For the first time in National Football League history, we will have a Wild Card team that won 14 regular season games. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The Wild Card, which began in 1970 with one team earning a playoff berth without winning their division and has grown to three teams joining four division winners in each conference today, was installed to allow a good team not to be eliminated.
What we have this season is two great teams playing out of the same division and meeting tonight to decide who gets the top seed in the National Football Conference and who is relegated to the fifth seed and opens the postseason on the road.
A lot is at stake for the Minnesota Vikings and their hosts tonight, the Detroit Lions.
The point spread has been pretty consistent with the home team favored by three, which when factoring in the home field advantage pretty much equates to these two teams being equal. In fact, while the Lions burst out of the gate, put together their longest ever franchise win streak of 11 games, and smoked many opponents with an offense that attacked from all different directions, the Vikings have been like the turtle in this race.
Other than dropping back-to-back games to the Lions and Los Angeles Rams mid-season, the Vikings have been perfect. And they come into tonight’s titanic battle with less injuries than the Lions are struggling with.
Detroit has had 11 defensive players miss games this year while spending time on the injured reserve list. Perhaps their most dominant defensive player, Aidan Hutchinson, was lost early in the season to a broken leg. A couple weeks ago their two-headed running game was cut in half with the loss of David Montgomery.
Based on the injuries the Lions have incurred, and the opinion that the Vikings have the better defense, a lot of real bright football handicappers are siding with the visitors in this one.
I’m not.
While the Vikings have had a surprise great season behind quarterback Sam Darnold, who was signed apparently to mentor first round draft choice J.J. McCarthy, who was lost for the year with an injury suffered in the preseason before Darnold emerged as the star, the Lions have checked all the boxes in recent years to land them in tonight’s challenge.
The Lions had been doormats for so long there was talk of stripping them of their long tradition of hosting the annual Thanksgiving Day game. They had suffered through another horrible season under another unsuccessful mentor when the Matt Patricia era came to an end with five games remaining on the 2020 schedule. Patricia had a 13-29-1 record in his five games short of three seasons as the Lions head coach.
Enter Dan Campbell.
In his first season as the Lions head coach, he was 3-13-1, pretty much typical for a man in his position with this team. But lest we forget, in 1989 Jimmy Johnson, in his first year replacing the legendary Tom Landry of the Dallas Cowboys, directed a season that finished with one win and fifteen losses. Like Johnson in Dallas, Campbell in Detroit benefited from a trade that brought a bevy of young talent to their teams’ roster. In the Cowboys case, Johnson had suckered a number of teams to trade for players that if they didn’t make the Cowboys roster had the provision of providing a high draft pick. By design, none of them made the Dallas roster, and Johnson cashed the picks to build the juggernaut that was the Cowboys three-time Super Bowl winning team.
Campbell got his draft picks in a trade with the Los Angeles Rams, sending quarterback Matthew Stafford to Detroit for Jared Goff and a number of high draft picks. The Rams won their Super Bowl the first season Stafford was on the West Coast but followed that season with the worst record for a defending Super Bowl team in history, five wins and a dozen losses. That meant in 2023, the Lions had draft picks gained in the trade that were a lot farther up on the draft board than anyone would have imagined when the trade was made.
Then Campbell developed Goff into the best quarterback in the NFC and in his second season, 2022, the arrival of the Lions took shape when they eliminated Aaron Rodgers and his Green Bay Packers from the playoffs with a win at Lambeau Field on the final day of the regular season. The following year, the Lions kicked off the season with a victory in Kansas City over Patrick Mahomes and his Chiefs in the Thursday night opener.
In 2023, they also went on to win their division with a 12 and 5 season record and had the San Francisco 49ers down by double-digits in last year’s NFC Championship Game. Then, the 49ers playoff experience and the path they were on carried them to a win over the Lions and a trip to Super Bowl LVIII.
So, the Lions are still one of the few teams in the NFL that has never been to a Super Bowl. This year is their best chance ever, and whether they climb that hill is yet to be decided. But in the game of checking the boxes on their way, Detroit has grown each season under Campbell and tonight is the next step they have already earned with experience.
Two boxes left to check for the Lions. Tonight’s win and a berth in Super Bowl LIX.
First things first.
Qoxhi Picks: Detroit Lions (-3) over Minnesota Vikings