0 and 16

Above all else, this blog is dedicated to identifying and mercilessly flaying the most pitable examples of mediocrity out there to-day. For to leave epic failure unscorned would be a moral failing of a severe sort.

So three jeers for the hapless Detroit Lions, the first NFL team to lose every single game on its schedule since the 16-game format was formulated.

0 and 16. The record says it all. To use the immortal words of Tom Benson, this franchise is worse than a high school football team.

And here I was believing all this time that the (s)Aints were the worst professional club in football. Guess I was wrong. Long term mediocrity as practiced by the black and gold ain't anything to write home about, but to plumb the depths of complete, reeking, unmitigated failure to this extent is foreign even to Who Dat nation. Not even the terrifying 1980 season, which birthed the concept of the baghead (and which I will profoundly remember till the day I die) could equal the mediocrity of the 2008 Lions squad.

Poetic justice, really. Detroit is a failure of a metropolis, having scorned productive capacities for subsidy seeking and welfarism on a grand scale. The decay of its football team mirrors perfectly the decay of its moral fabric, its economy, its people, its sense of human dignity.

Maybe this, above all else, will be the wake up call for the people of Michigan to get their act together and shape up. There will be no more bailouts. The bailout pantry is bare, the soup kitchen closed, the subsidy well tapped out.

I know it's just football. But it is a metaphor for so much more to-day.

0 and 16. A shameful albatross that will and should haunt your blighted city to its final wheezing gasp.

At least there are some places that I can spit upon, even living in last-in-everything Louisiana.