How Last Year's Detroit Lions Changed My Perspective On Sports

I've seen the misconception out there in the past that I'm not a Lions fan, and that could not be further from the truth. In general, even with the Pistons, I don't want any Detroit sports team to fail. But I've never seen the Lions before last year have any semblance of success. I've seen them hire incompetent people over and over again. They'll acquire good players like Stafford or Megatron and waste their talents. Poor Matthew Stafford took a beating before reviving his career in Los Angeles. I went to one place with the Lions that you should never go, a place of complete hopelessness. Don't get me wrong; there were many points throughout the Tigers' terrible rebuild in which I wondered if this team would ever be good again. But if you pressed me on it and put a gun to the back of my head, I'd tell you I always held out hope. Every Opening Day, I think this team will win the World Series. By the time we get to game two, my opinion has changed, but I digress.

I found last year's run to the NFC championship to be one of the coolest things the Detroit sports has seen in a long time. Even now, the Lions seem like the team the whole world is rooting for. And as happy as I was to see them succeed, I didn't feel as attached to it as I did with the Tigers run this most recent year. Perhaps for too long, my skepticism ruined my fandom. I was the guy who watched Dan Campbell's biting kneecaps speech and rolled his eyes. I felt it wouldn't work, not because of Dan Campbell, but because it's the Lions. The Lions fuck things up. There's nothing wrong with skepticism about a particular regime, and God knows if any organization deserves cynicism over the years, it's the Detroit Lions. Still, it's unhealthy to go into any scenario, certain that it will fail. Because when they surprise you, you feel like you hopped off the bandwagon. It doesn't mean you're not a fan; it just means that you don't deserve to ride in front of the bus.

As sports fans, and I'm as guilty of this as anyone, we tend to look down on the diehards. We scoff at people who always root for their team to win, even if it compromises the future (e.g., Tanking for a better draft pick). The truth is that, in general, most people don't view sports as the business venture that we view it as. When we watch a game, we think about the repercussions of that game. We think about what the team or the organization may look like in two or three years. Most casual fans don't feel that way, and there's nothing wrong with that. Most fans come home from work or have a few days off on the weekend, and they just want to watch their team win. It's that hope that drives us. With the Lions, I spent way too much time feeling as though success was impossible because, quite frankly, I hadn't seen it. The older you get, the more you watch sports, the more you realize that there is no such thing as impossible; in general, there's no such thing as curses. There's only bad culture and bad leadership. To the credit of Brad Holmes, Sheila Ford Hamp, and Dan Campbell, they first focused on changing the culture and Detroit. It worked, and it has resulted in unprecedented success for this organization. They've not only proved me wrong, but they changed my perspective on fandom.