Detroit Lions: Pretenders or have they become contenders?

I was enjoying lunch with a friend of mine the other day when he said to me, ‘why do you hate Lions offense so much?’

I was slightly surprised when he said that, but I took him on a little journey down memory lane. From the time I became hooked on football, there was nothing more exciting than watching an explosive offense.

In Detroit, that was sort of a rarity because either the Lions had the ability to run the ball, especially in the Barry Sanders era. But they were unable to pass because of quarterback ineptitude. Or, as has been the case in recent years, Detroit can pass the ball, but can’t run the ball to save their lives.

In other words, unless you are collecting social security, you’ve never seen the Lions have an effective offense that could gain yards on the ground and in the air outside of 1995 when quarterback Scott Mitchell recorded his best season and Detroit’s offense was sort of scary.

Of course, that ended in the first round of the playoffs when Philadelphia blew the Lions out 58-37.

Consequently, over time as the Lions have been watching the playoffs, like myself, I would usually find ‘surrogate’ teams to cheer for. Teams that were exciting and fun to watch.

However, more often than not those teams would lose to better defensive teams in the playoffs or Super Bowl.

That was when I started making the correlation that ‘defense wins championships’. Forget about blind love, it was time to pull out the bifocals to look beyond my heart and understand what was happening.

Of the 10 highest single season scoring teams in the history of the league, only one was able to win it all. Because you can’t outscore everyone. On an even field, good defense usually beats good offense.

For those who want to point out this past Super Bowl as an example of offense winning it all, first of all that much scoring was an anomaly that has occurred only once (see three months ago) in the Super Bowl and secondly the game was decided by Brandon Grahams strip sack on Tom Brady.

That’s right! The most pivotal play of the game was a defensive play.

So for everyone that thinks defense is a second class citizen, don’t even bother.