It’ll cost Lions dearly to continue to fool fans
If you’ve followed the Detroit Lions for any length of time you realize that William Clay Ford has been one of the worst owners in professional sports. His franchise has won one playoff game during the 46 years he’s owned the team. That level of suckitude sets the bar for all other franchises to measure just how bad they really are. That’s not a bad streak or just plain bad luck - that’s complete and utter incompetence.
It is William Clay Ford’s team and he can run it however he likes. But there are consequences to such mismanagement and we saw the first signs of those consequences when a furniture company had to step in and buy thousands of tickets so that the home opener wouldn’t be blacked out.
Michael Rosenberg wrote an article about a lack of fan support for the sad sack franchise last week and I feel bad about ripping him yet again as he’s been the best sports columnist in Detroit for the past five or so years. But this column was a complete waste of keystrokes, of bandwidth on the Freep website and of paper in the print edition of the paper. Here’s the crux of his take on fans tuning out the Leos by not attending games:
Surely you’ve heard the argument 1,000 times: As long as Lions fans keep supporting a losing team, William Clay Ford will be content to lose.
This argument is a strawman, and it’s certainly easy to sit there and pick that strawman apart while you don’t have to pay for tickets to watch the team’s latest performance of self-immolation. No Mr. Rosenberg, it’s so much more cut and dried than that: the Lions have gone from being merely incompetent to being a freaking embarrassment ever since Matt Millen was put in charge of the franchise, and enough people have been pissed off to the point that they aren’t willing to part with their money to watch this franchise mock them for their support.
The Lions are lucky they’ve had Ford Field to draw customers in as there’s no way they’d have the same sort of support over the past five seasons if they were still playing at the Silverdome. They’ve also benefitted from the fact the NFL is the dominant sports league in the United States. So both of these factors are things that have propped the franchise up, much like the SUVs that helped prop up the auto industry before high gas prices killed demand for those gas guzzlers.
So I think we can do away with the idea fans are trying to prove a point by not buying tickets, as suggesting this is the case is an insult to a fanbase that has had plenty of insult heaped upon them. There’s a simple economic explanation: people just lose interest in supporting a team that sucks, and I’m sorry if that comes across as being unduly harsh. Look at Michigan basketball, as they can’t fill Crisler arena. When they were a consistent tournament team the arena would be packed. Are fans trying to send the University of Michigan athletic department a message? Not unless you are talking about the most basic of messages of the cost/benefit decision people make all of the time. Hopefully John Beilein will change that but as it stands right now Michigan basketball and Detroit Lions football are not entertaining, and as a result people aren’t going to waste their money on something that was supposed to be fun and enjoyable but instead makes them miserable.
So where does that leave the Detroit Lions after starting the season 0-2? Well I think the franchise has two roads they can take and that decision will really tell you what they think about their fans. The first road is to remove Matt Millen and replace him with a competent general manager. Removing him would be necessary as Millen has stated he is not going to walk away from a job that has paid him millions of dollars over the past seven years. Millen’s reign of error has been dissected over and over and over. The only way you regain the support of the Detroit Lions fanbase is if William Clay Ford leads the fans to believe a big change will turn around the franchise’s fortunes. The most obvious way to do this is to remove Millen.
The second route would be to continue to thumb their noses at their fans by keeping Millen in place. There is certainly precedent here and all you need to do is look at Russ Thomas’ tenure with the franchise. If Millen is kept in place and nothing really changes other than perhaps scapegoating a player and/or coach then what is there to really convince the fans that this franchise isn’t going to continue to cause more frustration and misery than entertainment?
If they choose that second route there is no way the team will be able to continue to sell out their football games. Will advertisers have the willingness to purchase ten thousand tickets which might be necessary if the team goes 0-5? People can come up with all sorts of cockamamie rationalizations about how fans think their actions will influence the franchise or even suggest those fans would be responsible were the franchise to move to a different city. But here’s the thing that seems to be difficult to grasp: the fans have supported this team for far longer than they should have, and it’s high time the Detroit Lions reward their fans for their support of this abysmal franchise.
–46 years and one playoff victory
–A 31-83 record under Matt Millen’s leadership
The fans who have spent money to support this franchise deserve much, much better.
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