We didn’t miss a thing. The NFL and the Players Association are on the five yard line of the negotiating game and are ready to punch it in. There was never a doubt in my mind that the league was going to lose any games. No one was stupid enough to put their egos ahead of common sense and stop the golden goose from laying those golden eggs. What did we miss anyway? The free agent signings that are stretched out for months will be condensed into a short window. Instead of reports of players signing contracts, we got updates of the deal making 9 billion dollar tango that bored any self respecting football fan to death.
You know football season is right around the corner when we hear that Hank Williams Jr. is recording some new songs for the upcoming season. I want to be the first to go on record to say that on that Monday Night Game on October 10 against the Bears, that the fans at the game should serenade Matt Millen, if he’s there, with a nostalgic chant of “FIRE MILLEN”. Detroit might be down, but we didn’t lose our sense of humor.
I don’t know when the free agent signings are going to commence, but I expect to see a crazy wild west of a time. It’ll be a once in a lifetime event that I feel confident Martin Mayhew will be able to handle. In just three short years, Mayhew and coach Schwartz have set up the Lions to cope with the lockout as well as any team in the league. Even though it’s a pretty young team, it’s so loaded that there are only a couple of spots that need to be addressed before the games start. This lockout is really setting back teams that have new coaches who can’t implement their plans until this thing is over.
In fact, the Lions are so well regarded that three years removed from being the ONLY team in NFL history to go winless, people around the country are jumping on the bandwagon in betting on the Lions to win the Super Bowl. The Lions have gone from 75 to 1 to 18 to 1 to win the Super Bowl at the MGM Sportsbook. One manager there was quoted as saying that “We can’t stop the money on Detroit.” The odds to win the NFC went from 30 to 1 to 6 to 1. I know that people are betting the odds, and not that Detroit is actually going to win the thing but it’s refreshing to find that the rest of the country definitely thinks the Honolulu Blue and Silver will be making an impact on the league this year. I still have a hard time believing that the rest of the nation thinks more of the Lions than the local fan does. I sure hope that the players aren’t getting big heads from all thie adulation they’ve been getting this off-season.
This team can’t wait to buckle up those helmets and prove to the world that these aren’t the “Same ‘ol Lions”. That ride called the 2012 football season is about to start. “Are you ready for some football?”.
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