Week 5: Chicago at Detroit

Maybe it was all a ruse. It’s vanishingly slim, but there’s a chance that the unfailingly undistinguished, implausibly lengthy, blessedly just-ended seven-season tenure of Matt Millen as the general manager of the Detroit Lions was some sort of strategic trick on the part of the Ford family. The conspiracy theory goes like this: the Fords kept Millen and his stern mustache at the helm of the football team they own to deflect criticism from their perpetually failing, just-as-poorly run automotive side-business. If that were the case, it would be brilliant: Ford is flailing into the hybrid-car revolution by eschewing plug-ins and proposing a car that runs entirely on ethanol – that is, on corn; that is, on a subsidy-dependant substance that’s somehow less efficient than good old mined-by-loathsome-authoritarian-ghouls gasoline? Uh oh, better have Millen draw fire by ditching the Lions’ best defenders as part of his plan to bring in “high character” guys. Ford requires a nine-figure government bailout again? Okay, don’t panic, just have Millen pick three more receivers on the first day of the draft. Whew, crisis averted.

It’s probably too brilliant for the Fords, honestly. (To reiterate: just fire a bunch of corn in there and go!) But the more ostensibly reasonable explanations for the Matt Millen Experience are, if anything, even less reasonable. Lions fans are well rid of him, of course – all those “Fire Millen” rallies and dour effigy funerals and the baleful countenances in the stands of the weirdly under-lit Ford Field suggest they already know this. The sadly understaffed and weirdly incomplete team those fans will be stuck with for the rest of the year, though, will be the mediocre-announcer-turned-terrible-GM’s last sad prank on the already pretty-sad-thanks city of Detroit. The bigger, sadder joke, of course, would be the Fords in general, who seem to be doing their best to replicate the end-stage, increasingly chromosomally deficient Spanish Hapsburg Empire both on the automotive and football sides of their business.

In contrast to the Ford’s floundering franchise, the Bears stand out as a beacon of efficiency and respectability. You know, like Mazda, or some other middling non-Ford car company. That contrast does the Bears more good than it ought, though: they are, at this point, a disciplined and fairly well-coached team that’s stratified into a dull and generally talent-deficient offense that’s almost balanced out by a still-strong, veteran defense. That defense is just good enough to balance out the offense in games against teams with badly malfunctioning offenses or inept defenses.

In Detroit, Chicago will face a team that features both. And yet, after all this time spent running down the Lions and their robustly wrongheaded former GM, we’re going to do something kind of stupid. Yes – and spoiler alert to those who never read the final paragraphs and last line of these things – we’re going to pick the Lions to win this one.

Admittedly, it is not likely to happen. But we’ve already been wrong an incredible amount this season, and it doesn’t really sting anymore. We write this knowing that the Lions have been down 21-0 in two of their three games so far this season (they were down 21-3 against Green Bay in Week 3). Yes, the currently injured (a sprained knee, instead of the usual bruised brain) Jon Kitna is still their quarterback and the defense could give up six points on any passing play. Yes.

Yes, the Lions have shown absolutely nothing thus far to indicate that they will ever win. We don’t really know where the bottom for the Lions D is yet: if they let Kyle Orton throw for 350 yards and 4 touchdowns here, it could be very far down indeed. But if the Lions defense can hold its own against the Bears’ uninspiring offense, we might get to see how the Lions talent-rich offense performs when it’s not trailing by three scores. Against a Bears pass defense that has given up a ton of yards this year and struggled to sack quarterbacks, the answer could be surprisingly positive.

The possibility of the Fords’ team earning a home win against a middling division rival is not as ridiculous as, say, firing a corn cob into your gas tank and expecting it to solve global warming or save a mismanaged business enterprise. But if the Lions win this one without Millen’s fuming imbecility to blame, the Ford Flex-Fuel line will have no cover at all. Lions, let’s do this one for America.

LIONS BY 2