Week 6: Detroit at Minnesota

There seems to be some sort of very painful existential crisis going on inside Detroit head coach Rod Marinelli as the Lions season continues to seek bottom. Marinelli seems an admirable enough guy – as all articles even vaguely concerning him are legally obligated to mention, he’s a former Marine, and apparently a very committed teacher and coach – but he’s running up against a conflict that most everyone who works for a living runs up against, and it’s clearly tough for him.

The Lions’ coach is belatedly finding that a positive attitude and elbow grease alone aren’t enough to overcome a bad deal coming down from those a couple of pay-grades up. Anyone who’s felt the vague nausea inspired by the last couple months of economic news knows how this goes: at some point, what’s happening to us has all too little to do with us, and that feeling is terrible and terribly diminishing. Marinelli has probably been screwed over on his IRA by some bottle-service-abusing finance-sector d-bag, too (pretty much everyone who uses money has), but Marinelli’s unfair deal extends beyond that. And unlike most of us he doesn’t have to try to figure out what a “derivative” is to know why his best-laid plans have failed so spectacularly with the Lions this year.

Here’s a hint: he has a mustache and just got fired as Detroit’s GM. Here’s another: his name is Matt Millen, and after seven years of appalling and appallingly mustachioed incompetence, he assembled a defense so poor that an anonymous NFC scout quoted at ESPN suggested that there might be “two or three guys worth keeping” among the team’s current starting unit. The Lions coaches tried making changes during the bye week, then came back in Week 5 with a spectacularly ineffective no-huddle offense and allowed the Bears’ outrageously mediocre Kyle “Kyle Orton” Orton to pass for 335 yards. The Lions were down 31-0 at one point, marking the fourth straight game in which they’ve been down by at least three scores in the first half. Their first and second string quarterbacks both sustained injuries. Detroit’s highlights for the game were that RB Kevin Smith scored a touchdown and the field turf not catching on fire. It was bad.

Marinelli, because it’s all he knows, is good-soldiering up and taking responsibility for all this by babbling Successories-inflected word-salad like, “I always look at authority, and I respect authority – which a lot of times that doesn’t happen in this country – I look at authority, and I take my marching orders from there. Authority is everything in my life, and there’s a certain chain of command that I’ll always follow, and I do a good job of that.” Got that? You’d probably go crazy, too, if your team had essentially no chance of beating a not terribly good Vikings team.

Minnesota continues to be a team in pieces: a spotty pass defense supported by a tremendous run defense; a brilliant runner behind a fine offensive line contrasted with a lame receiving corps and an aging backup quarterback who frankly wasn’t that great a decade ago, when he was last considered a viable starter. The Vikings have generally been good enough to beat not-very-good teams – which, if you skipped the previous paragraphs, is a nice way to describe the team they’re playing this week – but still, vexingly, seem to be just on the wrong side of good. Some of this will probably wind up being blamed on Coach Brad Childress, and not unfairly – the team commits a lot of penalties and it was Childress who encouraged the team to reach for unusable deposed QB Tarvaris Jackson in the 2005 NFL Draft. Considering this week’s opponent, though, the Vikings should dominate both sides of the ball and Childress should be able to defer a Marinelli-style crisis of faith for at least another week.

VIKINGS BY 14