“They’ve got a name for the winners in the world. I want a name when I lose.”
Lyric from: Deacon Blues on the album Aja
Written by: Walter Becker, Donald Fagen
Performed by: Steely Dan
For a long, long, long, LONG time now the Detroit Lions have been the name and the face of the losers in the NFL. Years and years of high profile, offensive first round picks from the likes of Joey Harrington, to Charles Rogers, to Kevin Jones to Roy Williams to Mike Williams left us all so jaded that we ceremonially presumed the failures of Calvin Johnson and Matthew Stafford as well. And that’s just since 2002. In the first round of the 1989 draft the Lions selected a beast, a man lionized by NFL.com as the #1 most elusive running back of all time, Barry Sanders.
Football junkies have almost held a collective opinion regarding Sanders’ early exit from the game-the man didn’t see the point, why risk the continued wear and tear for a team that would never turn it around. Who are we to trust that the Lions could ever rise from the ashes of perennial losers when one of the most famous Lions of all times couldn’t bring himself to believe that.
Last season the Lions almost won their season opener and when it comes to the Lions, almost does count. It was a big deal. A last second touchdown that was erased upon official review cost them the victory. But we thought that we had caught a glimpse of something, that maybe we had caught a glimpse of a new possibility for Lions football. Someone once said to me that winning and losing are contagious. You win one game and you’re infected with the drive to keep winning and the same can be said of losing. So while almost winning their season opener last year was a big deal, it wasn’t a big enough deal to make winning infectious. Until maybe, it was. Maybe just a whole season later.
The Detroit Lions head into their week 4 matchup against the Dallas Cowboys undefeated, having started a season 3-0 for the first time since 1980.
The Dallas Cowboys are the NFL’s most valuable franchise. Cowboys Stadium is the most expensive stadium in the country at just over a billion dollars to construct. The Dallas Cowboys blue star logo is one of the best known professional sports logos in the world. Finally, the team’s owner is just as famous if not more famous than most of the players he employs.
#Winning, right?
Wrong.
Maybe.
And here we arrive at one of the great mysteries of the 21st century. How can a team whose coach we barely know, whose high paid quarterback always gives you a chance to lose, that has won just two playoff games since 1996 be considered a winner? I don’t know.
My dear friend Hulesy Britt, a long-suffering Cowboys fan, said to me last week, “Listen, at this point, when you talk to a new fan, who’s new to loving the NFL about the most recent glory years of the Cowboys-back when we won our last championships with the Jimmy Johnson and Barry Switzer teams-it’s gotta be a feeling similar to the one I had back when I first became a Cowboys fan and people would talk to me about the old Baltimore Colts. It feels like a completely different era.”
Listen, I’m a yogi. I’ve been practicing yoga for seven years and in yogic practice much is made of the concept that many times our beliefs about ourselves don’t always reflect the truth. These beliefs are so powerful however that true or not, they can dramatically define your perceptions, intentions and your actions/inactions. Talk to any Cowboys fan (with maybe the exception of my friend Britt) and you will find a proof point for how powerful a singular belief can be. Catch an interview with Jerry Jones on talk radio and let his words be your second proof point.
The Dallas Cowboys, aka America’s Team, are winners mostly because they believe they are and they tell us they are.
And so this coming Sunday the winners and losers face off. You’ll have to forgive me for mentally fast forwarding past this evening’s Monday Night Football matchup between the Cowboys and the Redskins. I am all about next week. And as much as I hate to admit it, the Detroit Lions will have to beat the Dallas Cowboys to prove to me that they are infected with winning. Do the Lions finally believe?
What we know for sure though is that win or lose, the Cowboys will still believe that they are winners-whether it’s true or not.
