Like the city’s auto industry, the football team has hit rock bottom, and hit it hard. With a 31–21 loss to the Green Bay Packers on Sunday, the Detroit Lions wrapped up their record-breaking 0–16 season. But unfortunately for Lions fans, there is no government bailout coming their way.
After laying the giant goose-egg for the whole year the Lions now join the 1976 Bucs as the only team to not win a game in a season. The Bucs went 0–14, but did so as an expansion team in their first year of play.
The Bucs were also not playing in the salary cap era that creates parity and a pretty equal playing-field among the teams throughout the league.
Head coach Rod Marinelli said of his team’s season, “Overall, the record speaks for itself. We know what that is.”
And that is the ’08 Lions heading to Canton, Ohio and the NFL Hall of Fame, to join the woeful 1976 Bucs (0–14), as the worst team in NFL history.
A team picture, with a short summary of their abysmal season, will go in a section that should really be labeled the “Hall of Shame.”
Many teams have come close, flirting with football “immortality” by winning just one of 16 games, but no team has lost every single week in a 16-game season.
The Matt Millen Era
Fans had been at Lions games with brown paper bags over their heads and “Fire Millen” signs for years and rightfully so.
Team president, CEO, and GM Matt Millen, hired in 2001, went 31–97 before he was fired just three games into this season’s 0–16 campaign.Millen made his fair share of mistakes in the drafts, picking a wide receiver with a top 10 pick in the first round for three years in a row from 2003–05.
In 2007, Millen drafted another wide receiver in the first round, picking Calvin Johnson from Georgia Tech with the number two pick. At least Johnson seems to be the one receiver that will pan out, so for the Lions, fourth time must be the charm.
Aside from drafting, Millen had trouble bringing in big name free-agents, but that’s because no one wanted to play for the crumbling franchise in Detroit.
Head Coach Rod Marinelli
The organization took no time to bag its head coach Rod Marinelli, firing him the day after their record setting loss on what has come to be known as “Black Monday” throughout the league, as three coaches got the axe.
When speaking about the season Marinellis said, “I thought they tried hard all year. I thought they gave it their best. But sometimes your best is not good enough, and it wasn’t good enough this year.”
Marinelli should have reworded his statement by saying it wasn’t good enough for years as the Lions had gone 1–23 in their last 24 games and were just 10–38 in three years under him.
At least Marinelli gave the team a winning record of 9–7 in his first season, shedding one of the few rays of hope on Lions fans over the past decade.
A bad president, GM, and bad coaching staff leads back to the owner, William Clay Ford, who’s owned the team since 1964.
Ford also had one of the greatest running backs in NFL history in Barry Sanders, but only won a single playoff game with Sanders in the backfield. Looking deeper into Lions history under Ford, little success can be found as that win was the only playoff win in the last 51 years. [caption id=“attachment_78663” align=“alignleft” width=“320” caption="BAILOUT NEEDED: Lions owner William Clay Ford must face the music as his team can
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