Root against the Detroit Lions this week. Even if you hail from Michigan, pull for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers against those hapless Motor City Kitties. In fact, root against Detroit for the next five weeks.
Why the cruelty, you ask? Why do I wish Detroit to suffer more embarrassing defeats? Simple?I want the Lions to go 0-16.
Since the NFL instituted a 16-game schedule, no team has ever run the table the wrong way. Sure, football fans across the country have witnessed atrocious ball clubs. But never one that finished 0-16.
Would a winless campaign make Detroit the worst team ever? Probably not.
Every season, the gridiron produces bad teams at all levels of play. Most of them, however, fail to earn a spot in football immortality. More often, bad teams are mercifully forgotten.
What happens to those who are not? Of course, we laugh with glee upon hearing their stories.
In 1974, the city of Detroit suffered humiliation when its World Football League team went 1-12. Indeed, Motown is no stranger to bad football. Yet teams far worse than the WFL’s Detroit Wheels have played with the pigskin.
Maybe the 1928 New York Giants were the worst team ever. Usually, bad teams fire the coach when change becomes necessary. After the 1928 season, however, the Giants were so bad they decided to fire 18 players. They weren’t traded or benched, just fired.
But the Giants could not have been the worst team ever. Not when the Washington Redskins lost a game to the Chicago Bears in 1940 by a score of 73-0. Now that’s funny. Yet the Redskins must have been a decent team, because the 73 point shellacking occurred in the NFL Championship game.
Surely, the Cumberland University football squad of 1916 was worse. This college team lost a game to Georgia Tech 222-0. That’s not a misprint. Georgia Tech coach John Heisman split his team into two squads, each playing half the game. The squad scoring the most points against Cumberland was promised a steak dinner.
Cumberland wasn’t that bad, though, because they intimidated Heisman. Leading 126-0 at halftime, Heisman told his team, “You’re doing alright. But you can’t tell what those Cumberland players have up their sleeves. Be alert.”
Cumberland couldn’t have had much up their sleeves because the players’ hands were obviously down their pants. How else do you explain a 126-0 halftime score?
Still, maybe Heisman knew something.
What about Columbia? Nicknamed the Lions?a strange coincidence?Columbia’s football squad dropped 44 consecutive contests between 1983 and 1988. Upon finally defeating renowned football powerhouse Princeton to snap the streak, Columbia’s fans tore down the field goal posts and the band members carried on, into the night with anti-Princeton chants.
Yet Macalester, a Division III school, was even worse than Columbia. It once lost 50 straight games, failing to prevail during the entire Ford and Carter presidencies. Was Macalester the worst team ever? Maybe. But how can you make that claim when Princeton’s 1899 football club started a defensive end who was 5-foot-6 and 145 pounds? That’s a defensive lineman, not a towel boy. And he started!
That might still be better than the Fairleigh Dickinson University Devils who brilliantly decided to start a football program from scratch in 1974. Students who had never played football were recruited from around campus. They lost their first game 63-0?to Kean College.
Do the Detroit Lions actually rank as low as these losers? An 0-16 finish will surely secure their spot in gridiron infamy.
A number of teams have come close to the coveted season-long goose egg, yet total futility often proves elusive. In 1986, the Indianapolis Colts began the year with 13 straight losses, only to win their last three.
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers actually suffered 26 consecutive defeats between 1976 and 1977. They ended the American Bicentennial with an 0-14 mark, then lost 12 straight to lead off the 1977 campaign.
Tampa fans should have known they were doomed from the start. Before the Bucs’ first game, the team got lost in the tunnels trying to find the locker room. Coach John McKay led his troops on a fruitless search deep in the bowels of the Houston Astrodome. After 20 minutes, they finally encountered a security guard who led them to the promised land?or at least to the showers.
The Buccaneers were so bad that losing to them provoked a public tantrum. When the New Orleans Saints became the first team ever to fall to Tampa, Saints’ coach Hank Stram exclaimed, “What a nightmare! We’re ashamed of our people, our fans, our organization.”
As the 1977 season dragged on, Tampa fans showed up to root for the other team and wore shirts that said, “Go For 0.”
They just don’t make teams like the Yuckaneers anymore. What ever happened to good, old-fashioned football incompetence?
2001 could be a special year for the Detroit Lions. If they go 1-15, no one will remember this club. They’ll simply be another lousy football team piled onto the trash heap. A winless season, however, makes Detroit immortal. It makes them timeless and unforgettably bad. And it gives us all a good reason to laugh.
James welcomes feedback at: [email protected].