What follows is a somewhat quixotic attempt to rewrite history, thanks to a video game.
A confession first. Like so many of us, I grew up in the 1980s on Channel 4's American football coverage. I remember in particular one playoff game from 1991, when the Dallas Cowboys, then an ascendant young team that would achieve greatness in the years to come, went into Detroit to play the Lions.
This was the era of Barry Sanders and the Silver Stretch, the wide-open run and shoot offense designed by Mouse Davis with multiple WR formations, receivers running wild in the secondary, a high-adrenalin pinball attack.
The dome in Motown was rocking as Channel 4 cut to the game, and I remember thinking, this is something to behold, a sea of Honolulu Blue and Silver roaring for their Lions, a rust-belt industrial town that had lost the greatness ofs its automobile past, a community that had forgotten its Motown sense of pride and identity, now united by its football team.
Well, the Lions came out like, in the words of the original LT, a "bunch of crazed dogs", and they killed the Cowboys 38-6. At the time, it seemed like a shining future awaited the Lions, but in truth that game is the high watermark for Detroit in the last 20 years.
In fact, Detroit's recent history has been a dark tragi-comic tale of bungling and misery, of the reign of the buffoon GM Matt Millen and his countless draft busts. This tale of woe culminated with the firing of Millen this season, but it should have happened many years ago.
This exercise in historical revisionism will discover what could have happened if that had taken place back in 2003, after Millen had compiled consecutive seasons of 2-14 and 3-13 to commence his career.
I will use Madden 2004, the finest incarnation of Madden on the PS2, and through playing the Detroit Lions on franchise mode, I will see just what could have happened in the years to come.
Like a true GM, I will not play the game, but rather make the decisions that count - the personnel decisions, draft picks and free agents and so forth. And like a real GM, I will not play the game, but instead watch it.
Madden will play itself if you set it to, and the effect is just like watching an NFL game. That's what I will do, but I won't watch all of them, just the post-season ones if and when the Lions make the playoffs. We will simulate the regular season games.
I plan to create an NFL Camelot through assembling the most brilliant athletes of their day in Motown, the fastest, strongest, most agile competitors, and so assemble a true NFL dynasty that will stand the test of time.
I will update you on all my moves as GM and tell you how the team does every season and together, we will write a new history of the Detroit Lions.
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