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Will the Detroit Lions ever make it to the Super Bowl?

By James F. Puzzuoli

Detroit Lions president Rod Wood, General Manager Bob Quinn (Photo by Leon Halip/Getty Images)
Detroit Lions president Rod Wood, General Manager Bob Quinn (Photo by Leon Halip/Getty Images) /
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The Detroit Lions future participation in the Super Bowl is not about curses, ownership, or an inability to win. It is all about management.

UNDATED: FILE PICTURE OF THE PONTIAC SILVERDOME DURING A DETROIT LIONS FOOTBALL GAME IN PONTIAC, MICHIGAN. Mandatory Credit: Allsport/ALLSPORT
UNDATED: FILE PICTURE OF THE PONTIAC SILVERDOME DURING A DETROIT LIONS FOOTBALL GAME IN PONTIAC, MICHIGAN. Mandatory Credit: Allsport/ALLSPORT /

For my first post about the Detroit Lions, I can’t help but think about the impending Super Bowl. The Lions are one of four teams to never reach the Super Bowl. The other three teams are the Cleveland Browns, Jacksonville Jaguars, and Houston Texans.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have the current perennial franchise over the past seventeen years: The New England Patriots. Super Bowl LII will be their eighth appearance in those seventeen years. Their record is 5-2 with both losses coming to the New York Giants in 2007 and 2011. They also have two previous appearances, both of which they lost to the 1985 Chicago Bears and 1996 Green Bay Packers.

It is this current run by the Patriots that is of interest to me because it is clearly of interest to the Detroit Lions. The Lions targeted the Patriots as a path to championship success. In 2016, they hired general manager Bob Quinn from the Patriots’ front office. And as soon as the Super Bowl concludes, it is basically a done deal that they hire Patriots’ defensive coordinator Matt Patricia as their next head coach.

Will these be the moves that take the Detroit Lions to the Super Bowl?

Here is the crazy thing: my answer is yes.

My optimism comes from four basic points of contention …

NUMBER ONE – THERE ARE NO CURSES

Curses, jinxes, voodoo, hexes, or whatever you may call it: do not exist! Can belief in something like a curse, make a curse real in a sense. Yes, it can. Negative thoughts like that can play out in negative results.

However, I don’t think anyone on the current Detroit Lions roster, staff, or management actually believes in curses (“Bobby Layne” or otherwise).

Let me use an example from baseball, since “curses” are so prevalent in that sport. The Boston Red Sox and Chicago Cubs both disprove the curse theory. They absolutely languished for many decades and had some bad breaks, but they were not cursed.

And the funny thing is both of these teams won the championship after hiring the same guy: general manager Theo Epstein. So, either Theo is the greatest of all curse breakers, or he’s just a really good general manager. I tend to go with the latter. This brings me to number two.

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