My neighbor Ray Kowalczyk called me at 11:42 last night, which is late for Ray, to inform me that the Detroit Lions had in fact not manifested their destiny. He said it exactly like that, in the specific tone Ray reserves for moments when the universe has confirmed something he suspected all along. Then he asked if I’d seen the final score. I had. Commanders 45, Lions 31, at Ford Field, in a game Detroit was supposed to win by the sheer accumulated weight of its own press clippings.
For three years now we have been told, mostly by people paid to tell us things, that Detroit was Different. They had a coach who bit kneecaps. They had a quarterback with a redemption arc you could set to acoustic guitar. They had a general manager who looked like he chopped wood for fun and a front office that leaked grit the way other franchises leak salary-cap problems. They had a Hard Knocks. They had a docuseries. They had a whole line of New Era caps with the old logo because the old logo was, apparently, emotionally load-bearing.
What they did not have, on Saturday night in the divisional round, was anybody who could tackle Jayden Daniels in the open field.
I will say this for the kid, and I don’t say it easily because I’ve spent the better part of my adult life watching rookie quarterbacks get eaten alive by the second weekend in January. Daniels is twenty-four years old and he plays the position like a man who has been paying his own electric bill for a while. He stood in the pocket. He threw on time. When the pocket collapsed he ran the way you’re supposed to run, which is toward the first-down marker and not toward a highlight. Coach DiMaggio used to say a quarterback’s job was to be the least interesting man on the field for sixty minutes, and Daniels was about as interesting as a glass of water, which in this case is the highest compliment I know how to pay.
Jared Goff, meanwhile, threw the football to the wrong-colored jerseys three separate times and fumbled for good measure. I don’t enjoy writing that. Goff is a professional and by all accounts a decent man who has done hard work to get where he is. But there is a thing that happens to quarterbacks when their entire city decides they are a symbol, and what happens is they stop being a quarterback and start being a symbol, and symbols are easier to sack than quarterbacks.
The kneecap-biting bit had an expiration date and nobody in Detroit read the label. It was funny in 2022. It was a little tired in 2023. By January of 2025 it was a t-shirt, and t-shirts don’t win playoff games. There is a specific kind of franchise that confuses locker-room culture with locker-room content, and the tell is always the same — the documentary crew gets there before the Lombardi Trophy does.
Coach DiMaggio, who I’ve mentioned in this column maybe four hundred times and will mention four hundred more, had a rule about this. He didn’t let reporters in the locker room until Thursday. His reasoning, which I am paraphrasing because he tended to season his reasoning with language you can’t print, was that a team that talks about itself becomes a team that listens to itself, and a team that listens to itself stops listening to the coach. I thought about Coach DiMaggio around the third interception.
The Commanders, for whatever it’s worth, showed up in the uniforms of a football team rather than the marketing materials of a lifestyle. Dan Quinn didn’t have a catchphrase. Nobody was biting anybody’s anything. They blocked well and tackled harder and ran a rookie quarterback around the yard like he’d been doing it for ten years, which in a sense he has, just at different addresses. There was no arc. There was no story. There was a game, and they won it.
I don’t want to be the guy who tells you the Lions lost because they believed their own content. Football is more complicated than that and also less complicated than that. They lost because Goff turned it over and the defense couldn’t get off the field on third down and Aidan Hutchinson wasn’t there because his leg is in pieces from October. Fine. All true. But somewhere underneath the Xs and Os is a thing I’ve watched happen to franchises for fifty years, which is that when the bit gets bigger than the ball, the ball tends to find somebody else’s hands.
Ray called back this morning, because Ray always calls back. He wanted to know if I thought the Lions window was closed. I told him windows in the NFL are closed until they’re open and open until they’re closed, and that anybody who tells you otherwise is selling a podcast. He grunted. Then he told me his grandson had ordered something called a “Grit Szn” hoodie off Instagram in November, which has now become, in Ray’s words, a forty-dollar dust rag.
Denise is bringing chili over for the late games. She says the recipe is from a podcast.