I’ve been thinking a lot about the kind of fight the Detroit Lions showed in Los Angeles and, for that matter, the fight they’ve shown all season.
But in L.A., something changed. The Lions went for broke and called three trick plays, each one of them successful and stunning, drawing gasps from many of the 70,000 people at SoFi Stadium who expected the Lions to roll over, instead of fighting back. They went from underdogs to junkyard dogs.
Even though they lost to the Rams, the Lions announced themselves to the NFL as a desperate team willing to do anything to win their first game. In that moment, the Lions might have become the NFL’s most dangerous team, one no team wants to face.
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It reminded me of a scene from “Spic-O-Rama,” John Leguizamo’s hilarious and brilliant 1993 one-man special on HBO. Playing a drunk, boorish father giving the toast at his son’s wedding, Leguizamo tells all the guests: “I’ll take everybody on. Everybody except you, Ophelia. I never fight with ugly people. They’ve got nothing to lose.”
Right now, without question, the Lions are the NFL’s ugliest, if for no other reason than their 0-7 record. And when they take the field on Sundays, you bet they have nothing to lose.
That, folks, makes them extremely dangerous. They should have beaten the 5-2 Baltimore Ravens. They should have beaten the Minnesota Vikings, winners of three of their past four games. They were beating the 6-1 Rams early and late and had them on the ropes for much of Sunday.
So the Lions will enter this week’s game against the 2-5 Philadelphia Eagles at Ford Field as the NFL’s only winless team — and likely its most desperate. Desperate for victory. Desperate to do whatever it needs to do to win a damn game. Desperate to win ugly.
“I think that I’m willing to do whatever it takes to get a win, within reason,” coach Dan Campbell said Wednesday.
That’s the surprising part in all this. Campbell, for all of his emotional bloodletting in his postgame press conferences, is proving to be calm and measured in the moment during games. He’s far from perfect — I think we all remember the Bears game — but he has also made some great calls, mostly seeing clearly through the fog of war on the sidelines.
If those three trick plays had not worked, I admit, I would have been tempted to call Campbell’s plan a gimmick. But they worked — because he knew they would.
“We really felt good about those plays,” he said Wednesday. “Like, those were calculated. We had a real good idea of the look would be there and really all three of them. Now, there is still a risk to it.”
Then Campbell said something that spoke volumes about why he trusted two fake punts and a first-quarter onside kick would work. He believed in his players.
“So when those guys do it and they execute in practice, it gives me all of the faith in the world like, ‘Oh, this is going to work,’ ” he said. “It’s like, ‘I don’t care what they put in there. This thing is going to work.’ Just because those guys, man, they start to feel it. They understand the looks. They know how to make it work.”
Compare the feel and trust Campbell has in his player to what Eagles coach Nick Sirianni said Wednesday. Philadelphia has lost five of its past six games and hasn’t been close in its past two losses (against Tampa Bay and Las Vegas), despite garbage-time scores that made those final scores look more respectable.
“There’s gotta be a message,” Sirianni told Philadelphia reporters, “that I have to keep everybody together and … sticking to what we really want to do. This is what I said to the team today.”
Then Sirianni launched into a tortured metaphor about making a flower grow.
“But it’s really important that the foundation is being built and the roots are growing out,” he said. “And the only way the roots grow out every single day, and it grows stronger, and they grow better, is if we all water. We all fertilize.”
I’m sure none of the Philadelphia radio stations had any fun with that.
The Lions and the Eagles are both struggling under rookie coaches. But it’s pretty clear each team is headed in a different direction. If the Lions don’t do anything out of character, and they’re able to avoid major mishaps, I have little doubt they’ll beat the Eagles. And handily.
I don’t know that there’s another NFL team that deserves to win this week more than the Lions. You have a young team riddled with injuries that’s responding well to its coach despite some awful luck in the final seconds of two losses.
I’ve said this before. To me, the Lions aren’t an 0-7 team because they don’t look, feel or act like one. Frankly, there isn’t much of a difference between 0-8 and 1-7 to me; it’s the same team. The players will work just as hard.
But I’ve known players and coaches long enough to understand that it does matter to them. Even just one win, finally. It validates their hard work. So I asked Campbell what that elusive first victory would mean to him and his team if it comes on Sunday.
“Everything,” he said. “That’s why we’re all doing this. Ultimately, it’s why you love it because it’s the — the same thing that makes this game so tough and hard is the same thing that just makes it unbelievably exciting and blissful, if you will, to get a win, because they are so hard to come by, and you have to earn them. You really do. It would mean everything.”
Then Campbell did something few football coaches ever do. And it was beautiful. He allowed himself to dream a little and look into the future, where his vision of victory might be realized going into next week’s bye.
“Any time it would be good,” he said of winning, “but I think just to — man, you end on a right note and we get those guys, get their bodies back a little bit and then you come back in, you almost feel like you’re starting over somewhat.
“Now, you’re continuing the progress you had. But now it’s a, ‘We’ve turned the corner here and now we’re ready to go. We got our first win under our belt.’ ”
I hope Lions fans show up for this game because I think they’re going to like what they see. Maybe it’ll be ugly. Maybe it’ll be pretty. And even if the Lions don’t win, I can’t imagine many people will say they’ve been disappointed by what they’ve seen halfway through this season.
Contact Carlos Monarrez at cmonarrez@freepress.com and follow him on Twitter @cmonarrez.