Fire Schwartz! Fire Linehan! Fire Cunningham!

 Not.

The disappointment of Lions fans this season is both palpable and understandable. No city in America has hosted a dumpy football franchise longer than Detroit has.

Overall, Motor City sports fans’ patience with our home teams has largely been rewarded with periodic championships. The sole exception has been the Lions.

The Detroit Pistons have played in five NBA championship series since 1968 and won three of them, including back-to back wins in 1989-90. They’ve been to the Eastern Conference Finals 20 times during that same period of time.

Since 1995 the Red Wings have played in six Stanley Cup finals and won four of them, including back-to-back wins in 1997-98

The Detroit Tigers have played in three World Series since 1968 and won two of them. They have also been to the ALCS twice more during that same period of time.

During the twelve years when Detroit was its hometown, the WNBA Shock won three championships.

Meanwhile, since their last NFL Championship in 1957, the Lions have managed to rack up a single playoff victory, which occurred in 1992 against Dallas. The last time they finished first in their division was 1993. The Lions haven’t had a winning season since 2000 when they went 9-7.

Pissing away parity

The NFL is set up to give struggling teams an opportunity to climb out of the cellar and achieve parity in a reasonably short period of time through the draft and waiver wire pecking order.

However, even the mighty NFL cannot prevent teams from repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot, which is exactly what happened under the seven year tenure of Matt Millen.

Fans are right to blame Lions owner William Clay Ford for tolerating the failures of Russ Thomas and Matt Millen for as long as he did.

That last seven year stretch in particular arguably left the Lions in worse shape than a new expansion team would have been in when Martin Mayhew and Jim Schwartz took the reins of the franchise.

Yet while fans today are understandably frustrated and their patience all but exhausted, prematurely axing Schwartz, Linehan or Cunningham would result in yet another sorry instance of the Lions doing more damage to our own organization than any opposing team could ever inflict.

More than at any other point in franchise history, fans today would be best served by continuing to give the current coaching staff and team the benefit of doubt. Let the season play out fully before judging its progress over last year.

The players on our current roster have enough to worry about already.

Losing fan support this early, especially after coming so close to beating Chicago (currently 3-0) and Philly (Vick is the one of the hottest QBs in the league right now), can only have negative consequences for the team.

So by all means fellow fans, continue to analyze and critique the performance of the Lions’ players and coaches. Just chill the premature calls for heads to roll.

Having said that…

The Lions defensive schemes have actually been pretty good. The points that the Lions have given up have largely been the result of spotty individual player performance.

Coaches don’t draw penalties, miss tackles, blow coverages, or drop balls that should have been intercepted, players do.

Gun Cunningham has done a good job of utilizing the talent he has available. The problem is that there just isn’t enough talent available at the linebacker and secondary positions yet.

It’s a different story on the offensive side of the ball. Even with the injuries to some key players that we’ve suffered, there has been enough available talent to score far more often than we have this season.

There is only one good way to compensate for defensive weaknesses between drafts, and that’s to put up more points than the other team does. That has to be Job 1 for Jim Schwartz for the remainder of this season.

The Detroit Lions’ Offense Is Simply Too Predictable

There is one tactical sin that no NFL team can commit and expect to win: being too predictable.

Please note that there’s a big difference between predictable outcome expectations and tactical, situational predictability.

For example, most of us expect that the Patriots and Colts will score a lot of points through the air each week and win a lot more games than they lose.

So do opposing defenses.

Yet even though defenses know what to expect, they rarely know how and where New England, Indianapolis, and more recently New Orleans, will strike at them on any particular play.

No team, repeat no team in the NFL has enough talent at every defensive position to prevent a gifted offensive tactician with even a modicum of talent at their disposal from exploiting their weaknesses.

Strategy, tactics and talent

Successful NFL teams all have two characteristics in common.

The first is they have a head coach who is opportunistic, adaptive and unafraid to take risks.

The most recent famous example of a head coach demonstrating these qualities is New Orleans’ Sean Payton coming out immediately after halftime during Super Bowl XLIV and dialing up a completely unexpected onside kick.

The Saints were down 10-6 at the end of the first half against a very good team in the most important game of the year, and the most important game ever for New Orleans.

Payton recognized the opportunity to catch the Colts by surprise.

He assessed the risks: the worst outcome would give the Colts better field position than they might have gained after a conventional kickoff. The best outcome would deny Indianapolis a series of downs at the opening of the second half and give his team an additional series of downs to score.

Payton made his decision and rolled the dice.

One onside kick and five consecutive pass completions later, the Saints were in the end zone and possessed their first lead of the game.

The second characteristic successful NFL teams have in common is that they fully and effectively utilize whatever talent they happen to have available.

Having a sufficient number of talented players on the field is only one part of the winning equation. Fluidly orchestrating mismatches on offense and scheming well-disguised defensive pressures and coverages is the other.

Minnesota and Buffalo have both been to the Super Bowl four times (Buffalo went four times in a row during the early 90s), and despite having an abundance of talent, neither team won a single Super Bowl.

Given the same basic talent, would a different strategy have made a difference?

In 2001, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers were eliminated in the Wild Card round of the playoffs 31-9 by the Philadelphia Eagles. Coach Tony Dungy was fired as a result.

The following season Jon Gruden was hired away from the Oakland Raiders to coach essentially the same Tampa team that Dungy had coached the year before.

Utilizing a different strategy and set of tactics, Gruden proceeded to guide Tampa to a 48-21 Super Bowl rout.

The pre-parity, pre-polite NFL

 Winning coaches during this era of football built teams that bit, scratched, punched, horse-collared, head-slapped and otherwise physically intimidated and punished their opponents.

Almost anyone who has watched archived film of football played prior to the mid-70s would agree that it was a far more brutal game back then than it is today.

Beginning roughly after Super Bowl X, a cascading set of rules have been put in place to enhance player safety and make it easier for teams to generate offense.

Some fans would argue that the rules have gone too far.

These fans feel that there are far too many penalties called during most games, too much ambiguity built into the rules, and too much inconsistency in how and when the rules are applied, especially as they relate to contact with a quarterback (and also what constitutes a receiving touchdown).

Few people would argue that player safety isn’t important.

However, when NFL football essentially ceases to be a contact sport and the outcome of almost every game is decided by part-time officials who interpret ambiguous rules on the fly, the game will be dead to most fans.

As it is now, we are rapidly approaching the point when NFL owners might as well issue red-shirts to quarterbacks on game day.

The Story

 Long ago, when NFL football was truly a contact sport and the outcome of most games was decided by determined men who demonstrated a superior will to win on the field of battle and not by a bunch of zebras, legends were born that exist to this day.

One such legend has been captured in a story that exemplifies the true spirit of the game as it was intended to be played and the grit of its coaches and players at their best.

As the story is told, during a practice session prior to Super Bowl II, Vince Lombardi was informed by an assistant that a stranger with binoculars was observing them from a distant vantage point.

The assistant was sure that the man was a spy for the opposing team and he asked the legendary head coach what he wanted to do about it.

Lombardi snorted and said, “Hell, I’ll give him the damn playbook! Their problem isn’t knowing what we’re going to do. Their problem will be stopping us from doing it!”

Green Bay went on to win their second consecutive Super Bowl 33-14.

There have been a few other teams and players in the history of the NFL that were so motivated that they were practically unstoppable no matter how hard an opposing team tried within the rules of the game.

The most recent memorable example that comes to mind involved “Refrigerator Perry” who played for the Bears during Super Bowl XX. Perry, a 6’2” 382 lb. defensive lineman, was put into the offensive backfield on the goal line against the Patriot’s defense.

It seemed pretty clear to everybody what the Bears were up to.

But coach Mike Ditka opted for an additional twist.

Perry’s first attempt to score was stopped short of the goal line when he got nailed for a one yard loss while attempting to throw his first NFL pass on a halfback option play.

Chicago lined up again in same formation. Ditka decided to abandon deception and see what would happen when an irresistible force met some immovable defensive objects.

The result?

New England was unable to stop The Fridge from scoring even though they knew he was coming.

That kind of football doesn't work as well today.

The post-parity, limited-contact NFL

 NFL rule changes have forced modern coaches to embrace what Vince Lombardi once disdained when he said:

“Football is two things. It's blocking and tackling. I don't care anything about formations or new offenses or tricks on defense. You block and tackle better than the team you're playing, you win.”

Winning teams today still have to block and tackle well.

But because of rule changes and that fact that today’s NFL players, especially defensive players, are generally much faster, stronger and smarter than they were in the Lombardi era, coaches rely more on clever, innovative formations to put points on the board.

Winning coaches must be adept at creating mismatches and keeping their opponents off-balance. This is especially true on offense, despite the fact that today’s rules clearly give offenses a distinct advantage over defenses.

When opposing teams know when you’re going to run a particular type of play, their odds of stopping it increase dramatically. When they know who’s going to get the ball during that play, their odds of preventing a successful offensive play increase even more.

The Lions don’t have the talent that the 1967 Packers or 1985 Bears had, nor do they play under the same set of rules Lombardi and Ditka did. On the other hand, neither do today’s Packers and Bears.

However, Detroit does have enough talent now, even when some key players are injured, to be competitive in every match-up if we do not run a conservative, predictable offense and do play aggressive defense with the talent we have on hand.

The risk/reward factor is clear. If the Lions gamble on both sides of the ball, we could continue to lose games by an even larger margin than we have so far this season. Worst case scenario, we end up picking near the top of the draft again next April.  

Taking more calculated risks could also result in more wins this season than anybody expects and would also make games more exciting for fans, many of whom believe that if we’re going to lose anyway, we might as well make the games interesting.

After all, whether you lose by one point or fourteen points, a loss is still a loss

The bad old days

Looking back, it’s easy to identify one common strategic error that almost every Lions coach seems to have made since George Wilson coached Detroit to a 59-14 victory over Cleveland to capture the Lions last NFL Championship in 1957: whenever the Lions managed to gain the lead in a game, they tended to sit on it and play conservative football.

The record indicates that more often or not, these were poor decisions that cost the Lions dearly, especially during the final half of so many games.

Fans are not eager to see more of the same old thing.

Restoring the roar

Win or lose, this fan would prefer to see the Lions put the pedal to the metal from the initial kick-off until the clock runs out in the fourth quarter. No Detroit leading margin can ever be wide enough for me.

Even if we end up losing, fans can at least be proud of a ramblin', gamblin’ team that leaves everything they’ve got out on the field and uses every trick in the book in order to try to win a game, whether it involves unorthodox offensive formations or unpredictable defensive stunts and coverages.

Over fifty years removed from our last NFL Championship, however, we fans really loathe losing as a result of overly cautious, unimaginative coaching decisions. Detroiters are not timid by nature and we don’t want our coaches to be timid either.

If Vince Lombardi were around today, he would no doubt remind Jim Schwartz that “The measure of who we are is what we do with what we have,” not what we’d do if we only had more talent on the team.

Football is a game. It’s supposed to be fun for coaches, players and fans. Of course it’s always a lot more fun when you win.

So let ‘er rip Jim. If we’re going to lose, let’s at least have some fun doing it.

Ironically, playing with that kind of attitude might actually be the only way to salvage this season and end up with more wins than we did last year.