Detroit Lions: Every win means less success next season

The Detroit Lions won against a team that gave no effort. When the season arrives next September, this team will pay the ultimate price: more mediocrity.

The Detroit Lions 17-3 win against the Arizona Cardinals was hard to watch. Not because the game was boring – and it was – but because it created false hope. The Lions dropped another five spots from number five to ten in the 2019 NFL Draft. How will this team ever win a Super Bowl with a roster that is full of holes?

Is Detroit against the idea of acquiring big time talents? The Lions already blew the chance to get defensive end Khalil Mack, who has turned the Chicago Bears defense into a juggernaut. And now they seem determined to get every victory possible – to alleviate any chance of getting an impact player in April’s draft.

So much has been said about the defensive effort by the Detroit Lions, who held the Cardinals to just three points. But was this a true test of the defense? Were the Cardinals actually trying to win the game?

CARDINAL COMMITMENT

There was a throwaway line in Peter King’s “Football Morning in America” column from Monday that got me thinking:

"“Congrats, Larry Fitzgerald, on his 1,282nd catch as a Cardinal on Sunday, in that desultory loss to the Lions. Fitzgerald has more catches with one team than any player in the 99-season history of the NFL.”"

I was mostly focused on the phrase “desultory loss.” Desultory basically means ‘lacking a purpose or plan.’ Basically, it is a way of saying that the Cardinals gave a halfhearted effort (and had no real game plan) because they didn’t want to win.

The insult of that statement is not that the Cardinals are tanking. But that the Detroit Lions look and act like they are trying to win. The Cardinals know they aren’t going to the playoffs, so they have concerned themselves with just one thing: draft position.

DUMBFOUNDED IN DETROIT

All this talk about not winning a game in Arizona since 1993 is so infuriating. The only thing ‘not won since 1993’ that matters is the division. This win doesn’t change a damn thing. Yet, the media acts like some big load has been lifted by beating the Cardinals on their home turf. Who cares?

The Detroit Lions have no chance at the playoffs. I don’t care about the math. They won’t make it. And if this mathematical anomaly occurs where an 8 and 8 record coupled with a six or seven team collapse ahead of them somehow happens, what would be the outcome exactly?

The Lions would go on the road and get smacked around by a better team. Even if that better team was playing a bad quarterback (see – Chase Daniel), Matthew Stafford’s play this year does not instill confidence.

This is a bad roster and general manager Bob Quinn is to blame. With his struggles to build the team into a contender, it is hard to fathom that lower picks will mean bigger returns. As his team falls down in the draft order, can Quinn be trusted to fill the holes?

Last week, I called for a “moratorium on wins” by Quinn and company. Clearly, the Cardinals are taking this path. They know they need the best options possible in the draft because this season is a failure.

Are the Cardinals really so much worse off at 3 and 10 than the Detroit Lions are at 5 and 8? Both of those records mean you have blown the season. But the 3-win team has a light at the end of the tunnel. And the 5-win team? Well, they clearly don’t understand how dire things have become.