You want to be happy for Matthew Stafford? Then be happy for Matthew Stafford.
You want to begrudge Matthew Stafford? Then begrudge Matthew Stafford.
You want to make fun of those who are thrilled for what Stafford just accomplished? Then do it from a corner. It’s safer there, and you won’t have to worry about tripping over those dancing after Stafford and the Los Angeles Rams won the Super Bowl on Sunday. Nor will you have to worry about attending the parade.
Wait, did the Detroit Lions win the Super Bowl?
I can’t tell. It’s all a bit surreal, even discombobulating.
MITCH ALBOM: Matthew Stafford’s Super Bowl win looked like Lions game … until the end
How else to explain the “Detroit Rams” shirts and NBA star Devin Booker, who grew up in Grand Rapids, wearing Stafford’s Lions jersey at a PGA tournament in Arizona and the photoshopped meme of a banner hanging from the rafters of Ford Field that read “Our Old QB Won A Super Bowl, 2021-2022″?
How else to explain the tsunami of social media eruptions where Lions fans acted like Rams fans, recording themselves howling as Stafford led his team (your team?) on a game-winning drive with a few minutes to play?
Oh, there was skepticism, incredulity and even shame at these developments. There was even a bit of (mostly) good-natured poking at the sheer weirdness of it all.
Like when a former Free Press sportswriter, Joe Rexrode — now a columnist with the Athletic in Nashville — posted a shot of his 14-year-old son, Brennan, donning a Stafford jersey and a Lions knit cap as he got ready to watch the big game.
To which Rexrode affixed this introduction:
“How could a parent fail to this extent?”
Yeah, haha.
It was funny and captured the strange and weary combination required to be a Lions fan. A sensation thousands and thousands of folks around here — or anywhere Lions ex-pats live and carry this godforsaken franchise in their hearts — know achingly well.
A sensation Rexrode knows in his bones. A sensation he doesn’t want for his son, who lives and dies with the Lions, despite six years in Nashville.
The elder knows the pain that awaits his son. Pain he recalls vividly.
“(The Lions) ruined my 11th birthday,” Rexrode said.
They were in the divisional playoffs — imagine that! — and quarterback Gary Danielson threw five interceptions and somehow the Lions were still in a position to win but Eddie Murray missed a 44-yard field goal with five seconds left.
DAVE BIRKETT: Matthew Stafford got his ring, now Lions must focus on the future
It was New Year’s Eve. And when Murray missed, Rexrode threw himself across the room, tears spilling from his eyes, and knocked over some folding chairs.
It wasn’t until Barry Sanders walked away 16 years later that he finally told himself: “That’s it! I’m done!”
I’m not so sure he is, even if he protests otherwise. What if the Lions ever go on a Super Bowl run? What if he can no longer make fun of those who still believe? Like his son?
He can’t fathom that, of course. Who can?
But if they do?
“When you disavow yourself and decide to make fun of someone to hide the pain … well, if (the Lions winning big) ever happens? I would definitely feel good for those who’ve stuck with them through all this.”
Like a lot of you, he cringed at the “Detroit Rams” shirts and the mock banner celebrating the Super Bowl and the breathless and joyful support fellow Lions fans have shown Stafford the last month.
[ Rams’ Super Bowl 56 win gives Lions 32nd pick in NFL draft ]
Is that cringing a way of masking the pain?
“Yeah, maybe,” he said, chuckling.
Is it possible those who’ve treated Stafford’s run as if he were still quarterbacking the Lions aren’t afraid of that pain?
And that their embrace of that pain has finally helped show the rest of the world what it really means to love the Lions?
When Stafford joined the NFL Network’s postgame set on the field, one of the first questions he got was about the Detroit-centered lovefest thrown his way. Think about the craziness of that for a moment.
Here was a Super Bowl winning quarterback a half hour after the biggest win of his life taking questions about the fans — the fans! — of the team that traded him the year before.
Think about this as well: the question didn’t come from a local reporter familiar with the dark ache of loving this team. It came from a national analyst.
Maybe that’s a sign that the rest of the country is catching on. That the Michigan reaction to Stafford’s run was so counterintuitive to fandom that the Lions fans’ plight couldn’t help but get acknowledgment.
Call it a validation.
It’s a long time coming.
The Lions fanbase doesn’t have a moment of spectacular loss on a grand stage in the way that the Buffalo Bills fanbase does, or the Cleveland Browns fanbase does, or the Minnesota Vikings fanbase does. There is not poetic tragedy in three loss seasons.
Spectacular loss can lead to empathy. There is nothing spectacular — or memorable —about the way the Lions lose. The losses are forgettable but constant, like a cold, steady drizzle, year after year, decade after decade, unseen and mostly uninteresting. Where the Browns have “the fumble” and the Bills have “wide right” the Lions have … “0-16?”
Though they didn’t even have that for long. The Browns minimized the ignominious record with an 0-16 of their own in 2017. Besides, no one pays attention to 0-16 until the end, and even then it’s a sad footnote, forgotten by the rest of the football viewing public the next week when the playoffs begin.
All of this can make a fan desperate, which can make part of a fanbase react in ways we just witnessed, like temporarily adopting another team, which can make a different part of the fanbase recoil in horror.
It’s embarrassing, many opined. You’re denying your pain, many others retorted. Like Rexrode and his son, the emotional attachment to this uniquely exasperating franchise can express itself in contradictory ways.
Some wear the jersey of a former, would-be savior. Some mock those that wear those jerseys, even if that someone is a father poking at his idealistic son. A more charitable view might conclude that Rexrode is trying to protect his son from a life of unrequited love.
Perhaps.
Perhaps, though, Brennan, even at 14, already understands what he faces, and he’s just fine with that. Just as so many others are fine with their unconditional love, too. Because whether you were mortified with the love Stafford received or part of the romantics expressing that love, you know what it means to love and root for this team. w
The rest of the football world finally understands this a little now too.
Contact Shawn Windsor: 313-222-6487 or swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @shawnwindsor.