–16.
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It was the worst season an NFL team had ever played—and I didn’t miss a single snap. Every Sunday that fall, during my last semester at Michigan State University, I watched, yelled, seethed, prayed, and ultimately witnessed the Lions come up short. A few minutes later, as predictable as a late-game turnover, the phone would ring. My dad wanted to check on me. We would commiserate for a little while, then talk about other things. Every conversation ended the same way. “We’ll win the next one,” he would say.
image of tim alberta and his father
The author and his father during a 2001 visit to the Pro Football Hall of Fame (Courtesy of Tim Alberta).
By then I was old enough to realize something: Dad didn’t actually believe we’d win the next one. He wasn’t predicting a breakthrough victory. He was teaching me how to handle defeat; he was urging me not to give up hope. He was assuring me that, no matter what, we’d talk again the following Sunday.
A few summers ago, the day after Dad died, I stood outside a funeral home with my brother Brian. Our father’s passing had been sudden and shocking; both of us were in a daze. After standing there in silence for a while, my brother let out a sigh. “Man,” he said, “Pop never got to see the Lions win.”
Brian was right: For all those decades of fanhood, for all those Sunday-evening pep talks, for all those life lessons drawn from watching his team lose, Dad had never been rewarded with a real winner.
I thought about that when I moved my own family back to Michigan shortly after the funeral. I thought about it when I bought season tickets. I thought about it last summer, when my wife and I took our son Lewis to his very first Lions game. He was almost 7 years old—the age I’d been when my heart was broken that night against the Packers. This was just a preseason game, but it delivered thrill after thrill. The Lions pulled away late; the home stadium, now Ford Field in downtown Detroit, pulsated with cheers. Lewis looked euphoric.
And then a familiar turn of events. The Lions, unforced, fumbled the ball away. The Atlanta Falcons, on a fourth down with 90 seconds remaining, scored a miraculous touchdown. The stadium fell into a hush. Lewis looked up at me. “What just happened?” he asked, his voice quivering. “Did we lose?”
On the car ride home, after we’d pacified Lewis with candy and a stuffed mascot from the stadium, my wife turned to me. Her tone was serious. As a practicing child therapist—and as the wife of a die-hard Lions fan—she knew what emotional trauma looked like. She was worried about our son.
“Are you sure,” she asked me, “that you want to do this to him?”
Ihad never considered it optional. The Lions were in my DNA. Some of my earliest, most vivid memories—formed at no older than age 3—are of my dad and older brothers erupting with screams inside our cramped living room, often frightening me to tears. I would peek in and find them whooping and high-fiving around the small television set, almost always in response to some laws-of-physics-defying maneuver and subsequent touchdown sprint by Barry Sanders. Dad hadn’t grown up a big football fan. But the year we moved to Michigan was the same year the Lions drafted Sanders; before long he and my brothers were hooked, and eventually I was too. Sundays became sacrosanct: Dad preached at our church in the morning, then raced home to meet us for the afternoon kickoff. We scampered outside afterward to re-create the action, pretending to be our favorite players, then came in for dinner and rehashed the results. I can scarcely remember feeling so content.
Of course that fandom would be passed down to my three sons. A framed photo of Sanders had hung over the crib in our kids’ nursery; the walls of their room were painted Honolulu Blue, the singular shade of Detroit’s home uniform. My boys would grow up obsessing over every draft pick, every free-agent acquisition, every coaching change, just like I had. We would watch the games together when they were young, and once they ventured out into the world, we would talk on Sunday evenings.
image of tim and his friends at a football game
The author and his friends at MetLife Stadium in 2014 for “The Mane Event” (Courtesy of Tim Alberta).
My wife knew what she’d signed up for. Back when we started dating, I had to explain to her the moral prerequisite of “The Mane Event,” an annual road-trip extravaganza with three of my closest childhood friends, in which we drained our meager bank accounts to watch the Lions play (and almost always lose) an away game. When my wife and I got married, the place cards for the reception were refashioned Lions tickets. The next day, for our honeymoon, we hosted a massive tailgate outside Ford Field. (In fairness, we lacked the funds to go anywhere else.) She was a great sport about it, wearing a veil to match her Ndamukong Suh jersey, proving that I married the most amazing woman in the world.
Over the years, however, her patience waned. The night Lewis was born, I was glued to the NFL draft inside the delivery room, a distraction that for some reason she found irksome. Minutes after Lewis emerged, I carried him over to the television, swaddled in blankets, and together we watched the Lions select Taylor Decker, an offensive tackle from Ohio State University. It was a polarizing pick: We don’t like Buckeyes much in Michigan, and plus, the Lions desperately needed talent on the defensive side of the ball. I cradled my newborn in one hand and traded angry texts with friends and family in the other, baptizing Lewis into a life he never asked for.
Some seven years later, after that preseason loss to the Falcons, I wrestled with my wife’s question. Rooting for the Lions had given me some wonderful memories, but also some punishing ones. This wasn’t merely about picking a favorite team for my children; this was about passing down a painful existence. Every team wins some games and loses others, but not every team is a national punch line and annual bottom-dweller. Was it really fair, I wondered, to force that on someone?
I decided to back off. If Lewis and his brothers were to become fans, it wouldn’t be their dad’s dictate. They needed to choose the Lions on their own. Frankly, I didn’t see that happening anytime soon. The regime that took over in 2021—head coach Dan Campbell and general manager Brad Holmes—had inherited the worst roster in the league. In their first season, they’d won just three games. In 2022, after my paternal moment of clarity, the team started the year by losing six of its first seven games. At this rate, I figured, it would be easy to abstain from pushing Detroit football on my boys.
But then the strangest thing happened: The Lions started winning.
The offense had shown signs of being explosive; now, midway through the season, it was unstoppable, soaring toward the top of the league leaderboard in yards and points per game. The defense had been dreadful; now it was scrappy, tenacious, improving every week. Campbell, the Hercules-size coach who’d played 10 years in the league as a tight end, had splashed a new, one-word team motto—GRIT—all across the Lions facility, even printing it on hats and shirts for the players to wear. Some fans viewed this as a token rebranding effort. But as the season progressed, our franchise transformed into something unrecognizable. These Lions didn’t give an inch to their opponents. They were mentally tough; they played with swagger, expecting to dominate every time they took the field. Detroit became the most dangerous team in football, winning seven of its last nine games and somehow, despite the awful start, sneaking into playoff contention. It would all come down to the season finale, a prime-time game in Green Bay against the Packers.
I had held firm on my promise not to indoctrinate the boys. But I couldn’t contain my own exhilaration: After booking our tickets for Sunday night, January 8, 2023, at fabled Lambeau Field, my “Mane Event” crew traveled north.
The Packers had owned this rivalry my entire life. First it was Favre, the Hall of Fame quarterback, who had killed us; then it was his successor, Aaron Rodgers, a future Hall of Famer himself. During one stretch, Detroit lost 24 consecutive games in Green Bay, the longest road losing streak in NFL history. Getting beaten was bad enough. Worse still was the “Same Old Lions” narrative we couldn’t seem to escape, owing to legendary choke jobs and unjust endings: the “completing the process” non-catch in Chicago, the 10-second runoff against Atlanta, the picked-up pass-interference flag in Dallas. And no team in the NFL seemed to benefit from our curse quite like the Packers.
Minutes before kickoff in Green Bay, a third playoff contender, the Seattle Seahawks, won their game following several atrocious fourth-quarter calls, eliminating the Lions from playoff contention but keeping Green Bay alive. All the Packers had to do was win, on their home field, to get in. The champagne bottles began popping around us at Lambeau. The Lions, most people assumed, would mail it in.
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But they didn’t. In the gutsiest performance I’d ever seen from my team, Detroit smacked Green Bay around inside its own house. Despite having nothing to play for but pride—and the chance to keep their nemesis out of the postseason—the Lions hounded Rodgers all night, sacking him twice and sealing his career in Green Bay with an interception on his final drive. As the Packers faithful emptied out of the stadium, my friends and I joined thousands of Lions fans in rushing toward the lower bowl, forming a ring of Honolulu Blue around the field, dancing and singing and hugging strangers in the snow. It was the best moment of my life as a Lions fan.
Riding the momentum from their late-season surge, the Lions became a league darling headed into the 2023 campaign. Several top free agents signed on to play for Campbell. National pundits picked Detroit to win the NFC North—something we have yet to do since the NFL realigned its divisions 20 years ago. Oddsmakers in Las Vegas took more bets on the Lions to make the Super Bowl than they did on any other team in the conference.
This was no longer some cute, try-hard Cinderella story. When the NFL released its 2023 schedule, the opening game of the season—Thursday, September 7, in prime time, all the buildup and all the eyeballs—featured the Kansas City Chiefs, the defending Super Bowl champions, playing at home. Their opponent: the Detroit Lions.
On the first day of training camp this July, Campbell told reporters that the “hype train” surrounding his team was “out of control.” But it wasn’t the hype that scared me. It was something else—a feeling I couldn’t make sense of. With some trepidation, I decided to check out training camp myself.
Barry Sanders doesn’t have the moves he once did. The immortal running back, whose jukes and spins and stop-and-start cuts left a generation of linebackers searching for their jockstrap, couldn’t shake the mob of people seeking an audience. It was a sweltering August afternoon and Sanders, now 55 years old, had dropped in on Lions headquarters in Allen Park. The Lions were hosting the New York Giants for a joint scrimmage ahead of their preseason game later in the week, and a crowd of several thousand fans swarmed the practice facility. When word got around that Sanders was here, everyone—players and coaches from both teams—lined up, pointing and whispering like little kids, waiting to shake his hand. By the time Sanders got to me, under a shaded pavilion next to giant metal tubs filled with ice, he looked exhausted.
Detroit Lions Barry Sanders (20) in action vs Green Bay Packers, Milwaukee, WI 11/21/1993
Barry Sanders playing against the Green Bay Packers in 1993 (John Biever / Sports Illustrated / Getty).
Nothing was forcing Sanders to be here—no sponsorship agreement, no contractual obligation with the club. He was happy to visit with everyone, to sign autographs and snap selfies. But really, he’d come to watch football. He’d come to see his team.
Given the circumstances of his departure years earlier—the retirement letter he faxed into a newspaper, the buzz around his feud with the organization, the distance he kept in the aftermath—one might assume that he’d want nothing to do with the Lions. It’s hard to overstate just how devastating his retirement was to the franchise. Every hard-core Lions fan can remember where they were when they found out. I was inside a Denny’s, eating eggs with my dad, when a guy sprinted inside, having just heard the breaking news over the car radio. “Barry’s retiring! Barry’s retiring!” he cried. We sat there in disbelief.
Sanders heard these sob stories in the years that followed. But it wasn’t until his children reached a certain age that he truly understood the emotion behind them. He had made southeast Michigan his home, putting down roots and raising his kids there. He had never pressured them to watch any particular sport, cheer for any particular club. Yet they became football fans. They became Lions fans. And so did he. The Hall of Famer could no longer help himself: Every Sunday in the Sanders house now centered on the team he’d left behind. He saw his sons crushed in all the familiar ways; he watched them mourn the shocking retirement of another Lions superstar, wide receiver Calvin Johnson, bringing the experience full circle. Yet all the while, Sanders and his family continued to cheer.
“It’s something that I grapple with, and it’s just hard to explain,” Sanders told me. “This team matters to us. You know what I mean?”
I asked whether he and his sons had ever considered switching allegiances. Sanders cocked his head to the side, rumpling his brow.
“No. No, no, no,” he said. “These people who have been loyal, people who have been there every step of the way—that’s the beauty of the game, I think. There are no guarantees. But they still believe.”
Sometimes that beauty gives way to torment. On the far end of the practice field, a man with a fancy job title—special assistant to president/CEO and chairperson—stalked the sideline with a notepad in his right hand. Most front-office types wear suits and ties. But this man was dressed in all black: workout pants, hooded sweatshirt, 50-pound weighted vest, all of it made more conspicuous by the mid-80s heat. It was Chris Spielman.
The anchor of Detroit’s defense in the 1990s, Spielman played brief stints in Buffalo and Cleveland before retiring because of injuries. He went into the broadcast booth and spent the next two decades providing color commentary for college and NFL games. He was happy, making a fine living, freed from the weekly stresses of a win-loss record. And then the call came. It was late 2020, and the Lions were coming off their third consecutive last-place finish. The team’s owner, Sheila Ford Hamp—great-granddaughter of Henry Ford and daughter of William Clay Ford Sr., who’d purchased the franchise outright in 1964—told Spielman the Lions needed a culture change. She was searching for a new coach and general manager, but first she needed a football consigliere, someone who could help guide those hires, who could connect the front office to the locker room to the X’s and O’s on the field. His mind was made up before she’d finished the pitch.
“Loyalty to this organization was probably the only thing that could have drawn me out of the booth,” Spielman told me.
There was more to it than loyalty, though. As we spoke, and he drifted back to his playing days in Detroit, I sensed a lack of peace about the man. He talked about “letting down the fan base.” He said the losses—especially to Green Bay in the playoffs—“always haunt me.” At one point, he gazed off in the distance, choking back emotion as he muttered, “My career was a failure.”
Professional athletes are sometimes thought to be indifferent to the plight of fans—millionaire mercenaries who collect a paycheck and move on to a new city for an even bigger one. Yet here was Spielman, a god of the gridiron—the first high-school player ever to appear on a Wheaties box; a two-time All American in college; a four-time Pro Bowler in the NFL—still distraught, 30 years later, about what could have been. And it wasn’t simply because he never won. It was because he never won here.
“I have so much respect for the folks who’ve hung in there. I felt I owed them something,” Spielman said of his decision to return to Detroit. He called it “unfinished business.”
Today the budding star of the Lions defense is Aidan Hutchinson, a second-year pass rusher who led all rookies in sacks last season and looks poised to become one of the league’s premier defensive players. He’s a local kid, born and raised in Plymouth, drafted out of the University of Michigan. He calls it “divine timing” that the Lions lost 13 games the season before he turned pro, allowing them to snag him with the No. 2 overall selection in last year’s draft.
There is just one hitch in Hutchinson’s homecoming story: He didn’t root for the Lions as a kid.
“I mean, it was hard to be a Lions fan growing up,” the 23-year-old told me after practice one day, a sheepish grin spreading across his face. “The boys were always struggling.”
Hutchinson knows that the Lions are something of a religion in southeast Michigan. His friends loved them. He grew up 20 minutes from team headquarters. And yet, he chose to cheer for the New England Patriots—the winningest franchise in the modern history of the NFL.
“My dad was never a big Lions fan. That’s where I didn’t get it,” Hutchinson said. “He grew up in Texas; he was always a Houston Oilers fan.” When that franchise moved to Nashville in the late 1990s, the elder Hutchinson—who starred at the University of Michigan himself, then stayed in the Detroit suburbs to raise his family—became a pigskin itinerant. He followed everyone, and although he rarely missed a Lions game, he couldn’t bring himself to invest in the home team. By the time Aidan was old enough to watch alongside him, a fellow Michigan alumnus named Tom Brady was establishing a dynasty in New England. And so the Hutchinsons became Patriots fans, reveling in Super Bowls from afar as their neighbors here hankered for a mere playoff win.
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I asked Aidan, now that he’s a Lion, if he felt badly about not supporting his home team sooner.
“Not necessarily,” Hutchinson replied, fighting a smirk. “I’m happy I’m on the team now.”
The implication was obvious enough. Nothing was lost by ignoring the Lions all those years—the blooper-reel lowlights and the humiliating headlines—because in sports, winning is what makes fanhood worthwhile.
Lots of people believe that. I used to question my own sanity, wondering why I subjected myself to such assured misery Sunday after Sunday, season after season, decade after decade. More than once I fantasized about rounding up my memorabilia—the jerseys and autographs, the helmets and framed photos, the old programs and saved ticket stubs—then dousing it in gasoline and setting it ablaze, escaping this abusive relationship once and for all.
Why didn’t I?
For the longest time, I told myself it was because I’m cursed. I told myself that the moment I walked away from the Lions, they would start winning and winning big, driving me to an entirely different level of madness.
But that’s not the real explanation. Embedded in the psyche of a sports fan is a belief
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