You could tell, right from the first week of the preseason, that this would be a different kind of year for the Detroit Lions.
While most NFL teams were sleepwalking, trying to get a handle on their new players and new wrinkles to their schemes, Matthew Stafford and Calvin Johnson were operating at full speed. This offensive pair had barely spent any field time together over the previous two years, thanks to a combination of horrific injuries that might have threatened Stafford’s career. In August 2011, they looked determined to make up for lost time.
The 2010 Lions galvanized an identity under new head coach Jim Schwartz, built on big bully Ndamukong Suh and Schwartz’s aggressive upfield pass rush scheme. That identity was: “We’re going to take the fight to you.” If that meant playing the villain, so be it. When your nickname is “Megatron,” you aren’t worried about being a good guy.
By the time the Lions got to 5-0 and ready for their showdown with Jim Harbaugh’s upstart 49ers (another team tasting the glory for the first time), they had become a force to be reckoned with. But there was still concern that they might slide back, that something would go wrong and the “same old Lions” would find a way to kneecap their season.
Credit Schwartz for not letting that happen.
The coach had started a snowball effect by giving Suh and company free rein to play as close to (or over) the line of acceptable conduct, and realized that he had to pull them back. Suh’s infamous Thanksgiving Day “stomp” (really more of a jitterbug if you ask me) was the turning point.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZXDmCVSnn1U?wmode=Opaque
At that point, they had lost four of their last six games, and the New Orleans Saints stood ready to make it five of seven, to drop the Lions’ record to 7-5. It was gut-check time, and Stafford turned to Calvin Johnson to help steady the offense. Stafford targeted Johnson 39 times in their last four regular season games, and got two 200-yard receiving days and three big wins to propel the team into the playoffs.
Stafford and Johnson lit up the field again versus the Saints, holding a lead well into the third quarter before Drew Brees went into NBA Jams “He’s On Fire” mode, wrecking the Lions’ secondary and the scoreboard in a flurry of game-ending points. There’s no shame in losing to the Saints in New Orleans, but there is a resolve to not let it happen again.
When Jim Schwartz had a chance to look back on the season, he called it “an important step,” reports Tim Twentyman of DetroitLions.com (emphasis mine):
Not good. Not respectable. Important. There probably isn’t a better way to describe it, really.
Important not just in the results — their first ten-win season and first playoff trip in more than a decade — but in the way the team built an identity, and won on that identity. They didn’t have to stray from what they believe in, didn’t have to sacrifice or sell out to make it as far as they did. They have reason to believe in what they’re doing, and that they can keep taking steps forward.
For a team exiting the playoffs early, that’s as good of a consolation as you can ask for.
