The Detroit Lions Have a Date With Destiny
Sunday night's game feels like a lot more than football
Matthew Stafford is alone in the backfield. The Detroit Lions already have the game tying field goal in the bag at the six yard line with 150 seconds left to play, they just need to avoid a catastrophe. The Lions’ quarterback catches the shotgun snap and his eyes immediately dart to the left front-corner of the end zone. Stafford knows exactly where he is going with this ball. He lofts a touch pass that would land about five yards out of play if left to its own devices, but was perfectly placed for his lanky, big-bodied receiver, Kenny Golladay.
Golladay uses his back to shield the ball from a defender and snags it as he stumbles out of bounds. His right foot is clearly down in play, his left foot brushes awkwardly close to the white paint of the sideline but is ruled in bounds. Touchdown Lions. Golladay, a budding NFL superstar who was currently in the midst of his only career Pro Bowl season, rushes to the back of the end zone to celebrate in front of the Ford Field crowd.
The mood isn’t joyous, it’s triumphant. The Lions are a Matt Prater extra point away from a 34-30 lead against the Kansas City Chiefs with 2 minutes-and-change to play. It is hard to explain the feeling of that moment. Detroit was 2-0-1 up to this point. They had just traveled to Philadelphia and defeated the Super Bowl champion from two years ago on a blocked field goal. Now, they were dueling with the NFL’s golden boy Patrick Mahomes, trading blows with a team that had seemingly been anointed Super Bowl champion in preseason.
A defense led by big money free agent signings Trey Flowers and Justin Coleman was starting to come together. Stafford was as good as ever, and Golladay was emerging as a Calvin Johnson-lite weapon. The long dormant run game had been revived by Kerryon Johnson a year earlier, and he managed to reach the century rushing yard mark against the Chiefs.
For a brief moment, it felt like the Detroit Lions I had been waiting for my entire life had arrived.
My girlfriend doesn’t really care about football. We started dating in early 2023, at the end of the Lions’ surprise 2022 campaign. I had trouble explaining the excitement of what was going on to her. I told her months earlier when we were initially dating that I really liked a sports team that was really bad. She didn’t really understand it. Why did I like a team that was bad? Why not root for a good team?
It’s a question I can’t really answer myself. A lot of Lions fans say they were born with Lions in their DNA, but I wasn’t. My dad was a fan of the team now known as the Washington Commanders as I grew up, and he usually worked on Sundays, so it's not like we watched football together much.
It’s always been hard to exactly put my finger on what it was that pulled me in about this team. Many other kids I knew didn’t root for the Lions, many opting to instead root for the much more successful Pittsburgh Steelers or New England Patriots or the alluring Dallas Cowboys. But, the struggle of the Lions kept me around. Something about rooting for the best team, or a team that I knew would be good every year, felt dirty. I was also a Michigan Wolverines fan for much of my life – but my fandom largely dropped off since they rose back to prominence in the 2020s. I watched the Wolverines win a national championship a few nights ago and felt nothing. If it happened when I was 12 I may have cried. There is something about rooting for the winningest program of all time that just doesn’t do it for me.
But I always wanted the payoff. The feeling of triumph. I didn’t want to just root for a bad team, I wanted to see my bad team become good. To silence the often correct doubters. To know that defending Joey Harrington and Jon Kitna to my friends at the lunch table was a worthwhile endeavor. That when I dedicated my Sunday every week to watching the Lions, and then to watching the Packers, Vikings and Bears to keep tabs on my biggest opponents, that this labor of love would be rewarded. One year, I finally might be able to drink from the fountain of success so many of my peers had already.
There were a few moments where it felt like that success was on the horizon. In 2011, Stafford went ballistic, having one of the best passing seasons in NFL history with more than 5,000 passing yards and 41 touchdowns. Detroit started 5-0, and still managed to make the playoffs at 11-5 despite faltering in the second half of the season. Even after their first round exit against the New Orleans Saints it felt like there was more to come. That this was a real first step towards winning.
They wouldn’t make the playoffs again until three years later. Jim Schwartz was fired after a disastrous 2013 collapse that cost Detroit its first division title in 20 years. Jim Caldwell would take over, and he had Stafford playing some of his best football yet. The Lions quarterback was named to his first Pro Bowl, and had his chance to etch his name into Detroit history with a week 17 trip to Lambeau Field. The Lions had not won a road game against their arch-rival since 1992, and a win in this game would not only break the streak, but clinch the NFC North for the first time ever. Detroit was one win away from breaking the seal, and becoming a real team to worry about.
The Lions lost, then lost again to the Dallas Cowboys in the Wild Card round a week later. Caldwell would always keep the team in playoff contention, winning seven to nine games each year. They returned to the postseason in 2016, but they were a lame duck as Stafford dealt with a hand injury he suffered late in the year. The Lions limped into the playoffs and were dispatched by the Seattle Seahawks with ease.
Then Matt Patricia came along in 2018. A coach with Super Bowl pedigree. A defensive mastermind and lead understudy to the greatest coach of all time, Bill Bellichick. Once again, it felt like the Lions were on the verge of doing it. Patricia’s first season was disappointing, but the team showed flashes - including an impressive primetime victory over the eventual Super Bowl champion New England Patriots.
2019 felt like the year. Detroit didn’t look like a juggernaut, but they were good enough to hang with the big boys, and were winning imperfectly - in previous years they’d even get blown out when they played perfectly.
The game against Kansas City felt like a culmination of it all. The Chiefs were an overtime period from playing in the Super Bowl a year earlier, and with a quarterback like Mahomes it was a guarantee they would be back - at least a few times.
Detroit battled with the Chiefs. Kansas City returned a fumble for a 100 yard touchdown on a play where 20 of the 22 men on the field thought the ball was dead. Travis Kelce pulled off a clever lateral to LeSean McCoy earlier in the game to convert a first down. These plays would usually break the Lions, but they held strong. Stafford found Golladay for a second touchdown, and now Patricia’s defense just had to make one stop to earn a signature win.
They didn’t. The Lions lost. They always lose.
On a 4th & 8 at midfield, Detroit locked up the Chiefs’ impressive receiving corps. Mahomes scrambled for 10 yards. Converting the first down anyways. Darrel Williams would score a one yard touchdown with 20 seconds left to give the Chiefs a permanent lead.
Detroit would only win one game for the remainder of the season, finishing 3-12-1. Mahomes would finish the season lifting a Lombardi trophy in February.
Jared Goff was never the most nimble of runners. A quarterback that was always more brain than brawn, he did not quite blow away scouts at the combine. But the most memorable play of his early career may have come with his legs, not his arms.
Goff took a deep drop out of shotgun as the pocket he was just standing in collapsed in front of him. He bolted to his right, only for a defender there to contain him. Instead, he knifed forward into the gaping area of green grass in front of him. Dashing to the goal line, it appears like he almost chose to slide at the one yard line as a defender approached. Instead, he trotted into the endzone for a touchdown.
Fireworks went off across the iconic Los Angeles Coliseum, as the Rams took a 30-23 lead over the Chiefs in the third quarter. He finger-rolled the ball through the uprights before turning towards the crowd and calling for more cheers. Goff would spend the Monday night dueling with Mahomes in one of the league’s highest scoring games ever, throwing for 413 yards and 4 touchdowns in a 54-51 win.
Goff was not a highly recruited player out of high school. The Northern California native received offers from a few mid-major west coast schools such as Fresno State and Boise State, but the California Golden Bears were the only power 5 team to come calling.
He stepped in as a starter as a true freshman, and became one of the best quarterbacks ever at the school. However, the team around him was poor. Cal remained one of the worst power 5 programs throughout the 2010s, and while the quarterback’s personal star was rising, the team never became a winner. As he left Cal to prepare for the NFL draft, his father indicated to the media that Goff was disappointed with the lack of big wins he earned in his college career. Cal never beat USC, UCLA, Stanford or Oregon in his three years at the school.
Now, in his third NFL season, Goff had earned the biggest win of his life. The Rams reached 10-1 in 2018, sending the Chiefs down to 9-2 in the process. The Rams looked like Super Bowl contenders, if not favorites, as they built on the surprise success of 2017. Goff was drafted first overall by the team in 2016. After a horrendous rookie year, his draft status may have been the only thing keeping him in the role as starting quarterback when Sean McVay arrived as head coach a year later.
The Goff-McVay combination was magical. The Rams would finish the year 13-3 and their offense reminded fans of the “Greatest Show on Turf” days of old. A season like this for the Lions would be the greatest in team history.
But Los Angeles always had their eyes on the bigger prize. The Lombardi trophy. Anything short would feel like a failure. Goff had limitations, his arm isn’t the strongest, he panics under pressure sometimes, can freeze in the pocket when under duress and sometimes struggles out of structure. But with a savant like McVay feeding him instructions, his flaws could be papered over.
The Rams played in the Super Bowl that year, reaching the NFL’s pinnacle after an impressive run carried by Goff, McVay, and a little luck at the end of a game in New Orleans. It was a chance for Goff, a California native who already set records at his state’s namesake school, to further entrench himself as a west coast legend. Instead, he was terrible. The Rams scored three points. The embattled quarterback had no answers for Bill Bellichick and his New England Patriots defense. On one play Goff will likely remember for the rest of his life, he had a wide open receiver in the back of the end zone. His pass floated too much, allowing a Patriots defender to undercut it for an interception.
Goff would remain in Los Angeles for a few more years, but his relationship with McVay would break down. Reports emerged that they would each complain about one-another in private, but neither would communicate their frustration with the other. Instead, the relationship became awkward and strained. During the summer of 2021, the first year after COVID threw everyone’s lives into disarray, McVay would run into Stafford in Cabo. You already know what happened next.
Stafford holds an interesting place in Lions fandom. He was our guy. Our champion. Every week we would tune in with expectations relatively low, but he’d give us hope. He’d fight through the injuries and through the pain. A lack of a run game, poor offensive lines and some terrible defenses would hold him back, but anyone who watched a Lions game during his 12 year reign knew he was, more than anything, a competitor.
It’s what made his 2021 decision to leave feel so comfortable. I’m not sure there were many Lions fans angry with him for asking out. A dozen years into his career, he still hadn’t won a division title or playoff game. He was one of our greatest players ever, but sometimes it felt like he was almost too good to be a Detroit Lion. After a disastrous Patricia-era that alienated much of the locker room, it made sense that he would want to spend the final stages of his career somewhere else. Somewhere he could win.
For Detroit, something fresh was needed too. At some point it became clear that, no matter how good Stafford was, we needed to start over. Sweep away the old era and bring in something new. And this led to the trade that has defined two franchises over the past three years, and will forever entangle the careers of two men with one-another. Two #1 overall picks, traded for one another. Except, for Stafford’s services the Lions also received a haul of draft picks, a sign that Goff was clearly the lesser player.
But Goff obviously doesn’t feel that way, and it seems like the Lions top brass doesn’t either. General Manager Brad Holmes and Head Coach Dan Campbell have repeatedly expressed confidence in Goff as not only the quarterback of the moment, but the quarterback of the future. He will most likely get a massive extension this offseason that will carry the 29-year-old veteran through his early 30s.
As fair as it might not be, Stafford will always be a measuring stick for Goff. He came into Los Angeles and won a Super Bowl in his first year. Meanwhile, Goff’s 2021 Lions were among the league’s worst teams and didn’t earn a win until December. Last year, both teams missed the playoffs, with a Rams loss to the Seahawks in week 18 sealing Detroit’s fate. Now, the results of both teams’ seasons will once again be intrinsically linked. Sunday night at Ford Field, one team is going to send the other packing.
The Detroit Lions and Los Angeles Rams are going to play a football game tonight. Just a football game. They will flip a coin, battle their hardest for 60 minutes, one team will win and one will lose, and then they will shake hands and everyone will go home.
I’ve been repeatedly reminding myself of that this week. In the end it's just a game. One football game. A lot of weird things happen in football games. Sometimes you’re just having a bad day. Sometimes a team plays better and still loses. Both Goff (a missed pass interference late in the game against the Saints) and Stafford (a dropped interception late against the 49ers) booked a Super Bowl ticket after winning a game they may have lost if not for a stroke of luck.
But it is hard to think of this as just a football game. The Lions have never won a playoff game in my lifetime. They never hosted a playoff game. Until a few weeks ago, they had never won the division. My mind has been on this game for months, even before we knew our opponent. About half way through the season it started to look pretty clear that Detroit would host a playoff game barring a major collapse. I didn’t get too excited – they've had many major collapses – but the thought was always at the back of my mind.
With expectations comes a chance for disappointment, however. This is clearly the best Lions team of my life, with a real chance to make a playoff run as the other NFC leaders all have clear flaws.
And then we got the draw. In week 18, the Rams’ backups beat the 49ers’ backups. Los Angeles was locked into the 6 seed. A Cowboys win over the Commanders locked the Lions into 3. Matthew Stafford was finally going to play a playoff game at Ford Field.
When the Lions drafted Stafford first overall in the 2009 draft, it felt like there was finally hope for the team. A franchise bogged down by incompetence for much of the 2000s, capped off with an 0-16 2008 campaign, had found its savior. We reached rock bottom, and found the hero that would lead us to glory. One of the most talented prospects to come out in years. He was the chosen one.
Now, he’s been cast as the villain. A man who not only has the opportunity to, but very much can, dash the hopes of this franchise. Detroit losing this Sunday would not only end their season, but feel like a setback to the entire project. Yeah we won 12 games, yeah we won the NFC North, but we aren’t a franchise that can win. Our losing quarterback went to the Rams and immediately won the Super Bowl. Now he’s coming home to steal our chance at one too. It would be a repeat of so many teams before, giving us hope just to steal it away, but even worse this time.
On the other hand, a win would be more than just a playoff win. It would bury the past, destroy the “same old Lions”, and birth something new. Fans who were so desperate for success they wore “Detroit Rams” shirts two years ago – as even celebrating someone else’s success at this point was better than decades of static – would now get to taste some of our own. Beating Matthew Stafford and the Los Angeles Rams at Ford Field this Sunday opens the door for something bigger. Goff gets his chance to defeat the team that left him behind. Players like Taylor Decker, Graham Glasgow and Tracy Walker – who all played in that 2019 Chiefs game – get to feel what they have waited for so long. To win with the Lions.
The Detroit Lions have a date with destiny tomorrow. Whether they write their own story from here on out is up to them.