[Author’s Note: So this is it. The End. The final preview before the NFL meat grinder spins up to turn convert the bodies of healthy(ish) young men into Entertainment. Après moi le déluge de merde. Get hype.]

Wyandotte.

Shit.

I’m only in Wyandotte.

Every time, I think I’m going to wake up back in Midtown….

Everyone gets what everyone wants.

I wanted another Team Preview. And for my sins, they gave me one.

As an initial matter, I would like to apologize. It turns out that despite copious evidence to the contrary, I am not Infallible. My prediction last year was that the Lions would finish 7-9. Shamefully, they finished 6-10, and that only by virtue of Aaron Rodgers getting his eggs scrambled early in the Week 17 game. Turns out when you drop games to the Jests and 49ers, you’re gonna have a tough time getting within shouting distance of respectability. Who knew?

But enough about my not-quite-inability-to-be-wrong. I’ve upgraded my oracle bones to “alpaca knuckles,” polished my scrying glass and had the finest artisan chicken entrails flown in from Brooklyn, so my predictions will heretofore be On Point. So without further ado:

Vanilla Ice

Ric Flair

Sean Hannity

Chris Penn

2019 Detroit Lions

*Opens Envelope*

“What are four 5-11 garbage fires?”

No, friends, it’s not going to be a happy time in Pre-Delta City this year. Last year sucked, and the Mystic Spirits from Beyond indicate that this year’s reshuffle ain’t going to cut it.

Matt Patricia is still an idiot teenager who has lucked into his first date with a girl and has no clue what the hell he’s doing, going for the hand on the thigh before the previews have finished. He’s patterned his game on watching his divorced dad Bill Belichick pick up Applebee’s waitresses, aping his moves without any understanding. He knows he’s supposed to be Grouchy With The Press so they know who’s boss, but he decides to scold a reporter for his posture while looking like a guy Jim Tomsula kicked out of the Hobo Brotherhood because his poor personal hygiene was upsetting Urine-Can Willie. He knows he’s supposed to make the team Gritty, so he forces them to practice in the snow in November, despite the next four games being indoors (in one case in Arizona). He then gets defensive about how fucking stupid that is and gives a rambling, incoherent statement pretending it was for player safety (since practicing inside on turf “affects joints [and] swelling”) and that it helps the team work on unspecified “fundamentals.” Pro tip, Matt: when you end a nonsensical explanatory statement of your conduct with the phrase “which is true,” it just emphasizes how utterly full of shit you are and what little respect you hold for the basic intelligence of your listener. The entirety of the season is going to be Matt Patricia metaphorically fumbling around struggling to unhook Lady Victory’s bra, insisting that he’s almost got it while she gets bored and ponders if she should tell him its a frontsie.

Yes, another year of what I suppose we must consider Matthew Stafford’s “prime” pissed away. He’s a fine quarterback at this stage of his career- in an ideal NFL he would be the league average, a high-end journeyman who gives his team a chance to win but is not counted on for heroics. Unfortunately, this is the Actual NFL, where competent quarterback play is at such a premium that Stafford is actually the highest paid player in the league this year under the arcane rules of Salary Cap Economics. That’s right, over 15% of the Lions’ cap space is going to Stafford this year, a number rivaled only by Kirk Cousins in terms of both size and futility. $3 million more this year than #3, Aaron Rodgers.  It’s not that the number itself is particularly important- Detroit has over $18 million in cap space according to Spotrac, so he’s not keeping them from picking up free agents- but it points to a mismatch between the performance that might reasonably expected from the dude with the biggest financial footprint in the league and the reality that Stafford is not one of the 8 or so quarterbacks who can actually Make Something Happen with an otherwise middling team.  While he’ll likely put up some numbers, as he will be playing from behind a significant portion of the season, he’s simply not good enough to support the emphasis placed on him by the team’s structure.

Also, Matthew Stafford’s wife- mother of their three young children and by most accounts a really nice lady- had a successful operation to remove a brain tumor in the off-season. Whatever luck Matt had coming to him this year has already been spent, and spent well.

The biggest change for the Lions is at the coordinator level. First against the wall after the season was Guy-Whose-Name-I-Love Jim Bob Cooter. Cooter was summarily dismissed after the offense gained a running game and lost all effectiveness. Top men from CERN and the Max Plank Institute are currently investigating the phenomenon in case it reveals other scenarios previously thought impossible under the Standard Model of particle physics.

Patricia chose to replace Dude Who Didn’t Know What To Do With A Successful Running Game

with Dude Who Famously Forgot What To Do With A Successful Running Game Darrell Bevell.

Trivia Note: as a young man, Bevell did his Mormon mission trip to…Cleveland.  Hate to break it to you Darrell, but trying to gain converts in Cleveland is as futile as passing the ball on 2nd-and-Goal from the 1 yard line– everyone who’s been there more than six months is a broken, soulless husk.

I understand the hire, but frankly it’s not going to work. Bevell tries to suit his offense to personnel, but the reality is that he’s generally only successful when he’s had a top-of-his-game star running back  (Adrian Peterson in Minnesota and Marshawn Lynch in Seattle) where he can capitalize on that threat to get a decent play-action passing game going.  This makes some sense with Stafford, who is sometimes pretty good off play-action. However, Kerryon Johnson is not the back to kerry this off. /ducks. He looked good in three games, decent in two more, crap in five and injured in six. In a league where rookie running backs routinely show their best stuff before injury and game film catch up with them, this does not bode well. Nor is free agent pickup CJ Anderson going to strike fear into the hearts of an opposing defensive coordinator- he was pretty good coming off the couch to sub for Todd Gurley, but his success both for the Rams and the Broncos was predicated on having an offensive line that could get Stephen Hawking 4 yards per carry.

The Lions do not have that line. The good news is that famed Staten Island plumber-turned-offensive-lineman Frank Ragnow avoided what looked to have been serious injury in meaningless preseason action, which means that the offensive line projects to be largely the same as last year. The bad news is that the offensive line projects to be largely the same as last year. The center has moved to right guard, the left guard has move to center, and the team still has no idea who is starting at left guard five days before the season opener. They signed one veteran offensive lineman (Oday Aboushi for 1 year and $2 million) and drafted no one. Apparently Patricia and general manager Bob Quinn are pinning their hopes on last year’s half-adequate cast and three undrafted free agents. They have not understood the Patriots Formula: you can only get away with a rotating cast of no-name offensive linemen if they are allowed to shamelessly hold and the quarterback knows the defensive signals ahead of time. Detroit has neither of these advantages.

Catching passes is going to be a bit of an adventure this year. Kenny “Doc” Golladay is The Man Now, Dog after WR1 Golden Tate was traded to Philadelphia midseason last year for a third-round pick. Normally this would be cause for hope, because Golladay has real talent. However, the passing game went to shit last year immediately after Tate was dealt, suggesting that Golladay (who caught 58.8% of passes allegedly thrown his way, ranking 156th out of 202 qualified players) may not be up to the job. Marvin Jones continues to be My Favorite Marvin, but will end up getting Shot in the Face halfway through the season. They picked up Danny Amendola, presumably in a cargo-cult attempt to instill the Patriot Way.  An increasingly frazzled and desperate Matt Patricia will take this to its logical extreme at the Week 5 bye, at which time all players will be forced to eat a portion of Amendola’s dismembered corpse to absorb his Grittiness. Unfortunately, this will lead to widespread sickness due to the corpse being three weeks old by that point.   First round pick TJ Hockenson might be a good second-year player in 2020, but there’s a reason why first-year tight ends tend to struggle and he’s currently behind famed Patriots-Officiating Victim Jesse James on the depth chart. All in all, this has a similar look to most post-Megatron Detroit casts of receivers- some talent, but largely trying to good-enough through it.

The defense…well, the defense was strikingly average last year in most respects. Decent on yardage against both the run and the pass, middle of the pack on scoring. The one place the Lions were abysmal was turnovers.

They were second-to-last in the league after the 49ers.  Three individual players on other teams had as many interceptions as the entire Lions team. That simply does not fly in Today’s NFL.

Ziggy Ansah is gone, as my Dire Prophecy foretold:

“I assume Ansah will have one or more important ligaments torn to shreds while playing on the franchise tag, because the Blood Gods of Lake Huron will have their sacrifice, oh yes.” 

He has been replaced with injured Patriots castoff Trey Flowers, who will have the team’s second-highest cap hit next year before he plays a down. Glover Quin was released and retired. The secondary is now Pro Bowler (and sole remaining Guy-Whose-Name-I-Love) Darius Slay, plus some Random Madden Generated Players. On the upside. A’Shawn/Da’Shawn is still rocking out, except that Da’Shawn has an injured elbow. The Lions obtained Damon “Snacks” Harrison from the lowly Giants for a 5th Round pick. It’ll be an interesting tug-of-war between Primal Forces of the Universe: LOLGiants versus LionsCurse. A man named Snacks will always have my support to succeed, but The Spirits are not hopeful.

PREDICTION:

5-11, last in the NFC North, Matt Patricia fired after Week 15 after he calls Martha Ford a slut.