Nice story about a long time Lions fan. He was on Morning Joe yesterday talking about his love for the Lions. Go figure they won last night.
THE THRILL OF DEFEAT
My life has been shaped by watching the Detroit Lions lose. Who will I be if they start winning?
By Tim Alberta
image of Tim Alberta in a Lions hat as a child with family
Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Getty; Courtesy of Tim Alberta.
SEPTEMBER 6, 2023
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Even now i can still see him, the man in gold and white, streaking down the sideline all alone.
And then the ball was in the air. It hung up there for what felt like my entire childhood, spiraling in slow motion, traveling 50 yards in total. I remember gasping. Just a few minutes earlier, my favorite team—my first true love—the Detroit Lions, had taken a three-point lead over the hated Green Bay Packers. It was the first round of the 1993 NFC playoffs, and it was my first time at a Lions game. The sound of the 80,000 souls crammed into the Pontiac Silverdome—a glorified warehouse in the blue-collar suburbs of Detroit—was deafening, a roar of humanity unlike anything I’d ever heard, the decibel level shaking the cement beneath our bleacher seats. But now, with less than one minute remaining, as the football dropped into the hands of Sterling Sharpe, the man in gold and white, there was silence. The Packers’ unproven young quarterback, Brett Favre, had just made the most spectacular touchdown throw of his career and eliminated the Lions from the playoffs.
I was inconsolable. The Lions had been the better team; even a kid could see that. We’d out-gained the Packers, out-converted them, out-played them. But we’d lost anyway—in dramatic, dream-shattering fashion. It was too much for my 7-year-old emotions to process. So, I wept. First in the stands as time expired, then in the swarming, beer-soaked concourse as my family searched for the exit, and for the entire hour-long car ride home. Finally, as we pulled into our driveway, my dad spun the radio knob leftward, turning down the postmortem show. “It’s just a game,” he said, smiling gently. “We’ll win the next one.”
It was the only lie my dad ever told me.
A year later, the Lions met the Packers again in the playoffs—and, again, the Lions lost. The next time they reached the postseason, they lost. And the time after that. And the time after that. Since falling to Green Bay that ill-fated night, the Lions have appeared in seven playoff games. They have lost every single one. This streak of futility, going more than 30 years without a playoff win, is unmatched in the annals of the National Football League. But the historical context is even worse. Since winning an NFL championship in 1957—a decade before the first Super Bowl was played—the Lions have won just one playoff game, in the 1991 season, against the Dallas Cowboys. That’s right: one playoff victory since the Eisenhower administration.
Every loss I’ve witnessed has been painful, but none more than that Packers game. The Lions were stacked with elite talent: linebacker Chris Spielman, offensive tackle Lomas Brown, return specialist Mel Gray. And of course, the most electrifying player in football, running back Barry Sanders. The team was poised to become one of the league’s best. But that loss to the Packers broke them. Suddenly, Favre and his Green Bay squad were ascendant, racking up division titles and conference championships and winning a Super Bowl. Meanwhile, the Lions fell apart. In the summer of 1999, on the eve of training camp, Sanders floored the football world by announcing his retirement. Despite being in the prime of his career—one season away from breaking Walter Payton’s rushing record—he was worn down by the losing. Two years later, the Lions brought in Matt Millen to rebuild the team as president and CEO. What ensued was the most disastrous tenure the football world had ever seen: The Lions went 31–97 during the eight seasons Millen oversaw the roster, solidifying our reputation as the laughingstock of professional sports. In 2008 we made history, going winless with a record of 0–16.
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It was the worst season an NFL team had ever played—and I didn’t miss a single snap. Every Sunday that fall, during my last semester at Michigan State University, I watched, yelled, seethed, prayed, and ultimately witnessed the Lions come up short. A few minutes later, as predictable as a late-game turnover, the phone would ring. My dad wanted to check on me. We would commiserate for a little while, then talk about other things. Every conversation ended the same way. “We’ll win the next one,” he would say.
image of tim alberta and his father
The author and his father during a 2001 visit to the Pro Football Hall of Fame (Courtesy of Tim Alberta).
By then I was old enough to realize something: Dad didn’t actually believe we’d win the next one. He wasn’t predicting a breakthrough victory. He was teaching me how to handle defeat; he was urging me not to give up hope. He was assuring me that, no matter what, we’d talk again the following Sunday.
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A few summers ago, the day after Dad died, I stood outside a funeral home with my brother Brian. Our father’s passing had been sudden and shocking; both of us were in a daze. After standing there in silence for a while, my brother let out a sigh. “Man,” he said, “Pop never got to see the Lions win.”
Brian was right: For all those decades of fanhood, for all those Sunday-evening pep talks, for all those life lessons drawn from watching his team lose, Dad had never been rewarded with a real winner.
I thought about that when I moved my own family back to Michigan shortly after the funeral. I thought about it when I bought season tickets. I thought about it last summer, when my wife and I took our son Lewis to his very first Lions game. He was almost 7 years old—the age I’d been when my heart was broken that night against the Packers. This was just a preseason game, but it delivered thrill after thrill. The Lions pulled away late; the home stadium, now Ford Field in downtown Detroit, pulsated with cheers. Lewis looked euphoric.
And then a familiar turn of events. The Lions, unforced, fumbled the ball away. The Atlanta Falcons, on a fourth down with 90 seconds remaining, scored a miraculous touchdown. The stadium fell into a hush. Lewis looked up at me. “What just happened?” he asked, his voice quivering. “Did we lose?”
On the car ride home, after we’d pacified Lewis with candy and a stuffed mascot from the stadium, my wife turned to me. Her tone was serious. As a practicing child therapist—and as the wife of a die-hard Lions fan—she knew what emotional trauma looked like. She was worried about our son.
“Are you sure,” she asked me, “that you want to do this to him?”
Ihad never considered it optional. The Lions were in my DNA. Some of my earliest, most vivid memories—formed at no older than age 3—are of my dad and older brothers erupting with screams inside our cramped living room, often frightening me to tears. I would peek in and find them whooping and high-fiving around the small television set, almost always in response to some laws-of-physics-defying maneuver and subsequent touchdown sprint by Barry Sanders. Dad hadn’t grown up a big football fan. But the year we moved to Michigan was the same year the Lions drafted Sanders; before long he and my brothers were hooked, and eventually I was too. Sundays became sacrosanct: Dad preached at our church in the morning, then raced home to meet us for the afternoon kickoff. We scampered outside afterward to re-create the action, pretending to be our favorite players, then came in for dinner and rehashed the results. I can scarcely remember feeling so content.
Of course that fandom would be passed down to my three sons. A framed photo of Sanders had hung over the crib in our kids’ nursery; the walls of their room were painted Honolulu Blue, the singular shade of Detroit’s home uniform. My boys would grow up obsessing over every draft pick, every free-agent acquisition, every coaching change, just like I had. We would watch the games together when they were young, and once they ventured out into the world, we would talk on Sunday evenings.
image of tim and his friends at a football game
The author and his friends at MetLife Stadium in 2014 for “The Mane Event” (Courtesy of Tim Alberta).
My wife knew what she’d signed up for. Back when we started dating, I had to explain to her the moral prerequisite of “The Mane Event,” an annual road-trip extravaganza with three of my closest childhood friends, in which we drained our meager bank accounts to watch the Lions play (and almost always lose) an away game. When my wife and I got married, the place cards for the reception were refashioned Lions tickets. The next day, for our honeymoon, we hosted a massive tailgate outside Ford Field. (In fairness, we lacked the funds to go anywhere else.) She was a great sport about it, wearing a veil to match her Ndamukong Suh jersey, proving that I married the most amazing woman in the world.
Over the years, however, her patience waned. The night Lewis was born, I was glued to the NFL draft inside the delivery room, a distraction that for some reason she found irksome. Minutes after Lewis emerged, I carried him over to the television, swaddled in blankets, and together we watched the Lions select Taylor Decker, an offensive tackle from Ohio State University. It was a polarizing pick: We don’t like Buckeyes much in Michigan, and plus, the Lions desperately needed talent on the defensive side of the ball. I cradled my newborn in one hand and traded angry texts with friends and family in the other, baptizing Lewis into a life he never asked for.
Some seven years later, after that preseason loss to the Falcons, I wrestled with my wife’s question. Rooting for the Lions had given me some wonderful memories, but also some punishing ones. This wasn’t merely about picking a favorite team for my children; this was about passing down a painful existence. Every team wins some games and loses others, but not every team is a national punch line and annual bottom-dweller. Was it really fair, I wondered, to force that on someone?
I decided to back off. If Lewis and his brothers were to become fans, it wouldn’t be their dad’s dictate. They needed to choose the Lions on their own. Frankly, I didn’t see that happening anytime soon. The regime that took over in 2021—head coach Dan Campbell and general manager Brad Holmes—had inherited the worst roster in the league. In their first season, they’d won just three games. In 2022, after my paternal moment of clarity, the team started the year by losing six of its first seven games. At this rate, I figured, it would be easy to abstain from pushing Detroit football on my boys.
But then the strangest thing happened: The Lions started winning.
The offense had shown signs of being explosive; now, midway through the season, it was unstoppable, soaring toward the top of the league leaderboard in yards and points per game. The defense had been dreadful; now it was scrappy, tenacious, improving every week. Campbell, the Hercules-size coach who’d played 10 years in the league as a tight end, had splashed a new, one-word team motto—grit—all across the Lions facility, even printing it on hats and shirts for the players to wear. Some fans viewed this as a token rebranding effort. But as the season progressed, our franchise transformed into something unrecognizable. These Lions didn’t give an inch to their opponents. They were mentally tough; they played with swagger, expecting to dominate every time they took the field. Detroit became the most dangerous team in football, winning seven of its last nine games and somehow, despite the awful start, sneaking into playoff contention. It would all come down to the season finale, a prime-time game in Green Bay against the Packers.
I had held firm on my promise not to indoctrinate the boys. But I couldn’t contain my own exhilaration: After booking our tickets for Sunday night, January 8, 2023, at fabled Lambeau Field, my “Mane Event” crew traveled north.
The Packers had owned this rivalry my entire life. First it was Favre, the Hall of Fame quarterback, who had killed us; then it was his successor, Aaron Rodgers, a future Hall of Famer himself. During one stretch, Detroit lost 24 consecutive games in Green Bay, the longest road losing streak in NFL history. Getting beaten was bad enough. Worse still was the “Same Old Lions” narrative we couldn’t seem to escape, owing to legendary choke jobs and unjust endings: the “completing the process” non-catch in Chicago, the 10-second runoff against Atlanta, the picked-up pass-interference flag in Dallas. And no team in the NFL seemed to benefit from our curse quite like the Packers.
Minutes before kickoff in Green Bay, a third playoff contender, the Seattle Seahawks, won their game following several atrocious fourth-quarter calls, eliminating the Lions from playoff contention but keeping Green Bay alive. All the Packers had to do was win, on their home field, to get in. The champagne bottles began popping around us at Lambeau. The Lions, most people assumed, would mail it in.
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But they didn’t. In the gutsiest performance I’d ever seen from my team, Detroit smacked Green Bay around inside its own house. Despite having nothing to play for but pride—and the chance to keep their nemesis out of the postseason—the Lions hounded Rodgers all night, sacking him twice and sealing his career in Green Bay with an interception on his final drive. As the Packers faithful emptied out of the stadium, my friends and I joined thousands of Lions fans in rushing toward the lower bowl, forming a ring of Honolulu Blue around the field, dancing and singing and hugging strangers in the snow. It was the best moment of my life as a Lions fan.
Riding the momentum from their late-season surge, the Lions became a league darling headed into the 2023 campaign. Several top free agents signed on to play for Campbell. National pundits picked Detroit to win the NFC North—something we have yet to do since the NFL realigned its divisions 20 years ago. Oddsmakers in Las Vegas took more bets on the Lions to make the Super Bowl than they did on any other team in the conference.
This was no longer some cute, try-hard Cinderella story. When the NFL released its 2023 schedule, the opening game of the season—Thursday, September 7, in prime time, all the buildup and all the eyeballs—featured the Kansas City Chiefs, the defending Super Bowl champions, playing at home. Their opponent: the Detroit Lions.
On the first day of training camp this July, Campbell told reporters that the “hype train” surrounding his team was “out of control.” But it wasn’t the hype that scared me. It was something else—a feeling I couldn’t make sense of. With some trepidation, I decided to check out training camp myself.
Barry sanders doesn’t have the moves he once did. The immortal running back, whose jukes and spins and stop-and-start cuts left a generation of linebackers searching for their jockstrap, couldn’t shake the mob of people seeking an audience. It was a sweltering August afternoon and Sanders, now 55 years old, had dropped in on Lions headquarters in Allen Park. The Lions were hosting the New York Giants for a joint scrimmage ahead of their preseason game later in the week, and a crowd of several thousand fans swarmed the practice facility. When word got around that Sanders was here, everyone—players and coaches from both teams—lined up, pointing and whispering like little kids, waiting to shake his hand. By the time Sanders got to me, under a shaded pavilion next to giant metal tubs filled with ice, he looked exhausted.
Detroit Lions Barry Sanders (20) in action vs Green Bay Packers, Milwaukee, WI 11/21/1993
Barry Sanders playing against the Green Bay Packers in 1993 (John Biever / Sports Illustrated / Getty).
Nothing was forcing Sanders to be here—no sponsorship agreement, no contractual obligation with the club. He was happy to visit with everyone, to sign autographs and snap selfies. But really, he’d come to watch football. He’d come to see his team.
Given the circumstances of his departure years earlier—the retirement letter he faxed into a newspaper, the buzz around his feud with the organization, the distance he kept in the aftermath—one might assume that he’d want nothing to do with the Lions. It’s hard to overstate just how devastating his retirement was to the franchise. Every hard-core Lions fan can remember where they were when they found out. I was inside a Denny’s, eating eggs with my dad, when a guy sprinted inside, having just heard the breaking news over the car radio. “Barry’s retiring! Barry’s retiring!” he cried. We sat there in disbelief.
Sanders heard these sob stories in the years that followed. But it wasn’t until his children reached a certain age that he truly understood the emotion behind them. He had made southeast Michigan his home, putting down roots and raising his kids there. He had never pressured them to watch any particular sport, cheer for any particular club. Yet they became football fans. They became Lions fans. And so did he. The Hall of Famer could no longer help himself: Every Sunday in the Sanders house now centered on the team he’d left behind. He saw his sons crushed in all the familiar ways; he watched them mourn the shocking retirement of another Lions superstar, wide receiver Calvin Johnson, bringing the experience full circle. Yet all the while, Sanders and his family continued to cheer.
“It’s something that I grapple with, and it’s just hard to explain,” Sanders told me. “This team matters to us. You know what I mean?”
I asked whether he and his sons had ever considered switching allegiances. Sanders cocked his head to the side, rumpling his brow.
“No. No, no, no,” he said. “These people who have been loyal, people who have been there every step of the way—that’s the beauty of the game, I think. There are no guarantees. But they still believe.”
Sometimes that beauty gives way to torment. On the far end of the practice field, a man with a fancy job title—special assistant to president/CEO and chairperson—stalked the sideline with a notepad in his right hand. Most front-office types wear suits and ties. But this man was dressed in all black: workout pants, hooded sweatshirt, 50-pound weighted vest, all of it made more conspicuous by the mid-80s heat. It was Chris Spielman.
The anchor of Detroit’s defense in the 1990s, Spielman played brief stints in Buffalo and Cleveland before retiring because of injuries. He went into the broadcast booth and spent the next two decades providing color commentary for college and NFL games. He was happy, making a fine living, freed from the weekly stresses of a win-loss record. And then the call came. It was late 2020, and the Lions were coming off their third consecutive last-place finish. The team’s owner, Sheila Ford Hamp—great-granddaughter of Henry Ford and daughter of William Clay Ford Sr., who’d purchased the franchise outright in 1964—told Spielman the Lions needed a culture change. She was searching for a new coach and general manager, but first she needed a football consigliere, someone who could help guide those hires, who could connect the front office to the locker room to the X’s and O’s on the field. His mind was made up before she’d finished the pitch.
“Loyalty to this organization was probably the only thing that could have drawn me out of the booth,” Spielman told me.
There was more to it than loyalty, though. As we spoke, and he drifted back to his playing days in Detroit, I sensed a lack of peace about the man. He talked about “letting down the fan base.” He said the losses—especially to Green Bay in the playoffs—“always haunt me.” At one point, he gazed off in the distance, choking back emotion as he muttered, “My career was a failure.”
Professional athletes are sometimes thought to be indifferent to the plight of fans—millionaire mercenaries who collect a paycheck and move on to a new city for an even bigger one. Yet here was Spielman, a god of the gridiron—the first high-school player ever to appear on a Wheaties box; a two-time All American in college; a four-time Pro Bowler in the NFL—still distraught, 30 years later, about what could have been. And it wasn’t simply because he never won. It was because he never won here.
“I have so much respect for the folks who’ve hung in there. I felt I owed them something,” Spielman said of his decision to return to Detroit. He called it “unfinished business.”
Today the budding star of the Lions defense is Aidan Hutchinson, a second-year pass rusher who led all rookies in sacks last season and looks poised to become one of the league’s premier defensive players. He’s a local kid, born and raised in Plymouth, drafted out of the University of Michigan. He calls it “divine timing” that the Lions lost 13 games the season before he turned pro, allowing them to snag him with the No. 2 overall selection in last year’s draft.
There is just one hitch in Hutchinson’s homecoming story: He didn’t root for the Lions as a kid.
“I mean, it was hard to be a Lions fan growing up,” the 23-year-old told me after practice one day, a sheepish grin spreading across his face. “The boys were always struggling.”
Hutchinson knows that the Lions are something of a religion in southeast Michigan. His friends loved them. He grew up 20 minutes from team headquarters. And yet, he chose to cheer for the New England Patriots—the winningest franchise in the modern history of the NFL.
“My dad was never a big Lions fan. That’s where I didn’t get it,” Hutchinson said. “He grew up in Texas; he was always a Houston Oilers fan.” When that franchise moved to Nashville in the late 1990s, the elder Hutchinson—who starred at the University of Michigan himself, then stayed in the Detroit suburbs to raise his family—became a pigskin itinerant. He followed everyone, and although he rarely missed a Lions game, he couldn’t bring himself to invest in the home team. By the time Aidan was old enough to watch alongside him, a fellow Michigan alumnus named Tom Brady was establishing a dynasty in New England. And so the Hutchinsons became Patriots fans, reveling in Super Bowls from afar as their neighbors here hankered for a mere playoff win.
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I asked Aidan, now that he’s a Lion, if he felt badly about not supporting his home team sooner.
“Not necessarily,” Hutchinson replied, fighting a smirk. “I’m happy I’m on the team now.”
The implication was obvious enough. Nothing was lost by ignoring the Lions all those years—the blooper-reel lowlights and the humiliating headlines—because in sports, winning is what makes fanhood worthwhile.
Lots of people believe that. I used to question my own sanity, wondering why I subjected myself to such assured misery Sunday after Sunday, season after season, decade after decade. More than once I fantasized about rounding up my memorabilia—the jerseys and autographs, the helmets and framed photos, the old programs and saved ticket stubs—then dousing it in gasoline and setting it ablaze, escaping this abusive relationship once and for all.
Why didn’t I?
For the longest time, I told myself it was because I’m cursed. I told myself that the moment I walked away from the Lions, they would start winning and winning big, driving me to an entirely different level of madness.
But that’s not the real explanation. Embedded in the psyche of a sports fan is a belief that these teams say something about us; that even though we can’t influence the outcomes—any more than we can control the weather or an economic downturn or a heart attack stealing a family member—we find in them a personal significance that echoes beyond the box score. There is a reason the Lions—not the Red Wings, or the Pistons, or the Tigers, all of whom have been winners in my lifetime—are the favorite sons of Detroit. In a city that can’t seem to catch a break, people find common cause in rallying around the team that best reflects their own story.
For Lions fans—and, I started to realize, for Lions players—all of the losing has formed bonds that winning never could.
“One hundred percent,” Taylor Decker, the left tackle whom the Lions had drafted when Lewis was approximately 15 minutes old, told me at training camp. “It makes you realize who you can rely on, who has your back, who you can trust.”
Now entering his eighth season—he is the longest-tenured player on the club—Decker told me, “I’ve become a man in the city of Detroit.” Part of that maturation owes to experiencing defeat: Coming from Ohio State, where he won a national championship before turning pro, Decker had never tasted the setbacks that would mark his first six years in Detroit. Strange as it might sound, he seems grateful for those setbacks now.
“In today’s society, I feel like quitting and taking the easy way out has been normalized,” Decker said, citing players who demand trades or refuse to re-sign with a struggling team. “I do think there’s something to be said for seeing it through and going through those hard times.”
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Hanging around the Lions facility this summer, talking with players, officials, and journalists who cover the organization, I thought about the irony of my tortured relationship with the Lions. Would I have talked with my dad every Sunday night if our team was steady, unspectacular, business-as-usual competitive? Would my brother Brian and I dissect every draft pick if our team was coming off back-to-back division titles? Would my friends and I bother with The Mane Event if our team had already won a Super Bowl?
Aidan Hutchinson felt sorry for us long-suffering Lions fans. But I started to feel sorry for him. Losing is hard and often harrowing. But it’s also inevitable. And what we take from these losses is precisely what’s necessary to win: resolve, perseverance, and, yes, grit. That’s what my dad taught me before I lost him. And that’s what I hope to teach my sons, who, one day, are going to lose me.
With the season opener in Kansas City drawing near, and my self-imposed ban on proselytizing the boys still in place, there was an uncomfortable truth to confront. Maybe I wasn’t afraid of them inheriting a loser. Maybe I was afraid of them inheriting a winner.
When i shared my epiphany with Brad Holmes, he was stone-faced at first. And then, slowly, he started to nod.
“I was doing a lot of research recently on heat exposure and cold exposure—like, deliberate heat exposure with your body. And a lot of research says that when your molecules suffer, it actually makes your molecules even stronger,” Holmes, the Lions’ general manager, told me one recent afternoon as the team practiced in a misting rain. “It’s kind of like when you’re growing wine. When the grapes are exposed to intense temperatures, it actually produces a better-quality wine. You know what I mean?”
Yes, I knew what he meant—not about the grapes or the molecules, necessarily, but about the metaphorical point he was making. Holmes had seen his share of adversity. Raised in a football family—his father played for the Steelers, his cousin played for the Rams, and his uncle, naturally, played for the Lions—Holmes became a defensive lineman at North Carolina A&T and briefly harbored NFL aspirations of his own. And then a violent car wreck after his sophomore season nearly killed him. Holmes spent a week in a coma, suffering a ruptured diaphragm and a stroke from the violence of the collision. Even though he battled back, eventually rejoining the football team and playing out his college career, the dream was over.
Holmes still wanted a piece of the NFL. He sent copies of his résumé to every organization, begging for an internship in someone’s scouting department. “And every team told me, ‘no, no, no, no, no,’” he recalled. Holmes took a job at Enterprise Rent-A-Car to pay the bills, but kept on pushing. “That’s just kind of how I’m wired,” he told me. “I embrace the darkness.”
After forcing his foot into the door with the Rams—Holmes started as an intern in the public-relations department—he eventually rose to become the director of college scouting, helping to assemble arguably the most talented roster in the league. That roster won a Super Bowl in 2022—but Holmes wasn’t there for it. He had, one year earlier, taken the top job in Detroit. The first move he made was trading the Lions’ all-time leading passer, Matthew Stafford, to the Rams. The torment was poetic: Detroit’s new general manager watched his mates celebrate a championship in his first year removed from his former franchise, while Lions fans watched their former quarterback hoist the Lombardi Trophy one year after requesting a trade from Detroit.
Holmes vowed to use that heartache. He told himself that he would build Detroit’s organization around people who had suffered like him—people who knew how to use that suffering as fuel. He hoped to find a partner who embraced the darkness like he did.
And then he met Dan Campbell.
When he was introduced as Detroit’s new head coach, at a press conference in January 2021, Campbell went viral with a breathless speech promising bodily harm to opponents. “This team’s going to be built on—we’re going to kick you in the teeth. All right? And when you punch us back, we’re going to smile at you,” Campbell said. “And when you knock us down, we’re gonna get up. And on the way up, we’re gonna bite a kneecap off. All right? And we’re gonna stand up. And then it’s going to take two more shots to knock us down. All right? And on the way up, we’re gonna take your other kneecap. And then we’re gonna get up. And then it’s gonna take three shots to get us down. And when we do, we’re gonna take another hunk out of you.”
He concluded: “Before long, we’re gonna be the last ones standing.”
Campbell was rendered a caricature. All the national media could see was a macho former player flexing for the cameras; all they could hear was the Texas twang and the grisly imagery. But Lions fans saw and heard something else. We weren’t enamored of the kneecap spiel. What made us fall in love with Campbell—what turned him into the face of Detroit sports—was what he said immediately preceding that viral moment.
“This place has been kicked, it’s been battered, it’s been bruised. And I can sit up here and give you coach-speak all day long. I can give you, ‘Hey, we’re going to win this many games.’ None of that matters, and you guys don’t want to hear it anyway. You’ve had enough of that shit,” Campbell said. “Here’s what I do know: This team is going to take on the identity of this city. This city’s been down, and it’s found a way to get up.”
How does a guy who grew up in the one-stoplight-town of Morgan, Texas (population 457)—“actually, outside Morgan,” Campbell told me—become an avatar for the defiant spirit of Detroit?
Campbell played here. More to the point, he played here in 2008, when the Lions achieved infamy with their 0–16 season. He came aboard as a free agent with the charge of providing veteran leadership, helping a languid locker room to mature and compete. Instead, in his three years in Detroit the team lost 38 games and won just 10. The 2008 season was especially scarring. Campbell, who nursed injuries throughout training camp, fought his way onto the field in the season opener against Atlanta. In the second quarter, he caught a pass for 21 yards down the seam, getting crunched by three Falcons defenders on his way to the turf. Then he limped off the field.
“That was my last play ever,” Campbell murmured.
Dan Campbell of the Detroit Lions during a game between the Detroit Lions and New York Jets in 2006
Dan Campbell playing against the New York Jets in 2006 (Brian Killian / NFL Photo Library / Getty).
We were sitting on the sidelines of the Lions’ indoor practice field. He closed his eyes, looking wistful. The cumulative toll of injuries sustained playing the game he loved—foot, elbow, knee, hamstring—finally caught up with him. He watched from the sidelines as his team lost every game that season. What happened next was just as excruciating: Campbell signed a one-year deal with the New Orleans Saints, determined to give his body a final go. He tore his MCL in camp and was placed on injured reserve, forfeiting eligibility to play. This time, instead of watching his teammates go winless, Campbell saw the Saints march all the way to a Super Bowl victory. But he didn’t get a ring. He hadn’t played a single down. History would not remember him as a champion. Campbell retired a short time later.
Detroit isn’t a prized destination for football coaches. But for Campbell, who went to work for the Miami Dolphins as an offensive intern the year after he retired, the Lions were his dream job. This wasn’t just a place where he played. This was a place where he hurt, where he grieved, where he lost something he would never get back—and where the fans understood what that meant.
“Man, to endure year after year, your hopes are back up and then it’s that. Your hopes are back up—‘This is gonna be the year’—and then it’s 0–16. But they just keep coming back for more,” Campbell said, shaking his head in amazement.
“The thought of being a part of bringing this place out of the ashes—”
He paused. “Man, it meant something to me.”
Campbell grew up a Dallas Cowboys fan. He watched every game with his dad, a diehard since the 1960s, and idolized the glamorous roster of the 1990s that won multiple Super Bowls. Now that he’s in Detroit, there’s a disconnect that’s hard to ignore. Those Cowboys had been dubbed “America’s Team,” yet most of America couldn’t relate to them. They were a group of hotshot players, led by a cocky coach and bankrolled by an ostentatious owner, who won in ways that were neither surprising nor inspiring. There was no grit about the Cowboys.
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“That’s been ‘America’s Team,’” Campbell told me, emphasizing the nickname with air quotes. I could tell we were thinking the same thing: Imagine how endearing these Detroit Lions would be to the masses, football junkies and casual viewers alike, if they parlayed their losing past into a winning future.
Campbell motioned toward the field behind us. “Why can’t we be America’s team?”
When the nfl scheduled the Lions-Chiefs season kickoff for September 7, my immediate reaction was to text the Mane Event crew. We began looking at tickets, hotels, flights. Arrowhead Stadium, in prime time, against the champs—this was as close to a Super Bowl as anything we’d ever experienced. We had to go.
It hit me several hours later: September 7 was our wedding anniversary. Our tenth wedding anniversary. As much as my identity is wrapped up in Lions football, it’s even more wrapped up in family. There was no way I could ditch my wife. So I did what any good husband would: I asked her to come to Kansas City, too.
She actually agreed, but between our jobs and kids and logistics, we couldn’t find a way to make it work. She felt terrible about it. But I told her not to worry: The Lions would be playing a lot of big games in 2023. We would have plenty of chances. After all, we have four season tickets.
I thought about those four tickets throughout the summer. Purchasing them a few years ago after moving back to Michigan had been a means of establishing continuity between generations, passing down a family tradition, ensuring that my three boys would make Lions memories—good and bad—with their father the same way I had with mine.
That no longer seemed likely. I had stopped pushing the Lions on them last summer, following that awful preseason loss to Atlanta, and I hadn’t heard a word from them about football since. That was just fine. My sons and I would discover a different identity together, a different way of bonding. Sure, if I’m being honest, it was a disappointment. But I’ve learned to deal with those.
A few days before I finished writing this story—two weeks out from the season opener—my 7-year-old, Lewis, approached me, apropos of nothing.
“Dad,” he asked, “can we go to a Lions game this year?”
I was reminded of another virtue of losing: It makes victory that much sweeter.
Tim Alberta is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/detroit-lions-nfl-football-fan-defeat/675220/?utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
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