

Maybe the rumblings have already started. Maybe I’m not the early bird that I think I am.

The Lions lost, 34-12, on Thursday to the Green Bay Packers. That’s what the Lions do anymore on Thanksgiving—they lose by scores like 34-12. It’s been so bad lately that 34-12 is actually one of the better ones, truth be told.

That’s six straight losses on Turkey Day. And those outside of our fair city are crying fowl.

It began a few years ago, when the Lions were starting a new tradition of getting the stuffing beat out of them on Thanksgiving.

“Take the Thanksgiving Day away from the Lions and give it to a team more deserving—or at least one that’s easier on the stomach.”

One of the biggest instigators was the late Lamar Hunt, the erstwhile owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, who whined yearly about the Lions and their Thanksgiving tradition.

Rotate the game, Lamar said. Let other teams get in on the fun. Other teams like his, for example.

The movement gained momentum. Hunt garnered more and more support, until it was forgotten by many that it was Hunt’s idea in the first place. You could almost see the pitchforks and torches gathering in front of the league office.

Hunt, among other things, thought that the quick turnaround from Sunday to Thursday benefited the Lions, who were used to doing it, so therefore they must have some sort of an advantage.

The Lions, after their latest Thanksgiving Day turkey, are now 33-35-2 on the holiday. Yeah—that’s some advantage, alright. They really clean up on Thanksgiving, don’t they?

The NFL went out and started scheduling its own Thanksgiving Night game on its own network, but that still hasn’t stopped the moaning about the 12:30 kickoff in Detroit.

At issue is the Lions as a team, not a franchise. It’s nothing personal, the pitchforkers and torchers say. They’d just rather see a better brand of football at 12:30.

So here’s my scientific, heavily-researched, highly analytical response to that argument.

We have precious few football traditions in Detroit. If we didn’t host a couple of Super Bowls, the Vince Lombardi Trophy wouldn’t have even crossed the state line.

Hell, we don’t even have Matt Millen to rip anymore, so there goes one of our pastimes, right there.

Yeah, the Lions are bad—been bad for this entire century, so far. The Lions wear bad like rice wears white. No argument there.

So you don’t like them soiling your television set from 12:30-4:00 p.m. eastern time every Thanksgiving Day? Then turn the channel, or turn the TV off and talk with your family—until the Cowboys come on. Or plan the meal for that time slot. I’m sure you can manage.

There’s this, too: WE have to watch them, so why should YOU be any different? Who died and made you Kings of Football?

You don’t seem to understand. This is all we have here in Detroit when it comes to the Lions. Every year, when the new NFL schedule is released, the first thing we do is ask, “Who’s the Thanksgiving opponent this year?” The second thing we do is get our magnifying glasses out and look for possible wins for the Lions on the team’s agenda—and squint realllllly hard.

I don’t care that the Lions stink. I don’t care that they’ve been the Washington Generals to the other team’s Harlem Globetrotters for the past six years. I don’t care that the game starts at 12:30 and the outcome is usually decided by 1:00.

The game is ours. Period. The ritual started in 1934, so that means we’re now in our second great economic depression of providing pro football on Thanksgiving Day.

Besides, you have your precious rotating game on the NFL Network during prime time, so shutty.

You think the Green Bay Packers want to take the game away from the Lions? Thursday’s stinker makes two shellackings they’ve laid on the Lions in the past three years. I’m surprised they haven’t called dibs on it by now.

Thanksgiving Day is special in Detroit. It’s enjoying the parade in the morning, then traipsing to Ford Field to watch the Lions get whacked in the afternoon. Then it’s back home to have dinner in the evening and bitch about how the Lions got whacked in the afternoon.

Look, all I know is that I don’t recall any blubbering about this game until Millen took over the Lions and turned them into a punch line. Talk about kicking a team’s fan base while it’s down.

Finally, as much as I hate to invoke Bill Ford Sr. as a heroic figure, the truth is that the NFL owes a whole lot to the Ford family. They pumped big time advertising dollars, via Ford Motor Company, into the league in the 1960s and ‘70s, when it was sorely needed.

So quit your moaning and get your grubby hands away from our Thanksgiving Day game.

We wouldn’t even know what to do with ourselves at 12:30. If you met some of our families, you’d see how attractive the Lions look, too.

Matthew Stafford’s Legendary Tale Gets Rewritten by Packers

Cinderella’s coach really did turn back into a pumpkin. Hansel and Gretel got caught after all. None of the pigs got around to building a joint out of brick.

John Elway’s legend is safe once again. Whoever sculpts those busts for Canton needn’t rush out to procure a head shot of Matthew Stafford at his earliest convenience.

Cloud Nine just touched down. The bandwagon came to a screeching halt—after one game.

If rookie quarterbacks were stock on the New York Stock Exchange, their chart would look like an EKG readout.

On Sunday, Stafford won a game for the Lions—damaged wing and all. Real storybook stuff. Someone dared to disturb Bobby Layne’s ghost over it.

Four days later, the reset button got hit, taking his progression back to the hot July days of training camp.

On Sunday, the kid threw five touchdown passes. It usually takes a Lions QB half a season to do that. On Thursday, he had a fetish of throwing to the wrong guys. Four interceptions, and it could have been more. Each one of them was a killer.

Stafford tried to pen another chapter in the tiny legend he’s trying to author as a first-year signal caller in the NFL.

His tender left shoulder was so bad after Sunday’s game that the idea of him playing on Thanksgiving Day seemed folly.

The days of the short week passed, and after each one, the diagnosis was the same: doubtful. Highly.

Backup Daunte Culpepper arrived at Ford Field Thursday morning thinking he was the starter. He had taken all the reps with the first team. Stafford’s left wing was still limp.

Stafford threw some footballs Thursday during warmups, and suddenly things weren’t so bad. The doctors, abiding by the script, agreed that Stafford playing wouldn’t cause any further damage. It was deemed to be a “pain management issue.”

So Stafford is announced as the starter not long before game time, and Culpepper was probably the only person in the stadium who was disappointed with that determination.

But someone forgot to send the script over to the Green Bay Packers for their approval.

After an early hiccup—a fumbled opening kickoff that led to a Stafford-to-Calvin Johnson TD toss—the Packers regained control and jammed Stafford’s next chapter into the paper shredder.

If you played a drinking game where you had to take a shot of booze whenever Troy Aikman said something like, “That’s part of the development of a rookie quarterback,” you’d be reading this with a hangover. But Troy’s right, and he ought to know. Aikman suffered through a 1-15 season with the 1989 Cowboys, in which he went 0-11 as a starter.

I tried my hand at playing soothsayer on Monday’s episode of “The Knee Jerks,” the Blog Talk Radio gabfest I co-host with Big Al Beaton .

Stafford could very well, I said, go back to being the goat as soon as on Thanksgiving Day, because that’s what happens with these young whippersnappers. They waddle, then they fall down sometimes.

Once again, the Lions’ pass rushers treated the opposing quarterback as if he’d had a garlic sandwich before the game, topped with limburger.

I think I saw Packers QB Aaron Rodgers, prior to rocketing a 68-yard bomb to Donald Driver in the first quarter, have a shave and brush his teeth. Or maybe the rules were that the Lions’ pass rushers had to count to 20-Mississippi, and they got stuck on 11 or 12.

Once again, the Lions were the antidote to what ailed the other team. The Packers have had trouble all season protecting Rodgers, who came into the game being sacked once for every 8.9 pass attempts. That rate was one for every 39 passing attempts on Thursday.

It wasn’t just that the Lions didn’t sack Rodgers; they didn’t even get within shouting distance of him. They made him more comfortable in the pocket than a set of car keys.

The Lions’ secondary needs all the help it can get, and it’s not getting it from the front four. The pass coverage is softer than Charmin, and it’s being made to look even worse because of the complete lack of pressure from the pass rushers.

So it’s not all on Stafford, but there will still be afternoons where he’s no help, as on Thursday, and at Seattle, and against the Rams.

Tell Me Another Fable: Detroit Lions Win with 0:00 Left

Someday, they’ll have Ford Field’s capacity up to a quarter million, for as many people who will claim to have been there. The Cleveland Browns will be defending league champions. Matthew Stafford will have been carried onto the field on a stretcher. Brandon Pettigrew will have one-handed the football, his body parallel to the turf.

That will pretty much be the gist of the re-telling of what went on Sunday, several years hence.

The Lions beat the Browns, 38-37 in what was deemed to be their last “winnable” game of the season. And we have six weeks to go.

Yes, this was a “winnable” game, alright. Just like how your Lotto ticket is winnable. Or Tom DeLay’s chances on “Dancing with the Stars.”

The Lions had 106 seconds and 88 yards to cover, with no timeouts. Otherwise, they’d have lost to a Browns team that scored, in one game, nearly half of the total points they’d scored for the entire season to this point.

The Lions don’t win games like that. They don’t even get first downs in situations like that. Remember the final “drive” against the Rams a few weeks ago? Someone forgot to take the transmission out of reverse in that one.

The Lions don’t drive down the field and score game-winning touchdowns. They never have. They’ve been the anti-Elway in that regard.

Someone ought to take this kid Stafford and knock some sense into him. How dare he think that he can pull off such miracles while wearing Honolulu Blue and Silver?

Maybe there IS something to this whole went-to-the-same-high-school-as-Bobby-Layne thing, after all.

It wasn’t enough that Stafford zipped and zapped the Lions down the field, gobbling up first downs like Pac-Man. It wasn’t enough that he got the Lions into a manageable situation—the Browns’ 32-yard line—with one shot left in his holster.

It was impossible not to think of Tarkenton when Stafford ran around the Lions’ backfield, faking one throw after the other, as the clock flipped to 0:00. This isn’t the NBA, thank the Lord, where you have to have the sphere in the air before time runs out. The NFL allows play to continue until it’s over with, which in this case took almost as long as Magic Johnson’s talk show run.

Stafford stopped more than once, planted his feet, and made like he was going to throw, but then he would change his mind and dart in the other direction, like the Lions were paying him by the hour.

Then, he could avoid the Browns no longer and heaved the pigskin, just before being firmly planted into the Ford Field turf, his shoulder used as a battering ram against the playing surface.

You know the rest. Hell, the whole state knows it. They know it in Peoria and Butte and Spokane and Amarillo, too. Even the tripe masters in Bristol, CT got the word.

Pass interference. In the end zone. Another lovely NFL thing: the game can’t end on a defensive foul like that.

Stafford was lying on his back, his left shoulder wrecked, while the Lions celebrated their officiating luck. Center Dom Raiola delivered the news.

Somewhere—not sure if up above or down below, knowing Bobby—Layne was smiling as Stafford, aided by a Browns timeout, bolted to his feet, like Cuba Gooding Jr. in “Jerry Maguire,” and ran back onto the field from the sidelines.

Stafford waved backup Daunte Culpepper—who had lined up under center before the Brownies took leave of their senses and called timeout—back to the bench. I can only think of a line uttered by Layne as he huddled the Lions prior to the game-winning drive in the waning minutes of the 1953 NFL Championship Game.

“Alright fellas,” Layne told his players, and it’s been confirmed. “Y’all block and Bobby’ll pass ya raght to the champeenship.”

So here’s this kid Stafford, with four TD passes already in his hip pocket—if he throws four of anything it’s usually interceptions, but don’t all rookie QBs?—and his shoulder is on fire and there’s one play to go, from the one-yard line.

It’s 1-8 vs. 1-8, for cripe’s sakes. But it’s a football game in the NFL and those things are lousy to lose when victory is so close.

Stafford throws the TD pass, his fifth, to fellow rook Brandon Pettigrew and the kid QB immediately looks to the bench and motions to his lame left shoulder, the arm hanging limp from it. He’s shaking his head. He wasn’t the only one shaking his noggin.

That didn’t happen yesterday. It couldn’t have. Next thing you’ll tell me is that Lucy let Charlie Brown kick the football. Jack and Jill made it down the hill OK after all. Dewey really did defeat Truman.

The Lions won a football game in dramatic, race-against-the-clock fashion. With no timeouts. On a break from the officials. With a rookie quarterback. After falling behind by 21 points in the first quarter.

Rudyard Kipling is dead. Aesop is long gone, too. You take that script to Hollywood and they’ll laugh, telling you that it wouldn’t play.

Rookie QB lies on the ground, uttering his dying words, and the sage veteran has to finish the job? Stafford might as well have been crumpled in a bunker, bombs and gunfire erupting all around him.

Then the kid hears “timeout Browns” on the “loudspeaker”—Stafford’s version in the post-game presser—and scrambles to his feet, puts his helmet on, and returns to battle.

They could make it into a war flick, if you get Hollywood to stop laughing at you long enough.

Last Night on “The Knee Jerks”: Lions’ Report Cards Are In: “SEE ME!”

Lack of “Franchise” Defensive Lineman Detroit Lions’ Bane for Decades

Football has had a fascination with the morose when it comes to handing out monikers to the game’s greatest defensive platoons.

We’ve had Steel Curtains and Doomsday and Purple People Eaters. There were the Killer Bees down in Miami.

Detroit and Los Angeles—when the NFL actually had a franchise there—shared the alliterate name Fearsome Foursome.

Pro football games are won in the trenches, they say. Rare is the championship team that doesn’t possess a solid line, both on offense and defense.

Lions fans will tell you that the team has been looking for its franchise quarterback for some fifty years or so. That’s difficult to refute, but how about a franchise defensive lineman?

The Lions haven’t had one of those around in these parts since the Carter Administration.

His name was Al “Bubba” Baker and he came from Colorado State and at his best, he appeared in the backfield frequently, as well as in quarterbacks’ nightmares.

Bubba Baker (pictured above) was, at times, simply unblockable. He played defensive end but he had the body of an NBA power forward: long and strong. Bubba would line up so far away from his tackle mate that you’d have thought the other guy had a liverwurst and garlic sandwich just before the game.

Bubba Baker, with three straight Pro Bowl appearances (1978-80), anchored a defensive line in Detroit that was pretty damn good.

It was the early-1980s when they started to call the Lions’ front four “The Silver Rush.” Not a cataclysmic football nickname, but a nickname nonetheless.

You had Baker and William Gay on the ends, and Dave Pureifory and Doug English inside. Pureifory, from Eastern Michigan University, was so mean and nasty that his sadistic behavior in 1979’s training camp almost caused the Lions’ No. 1 draft pick, offensive tackle Keith Dorney, to quit. Dorney said so in his book.

Gay was a converted tight end who made a Pro Bowl as a D-lineman and who teamed with Baker to form two towering bookends. Pureifory was short, stubby, and ferocious—and English was just plain good, and a consummate professional.

English, a Texan, retired after the 1979 season to go into the oil business, but returned to the NFL in 1981.

The Lions traded Baker to the St. Louis Cardinals after the 1982 season, after Bubba grew tired of the Lions, and they him.

And not since have the Lions truly had a stud on the line of scrimmage, on the defensive side of the ball.

The Lions have been a bad football team for a long time with a lot of warts, but if they could ever plug someone into their defensive line who was top grade, you watch how much better their defense plays.

Sadly, the Lions haven’t even really tried to address this gaping hole, this empty chamber in their popgun.

Only twice since 1992 have the Lions selected a defensive lineman in the first round of the NFL Draft.

Here’s a deficiency the Lions have had for decades, and it routinely gets the short shrift when it comes to the draft.

The Lions’ lack of a playmaker—a bona fide game changer—on their front four has contributed more than anything to the pathetic overall defensive play in this town.

The Lions have no true pass rusher. No run-stopping behemoth. No freak of nature with the strength of Atlas and the speed of a gazelle who can seem to be out of a play, then traverse 15-20 yards in a heartbeat and run a ball carrier down.

I’ve said it before—if there’s a team in pro sports today who needs help at any position more than the Lions need help on their defensive line, that team is merely a figment of a vivid imagination.

Oh, how the Lions should be combing the college campuses at this very moment, seeking the biggest, baddest, fastest, meanest, quickest, strongest down lineman college football has to offer. They’re likely to qualify for, once again, a top-five pick in next year’s draft. They should absolutely use it on someone whose uniform number is in the 90s.

There’ve been some impostors passing through Detroit, who we’ve elevated beyond their actual abilities, mainly because we’ve wanted them to be successful so badly.

Rogers had potential. He was a man child who could have owned Detroit, if he would have kept himself in shape and his mouth shut—both to keep from talking and eating. His moments of dominance were absolute but terribly fleeting.

Ball, from the early-1990s era, was a solid nose tackle who we thought was an elite lineman as a Lion. But he went to Oakland and from afar we could see what we could not because of the trees in Detroit: that he was good but not great.

But beyond those two players, the Lions haven’t had anyone remotely close to being dominant or a star in the league, playing defensive line, since Bubba Baker’s day.

This has got to kill the old-timers who remember when the Lions routinely fielded tenacious, impenetrable d-lines.

The Fearsome Foursome of Sam Williams, Roger Brown, Alex Karras and Darris McCord—they swallowed up ball carriers and quarterbacks and were often the only thing that could slow down the vaunted Green Bay Packers’ running game.

Detroit Lions: Momma Said There’d Still Be More Days Like This

Things are apparently so bad with the Lions that they don’t even show up for their games anymore.

The Lions yesterday set football back in Detroit all the way to…2008.

If this is them turning the corner, then they just ran smack dab into a bus, like that girl in that scene from “Final Destination.”

WHAM!!

The Green Bay Packers, if this was dinner time, would have been scolded by their mother for playing with their food, as they skipped out to a 14-0 lead before adding a slew of field goals when touchdowns would have made things butt ugly.

The 26-0 whitewashing was about as much of an indication of how much the Packers dominated the Lions as a scoop of white rice tells you how much of the stuff they have in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant.

The Packers committed penalties by the boatload. Their offense mysteriously stalled in the “red zone” when it was a hot knife to the Lions’ butter between the 20s. Yet the Pack was never not in control.

It’s amazing the number of transgressions you can commit in a football game and still never be in danger of losing it, when you’re playing the Lions.

This wasn’t a football game—it was serio-comic performance art, played out in front of 50,000-plus bloodthirsty zealots.

The Lions lost control of this one as soon as Jason Hanson’s toe met the football for the opening kickoff, which was taken all the way back for an apparent touchdown. But the Packers were flagged, as usual, and it appeared as if the Lions dodged a bullet.

Yeah, they dodged a bullet alright—just like Bonnie and Clyde did in their car before being eventually aerated by lead.

It was painfully similar to so many of the Lions games last season, when the folks who were late to the game might as well have been ordered back at the gate by the ushers and the police.

“Nothing to see here, folks. Just move back to your cars and exit quietly.”

It was 14-0 before all the first beers and hot dogs were in the Packers’ fans tummies.

Then the Pack got sloppy and acquired a field goal fetish, making the final score marginally respectable.

Packers QB Aaron Rodgers was the latest passer to need a drool cup for all the salivating he did while looking over the Lions’ secondary. The Lions’ pass defending corps—which I had foolishly declared on “The Knee Jerks” podcast a few weeks ago was improving steadily—is the “easy” setting in the NFL for opposing QBs, while the rest of the league is categorized as either “moderate,” “tough,” or “expert.”

There weren’t seams in the Lions’ defensive backfield—there were canyons. Watching the other team pass against the Lions is like watching no-contact drills in practice. The Packers’ receivers might as well have been wearing just helmets and shorts.

As bad as it was, you figured that there might be Sundays like this, even in the Jim Schwartz Era. This made the Saints game in Week One look good. But what Schwartz and defensive coordinator Gunther Cunningham inherited could not possibly be fixed in one year. So a stinker like Sunday’s in Green Bay shouldn’t be too terribly shocking.

The idea, of course, is to have far fewer of them in 2009, and even fewer in 2010, and so on.

The Lions were a little banged up—especially on offense with QB Matthew Stafford and WR Calvin Johnson out with injuries, and on the d-line—and that didn’t help. At all. But this is the NFL, and others must step up, not step back.

Lions QB Daunte Culpepper was frightfully ineffective, and the game plan is so much more conservative with him in the game than when Stafford plays. It’s like o-coordinator Scott Linehan doesn’t believe that Culpepper can zing the ball further than 20 yards at a time.

Maybe he can’t.

So take this one and pitch it. Burn the tape, as they say. The Lions will now go into their bye week with the aftertaste of castor oil in their mouths. For almost two weeks.

The Lions didn’t play football on Sunday—they committed it.

I wonder if they wrapped Lambeau Field in crime scene tape after the game.

Matthew Stafford Has QB Presence Like No Detroit Lion in Years

It was Super Bowl week, and Thomas Henderson wanted to try out some new material.
What better opportunity than Media Day—held on Tuesday before The Big Game—to show how brilliant you are, and how much the other guy isn’t?

Henderson, the bombastic Dallas Cowboys’ linebacker who encouraged the use of the nickname “Hollywood” for himself, wanted to tell reporters just what he thought of the opposing quarterback, Terry Bradshaw of the Pittsburgh Steelers.

This was before Super Bowl XIII in January 1979, with Bradshaw’s Steelers already having won two championships, after the 1974 and ’75 seasons.

Henderson made sure the eyes were on him and the pens were put to notepads and the tape recorders were whirring.

“Terry Bradshaw,” Henderson said, “couldn’t spell ‘cat’ if you spotted him the ‘c’ and the ‘a’.”

In a game whose strategic tactics are often compared to that of chess and military theaters, Bradshaw, playing what should then be the most cerebral of all of football’s positions—quarterback, for goodness sakes—somehow garnered a reputation of being a little shy in the smarts department.

The country bumpkin from Louisiana proceeded to go out, in the wake of Hollywood Henderson’s biting comedy, and victimize the Cowboys with one big play after the other.

Bradshaw carved up Hollywood and his Cowboys for his third Super Bowl victory. He’d win another, the following season.

Bradshaw, today pulling down way more dough as a Fox Sports studio analyst than he ever did being a Hall of Fame quarterback, last week harkened back to his then-fledgling football-playing career.

The subject was our own Matthew Stafford, the Lions’ rookie quarterback, who had just earned his first NFL victory.

Jimmy Johnson, a Super Bowl-winning coach before being lured into the bosom of TV, reminded everyone that he had Troy Aikman as a rookie in 1989, and Troy went 1-15 in his debut season.

“Sometimes you gotta throw these kids to the wolves!,” Jimmy said with emphasis.

Bradshaw joined the Steelers in 1970 from Louisiana Tech as the NFL’s first overall pick, when the Steelers were coming off a 1-13 season.

What else do you call it, when they hang the quarterback in effigy at his home stadium?

They did with Terry in Pittsburgh—his “likeness” purposely portrayed with a goofy, idiotic, cross-eyed look on his face.

The more Bradshaw struggled in his rookie season, the louder the whispers became.

Terry Bradshaw, those so wise in such things said, is too dumb to be a pro quarterback.

Hollywood Henderson, before that XIIIth Super Bowl, tried to revive the “Bradshaw is dumb” thing, despite Terry being twice a champion at the time.

Stafford is, indeed, being thrown to the wolves in Detroit. When your new team went 0-16 the year before your arrival, you’re also being smeared with raw meat before being chucked.

It’s a monumental task, to lead the Lions from historic depths to the look and feel of a winning unit.

It’s hard to make my case, I understand that, because it’s rooted in gut feel and held together with intangibles, but I’m telling you that Stafford has “it.”

Matthew Stafford carries himself more like a pro quarterback, after just three regular season games, better than so many of the other bozos the Lions have thrust under center.

He also fits this town very well, despite coming from the University of Georgia.

Ty Cobb was a Georgia Peach, too, and look how he fit in, in Detroit. So it has been done before.

Stafford has embraced Detroit—its people, its financial hardships and its grit. He did so almost immediately after being drafted No. 1 overall by the Lions in April. He’s a good-looking kid but there’s no “pretty boy” about him. He has already spoken of getting involved with the community, helping in any way that he can.

So many things went wrong with the last highly-drafted quarterback the Lions had, but if Joey Harrington had one flaw that stood out above the rest, it was this.

Joey wasn’t a Detroiter. He was wine and cheese, being drafted into a shot-and-beer town. He was an “aw, shucks” guy coming into a “you got a problem with that?” city.

He arrived in town playing the piano—literally—and no one in Detroit even owns a piano, much less plays one.

But we were willing to overlook Joey and from where he came, because he was new and exciting and maybe he could play quarterback a little bit—and in that case, who cares what his pedigree is?

Big oaf Tony Siragusa, several years back, made some snide remarks about Harrington, in Tony’s role as another of those Fox Sports blabbermouths.

Joey was soft; he was all about champagne and strawberries, or something like that, Siragusa said, when you need your QB to be piss and vinegar. Tony then questioned Harrington’s manhood, in an indirect way, not too subtly.

I bet you that a lot of the people who purported to be offended, on Joey Harrington’s behalf, by Siragusa’s comments, secretly made an admission at the same time.

Tony Siragusa, in our heart of hearts, was right. Only, we didn’t want to believe it.

Stafford shows fearlessness on the football field. There’s some mad bomber in him. He’s always eager to show off his rocket arm. He’s not afraid to fail.

There’s no panic. No happy feet in the pocket; Harrington danced the cha-cha back there as a Lion.

Stafford always believed, from Day One, that he was going to start for the Lions—and right now. Not next year; not in Week Six. Now.

He carries himself like a pro quarterback. He has a good head on his shoulders. He’s already ingratiating himself with his teammates—offense and defense included—fabulously. They believe in him, to a man.

I’ll even go out on a limb and say that Stafford can spell “win,” without being spotted the “w” and the “i.”

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