Three Cups Deep: NFC Champion Detroit Lions To Host Second Playoff Game

The zero-degree chill is once again palpable through every window in my house, the furnace churning almost constantly to stave it off. A bright blue car sits frozen over in my driveway, just as one did when I started this blog fifteen years and two weeks ago.

But I'm not out in the frigid snow, hacking the ice off the driver door. I'm not wrenching the key trying to get the engine to turn over, nor listening to David "Mad Dog" DeMarco on local AM radio while the car, and my fingers, un-freeze. Because while Detroit Lions history has repeated and rhymed over and over again in the decade since I last posted, everything—everything—has changed.

I work full-time from home. I can warm my electric Ford up all toasty with a button in an app on my phone. Mad Dog retired and moved someplace sunny. And the sputtering little blue flame, the spirit of Lions fandom I swore to keep alive, is burning more brightly than it has in generations—so brightly, the whole NFL-watching world is in awe: 

If you see what's happening in Detroit tonight, you should never again question why a fan says "we."

— Luke Easterling (@LukeEasterling) January 15, 2024

In the utter, freezing bleakness of 0-16, the hiring of Jim Schwartz and drafting of Matthew Stafford gave Lions fans something to pin our hopes to. When they made the playoffs in their third season, I was already struggling to balance posting here with professional sportswriting opportunities, my full-time day job, and three small kids. By the time the wheels fell off the Schwartz regime, I was a National NFL Lead Writer for Bleacher Report.

I would never hide where I got my start—and even if I wanted to, I couldn't. But blogging about being the One True Eternal Fan of one NFL team while covering the league for one of the biggest sports sites in the world wasn't just a bad look. It was fundamentally incompatible.

When you're watching and re-watching nearly every game, and writing an on-deadline reaction column for two of them, twice a seek? It's a lot harder to think your team is uniquely bad (or good). When you regularly interview active players, coaches, agents, and executives, it teaches you a whole lot about the game you didn't know. And when you spend three years co-hosting a SiriusXM show with a Hall of Fame voter who's been covering the league full-time since you were "wearing Barry Sanders pajamas," as Jason Cole more-or-less rightfully used to tease me about, you learn a whole lot about how the league works.

Talking with Lions fans felt more and more like speaking in translation, a way of thinking it took effort to adopt. Writing about the NFL full-time was my dream job, and I had it; participating in Lions fandom was starting to feel like work.

Schwartz's firing felt like a natural place to let the sun stay set on TLiW forever. I titled that last post "Plus Ça Change, Plus C’est La Même Chose": The more things change, the more they stay the same.

But things did change, and stayed changéd.

Bleacher Report got acquired by Turner Broadcasting not long after I started there. Not long after that, they started firing writers in waves. They hired in big-name talents, and built out expensive new video facilities in Manhattan. I could see the writing on the wall: B/R was pivoting away from expert analysis and written opinion towards a video-heavy, social-first, branding-and-vibes-based operation.

I went out and got cool freelance gigs at VICE Sports and FiveThirtyEight. I interviewed for the Lions beat writer position at new startup The Athletic, which turned into some great feature assignments and a couple years of podcasting. OddsShark invited me in to their stable of betting experts, and I finished in the money in the Westgate SuperContest. I did some TV and culture writing, recapping Shark Tank for The Comeback. I even interviewed for the dream-job-of-dream-jobs, a full-time NFL writer position at Sports Illustrated—and actually made it all the way to the end of the process before losing out to Jonathan Jones (who, to be clear, deserved it).

By the time B/R actually let me go, I thought I could make full-time freelancing work.

Not only couldn't I do it, I started trying at a time in media where practically no one can.

USA TODAY Sports Media Group brought me on to launch the Lions edition of their new blog network, Lions Wire. I'd always wanted to try editing a professional site, and I thought going back to day-to-day Lions coverage would be fun and rewarding.

But new Lions GM Bob Quinn seemed to be drafting for the 2016 New England Patriots, while Jim Caldwell was still trying to coach the 2010 Indianapolis Colts. Watching Matthew Stafford sacrifice his body and hamstring his game to run schemes that weren't working with less-talented players than the ones Schwartz and Martin Mayhew had drafted was painful. And trying to do great work for a media company that wanted fast work was killing me.

I was either frantically writing, or one Tweet away from having to go frantically write, basically every waking moment of the day. I was trying to recruit promising early-career writers to write for me for free, even as I spoke out more and more loudly against the devaulation of writers' labor. I had three kids, I owned a house, and all my gigs added up together were nowhere near enough money to make ends meet. It was untenable. It was unbearable.

As Jim Caldwell's iteration of the eternal Lions cycle of hope and failure came to an end, I started looking for IT work.

Having an actual paycheck, and actual health insurance, gave me the time and space to be the husband and father my family needed me to be. To focus on my badly neglected physical and mental health, playing and refereeing soccer to get in shape—and hey, it turns out naming The Lions in Winter's Monday-morning blog series "Three Cups Deep" because I needed three cups of coffee to focus enough to write should have tipped me off about the undiagnosed ADHD!

That safety and security also gave me time and space to start writing what I wanted, when I wanted to.

I wrote three non-ficition kids' books, sold to school libraries by an actual-factual New York City publisher. I wrote a YA fantasy novel, the second draft of which I'm well into revising. I got back into drumming, playing in the pit for shows all around town. I'm currently developing a podcast about old video-game magazines, and how (for better and worse) they inspired lots of writers like me. I started "Gimme Schalter," a free newsletter that has 400 subscribers—and hey, if you're reading this, you should subscribe!

I'd thought the Lions would never hire a coach who "got it" the way Schwartz did, but then they went and hired a guy, Dan Campbell, who was literally on the winless Lions roster that inspired me to start this blog.

Watching him and GM Brad Holmes team actually make great decisions on draft day and in free agency, develop young players, brilliantly manage their staff, truly dismantle a toxic culture and build a tough, smart, exciting team that's fun to root for has been incredible. And I spent two years saying 2023 would be the year we found out about Brad Holmes and Dan Campbell; the year interesting potential became a reality to be judged.

But this spring, Disney laid off many of my FiveThirtyEight colleagues and closed their entire sports operation. Part of me wanted to run out and line up some gigs; maybe some of my friends in Lions media would have me on part-time? But I realized I had an opportunity to watch and enjoy NFL games without anyone paying me to cover them for the first time in 15 years—just as Campbell's Lions were going to be the best squad to wear Honolulu Blue since I wore Barry Sanders pajamas. 

I took it.

Of course, I'd never stopped watching the Lions, cheering for them to win, and being disappointed when they lost. It's been a blast being able to try and enjoy this season as nothing more, officially, than a fan. But, as I already knew, 15 years of covering this game for money has changed me forever.

Even as I consume much of the great work being done by my former Lions-writing colleagues and peers, I'm still not really surfing the hour-by-hour, minute-by-minute cycle of emotions and discourse that one-team superfans swim in. I can't un-see the game from a 30,000-foot perspective, I can't un-learn the things I know about how the league, and I can't feel Lions feelings without the compartmentalized detachment of somebody who still needs to be thought of as a respectable professional in the morning.

I've spent weeks looking around in thrilled wonder as everyone around me here in Lansing is buying and wearing new Lions gear, but I waited until my niece got me the "It's A Lock" shirt for Christmas to rock anything new myself. At the watch party I went to last night, I cheered and hollered and clapped and gripped like everyone else, but I was also looking up NextGenStats and trying to confirm I was right about second-round playoff scenarios. 

I wish I could say that I cried when Jared Goff started taking those knees—but it would be with the sincere-yet-false affect of someone placidly replying "lololol, doubled over belly-laughing, actually gasping for breath" to their friend about the really funny video they just texted.

Seeing all the fans on the TV and friends in the room with me and mutuals and strangers on my Twitter feed crying and woo-ing and living for this moved me, awed me, delighted me like nothing else. I saw the post-game interviews with Goff and Stafford and I felt feelings. I replied to congratulatory replies and DMs and texts and felt feelings.

But nine-year-old me would have cried at so many droughts having ended, so many curses and hexes and narratives being slain: 32 years since a playoff win, 30 years since a home playoff game, Super Bowl Champion Matthew Stafford coming back to the team he left, his wife Kelly again causing Lions drama online, the refs inventing incredible new ways to screw over Detroit, Jared Goff beating the team that gave up on him with the God-forsaken franchise he was "exiled" to. Maybe twenty-nine-year-old me might have cried at the relief of all those ghosts being put to rest, too.

Or maybe, twenty-nine-year-old me would have had in the back of his head the same thing I had in the back of mine: That is not the time for the big celebration. That this squad can, and should, go farther. That there are a few more milestones left to hit, and they might hit them. A few more mountains left to climb, and they might climb them.

That this is the first historic win of Dan Campbell's Lions head-coaching career, but it is by no means going to be the last.