I fully know that this headline is kind of weird. Like what could I possibly mean about the Lions having a loyalty problem and the coaches who just left and the players who have left in the past having nothing to do with it?
Here’s the part where your first reaction might be to get pissed off and close this article. Stick with me for a second because I’m including myself in this too. It’s Lions fans, we’re the ones with the loyalty problem. And everyone in the media as well as players in the league are noticing it right now.
Nobody ever likes to admit they were wrong about something. We all do this and it’s a human behavior. But the fact is that it took a lot of Lions fans a while to get in on Jared Goff and just believe that he was the guy. Even I was in on moving on from him early in 2022.
This goes back to last season when the Lions had just lost to the Bears in Chicago and wrapped up a rough stretch of play for him. It seemed evident to like 50% of people that he had balled out in 2022 and had been balling out in most of 2023, yet many Lions fans were on social media saying that the Lions shouldn’t pay him a lot of money or that they shouldn’t extend him.
In January, he led the Lions to their first playoff win in more than thirty years, and the Jared Goff chant was born. This chant was heard everywhere: at Pistons games, Red Wings games, Tigers games, Michigan State games, Grand Rapids Griffins games, Kalamazoo K-Wings games. You name it, the chant was heard there.
Goff put up an MVP-caliber season in 2024. That’s not just us saying that because he’s our quarterback. He is an actual MVP nominated player right now.
Then in the playoffs, everything went wrong early in the game and the Lions tried to desperately chunk play their way out of it and sometimes when you do that, you get picked off.
If you ask me if Goff played a bad game last Saturday, I’m not going to tell you yes, I’m going to tell you that the fumble ruined everything and the Lions schemed him into plays that had a low percentage of working, but a high reward if they did. He did what the team drew up for him.
The problem is that after that game he becomes the only reason the Lions lost and the conversation switches to stuff like this:
We have to stop doing this. I understand because I’ve been in the trenches with you for 39 years. I want this Super Bowl really bad just like you do, but turning on players whose name you chanted in stadiums for over a year after one game is just too much.
You might think that’s just fans chirping on Twitter and social media and that nobody really cares in the outside world. They see it. Players you want to come play in Detroit see it. They see that you’re just going to kick them to the curb if it doesn’t work out.
Former Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman put it perfectly on his show this week.
“If you think about last season, Detroit won their first playoff game in however many years. Got to the NFC Championship unexpectedly. They were talking about building a statue of Jared Goff if he wins the Super Bowl. He gets paid, does his thing. 15 win season number one seed and Ben Johnson’s coming back. There’s so much love in the city or so much greatness, so much happiness, and then disaster strikes. They lose. Now you’re saying he was unprepared. Team scored 31 points. Now you’re saying Jared Goff isn’t worth the contract he was getting. Had a really good season. Didn’t play great in this game, sure give him criticism, but to almost like totally flip on these guys is the disappointing part for me. Don’t expect loyalty from players, because of how quickly people are to turn on you because it didn’t work out the way you wanted to.”
It’s that last part. Lions fans want to keep players in Detroit. They absolutely love it when it happens and they should. Retaining good players is a sign of a good culture and good ownership.
What fans have to realize is that we’re part of the culture too. We have an effect on what happens in that building. If everyone is having a good time, the team is having a good time. If everyone is a jerk and turns on players and coaches, then there’s a lot higher chance that things go sour and players feel unappreciated. When players feel unappreciated, they tend to go find a place where they can feel appreciated.
From the outside everyone is talking about the Lions and their fans right now and if I’m a free agent, Detroit doesn’t look like the fun place to play that was last March. Now it looks like a pressure cooker where people might take to the internet and proclaim that I should be out of a job if things don’t work out every single time.
To be fair, not every fan was like this. I don’t want to paint so broadly here. This wasn’t everyone. Still, it was a hefty amount and it was enough for me to sit down in front of my computer and address it.
At the end of the day you do what you want, but I think we need to do better. We need to get back to that pride that we’ve had for this team all season and stop acting like the sky is falling every single time something goes bad. These are the golden years of this franchise and they’re far from over. Wouldn’t you hate to look back on them and feel like you wasted half of them being frustrated?
