Tonight, the Detroit Lions visit Levi’s Stadium in a game those in the know will tell you means nothing. The San Francisco 49ers are playing out the string of a most difficult campaign in defense of their National Football Conference title and Super Bowl loss. The Lions will have the first or fifth seed in the NFC playoffs this year whether they win or lose tonight depending on what they do next week in their season finale against the Minnesota Vikings.
Those in the know, don’t know Dan Campbell.
The head coach of the Lions has a mindset like a murderer who kicks his dead victim leaving the crime scene. In the spirit of one-time head coach Jimmy Johnson, who as mentor of the Dallas Cowboys never thought a 31-3 lead didn’t look better at 38-3, Campbell does not have a let up on the accelerator in his makeup.
The Lions also have a score to settle with the 49ers. The Lions have done very well against the point spread in recent years against the 49ers, Kyle Shanahan is 3-0 straight-up but 0-3 versus the line in contests against Detroit. This is his third meeting with Campbell and Shanahan meeting as opposing head coaches, and among Campbell’s two point spread wins but losses on the scoreboard to Shanahan was last year’s NFC Championship Game.
In that contest, the Lions built up a double-digit lead only to have the more experienced playoff savvy 49ers run them down and come away with a narrow victory and date against the Kansas City Chiefs in Super Bowl LVIII.
Since that loss last January, the Lions have perhaps been the best team in football. They won a franchise record eleven straight games this season and have had a perch atop their division since they beat the Minnesota Vikings in October. That game was the Vikings first of only two losses they have suffered this season.
That is what makes this division race in the NFC North so intriguing. The two teams with the best records in the conference are battling each other for the title. The division winner will get the top seed in the upcoming playoffs, the loser will drop to the fifth seed and open the postseason on the road. It is the first time in NFL history that a Wild Card team will have a won/loss record as good as either the Vikings or Lions will have when they open the playoffs in two weeks. If the Lions win tonight, the Wild Card field will include a team with 14 wins. Even if the Lions lose tonight and again next week to the Vikings, they would be the first Wild Card team with as many as 13 wins.
My mother was a schoolteacher. She opened each year while posing this question to her class, “Do they have a fourth of July in England?”
A discussion would ensue where the kids who thought they were most in the know would claim that the Fourth of July was an American holiday to mark the birth of our country. They didn’t have that in England.
“So, in England,” my mom would then say as if it was a question, “They go right from the third to the fifth of July?”
When put that way, the idea that the fourth of July brought up something more than just a date, had the kids not only smile with that realization but ushered in the beginning of thinking without making false assumptions.
Like tonight, where some in the know will think this game doesn’t mean anything to the Lions, missing the more basic point, the Lions like to win.
Qoxhi Picks: Detroit Lions (-3½) over San Francisco 49ers