So I'm watching "SportsWorks" on Fox 2 Sunday night, as Dan Miller, Jamie Samuelsen, and Sean Baligian try to pick apart yet another loss (the 14th of the season) by the Detroit Lions. And there's really only so much to say when the losing continues week after week. Maybe the Lions are showing a little bit of fight at the end of the season, especially as it tries to avoid becoming the first team in NFL history to go winless over a 16-game season, but with only two games left on the schedule, they're running out of chances to avoid pro football infamy.
But while discussing that very possibility, Miller asks Samuelsen and Baligian if they're part of the "moron contingent" of Lions fans that is rooting for the team to go 0-16. And when I hear that, I sit up. Because I count myself among the segment of Detroit sports fans that want to see the Lions suck on a historical level. And maybe my perception is influenced by the echo chamber of my friends, but I don't believe I'm in the minority on this. I think many Lions fans believe that the only way the team has any chance of getting better is for the ownership to suffer the kind of humiliating indignity that they'll never want to experience again.
Apparently, that makes me a "moron." Or as MLive.com's Tom Kowalski put it, not a real Lions fan.
If you want these things to happen and you still want to call yourself a Lions fan, I have a huge problem with that. It might be a silly little pet peeve of mine, but I firmly believe that once you start rooting for your team to lose, you're no longer a fan.
My response to Miller and Kowalski on this consists of two words.
Fuck you.
(What, did you think they'd be "Merry Christmas"? I'm sorry, but no other words better capture how I feel about this.)
Let me get this straight: two members of the credentialed Detroit sports media - who are paid to attend games and watch them from what is essentially an office environment in the press box - are going to tell people whether or not they're fans? Miller, as the radio play-by-play man for the Lions, is literally a professional mouthpiece for the team. Kowalski is presumably impartial as a beat reporter, but when you spend that much time around a group of coaches, players, and executives, it's impossible to remain completely objective. And he doesn't.
Am I less of a Lions fan than I was three years ago? Absolutely! This team - and its entire organization - has given me nothing to root for. Their games are a frustrating, joyless ordeal. And I can't even watch another, better team that might play more enjoyable football. (Believe me; I've tried to find a new team. But what fun is it to root for Pittsburgh's team? Or New York's team?) The Lions have actually drained my love of the sport right out of me.
Would I be more of a fan to blindly surrender my loyalty to a team that has given its fans an utterly inferior - and progressively worse - product for eight years? Am I not a fan because I want the team that represents my community to get better and know, deep down, that it can only be rebuilt once it's completely destroyed?
Miller and Kowalski dispute that line of thinking, asserting that changes are going to be made, so there's ultimately no difference between a 1-15 and 0-16 season. No, there is every bit of difference. Other teams have gone 1-15 or 2-14 before. No team has gone winless. And if the Detroit Lions have to carry that weight around their collective necks, maybe they'll work that much harder to make us forget what a laughingstock they've been.
The fact that I'm hoping for that, that I care enough to have typed out 600 words about all this, makes me a fan. How dare someone in the media try to tell me otherwise.
