My assignment on that unseasonably warm January afternoon was to write about the losing team, which is why I found myself in a windowless room in the bowels at RFK Stadium in Washington DC, watching a portly football coach clamber atop a platform for a news conference.
Writing about losing teams is never much fun, let alone about a team that had just been routed in their first (and, until this Sunday, only) appearance in an NFC championship game. But Wayne Fontes was that portly coach. He was fun, ebullient, always with something interesting to say.
Fontes faced the microphone, then exhaled, deeply, before exclaiming, “Wow! God! Did that look like the last game, or what?”
Four months before Fontes and the Detroit Lions were battered in the 1991 NFC title game by Washington, 41-10, they’d been hammered by the same team in the season opener, 45-0. But so many things had gone right for Detroit between those two games. They had hope.
The Lions won their last six regular-season games, then trounced the Dallas Cowboys, 38-6, in their playoff opener at home. These were the ascendant Cowboys of Jerry Jones, Jimmy Johnson, Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith and Michael Irvin. They’d win it all a year later.
At half-time against Washington, Detroit only trailed 17-10. But the Lions were more or less overrun in the second half, with Washington scoring 24 unanswered points to win with ease. Barry Sanders, Detroit’s spectacular running back, gained 44 yards rushing, losing two yards on his last carry.
“The holes just weren’t there,” Sanders said later at his locker.
Fontes had already apologized to Metro Detroit “for our poor effort,” and Washington were a tremendous team that won Super Bowl XXVI two weeks later by roundly defeating the Buffalo Bills. The loss notwithstanding, the Lions were regarded as a team on the rise.
That was 12 January 1992 – 32 years ago, half a lifetime for me – and the Lions did not make it back to the NFC championship game until just this past Sunday, when they beat Tampa Bay at a different and newer stadium in Detroit than the one where they’d whooped Dallas. It has been a while.
The Lions are one of only four active NFL teams that have never appeared in a Super Bowl, but, founded in 1928 in Ohio as the Portsmouth Spartans, they have been around far longer than the other No-Supes: Jacksonville (1995), Cleveland (1999 in their most recent incarnation) and Houston (2002).
Five years ago, after the Lions finished 6-10 under first-year head coach Matt Patricia (who recently lost his job coaching Philadelphia’s leaky defense), I wrote a piece for Forbes.com with the headline: Meet The NFL Team That Might Never Make It To The Super Bowl.
At the time, it seemed that the Lions were cursed. Look at what happened to poor, old Fontes: He went on to lead the Lions to the playoffs in 1993, 1994 and 1995, but they lost three wildcard games, the first two to Brett Favre and the Packers, the third a woeful rout at the hands of the Eagles, who ran up a 51-7 lead at Veterans Stadium on their way to a 58-37 drubbing.
Sanders retired in 1998 at the age of 30, and the Lions went into the darkness, appearing in the playoffs just three times between 2000 and 2022. Detroit lost at least 10 games in 14 of those 23 seasons, hitting rock bottom by losing all 16 games they played in 2008 – an NFL first at the time.
Even the current head coach, Dan Campbell, scuffled for success after he took the job in 2021, losing his first eight games and avoiding defeat only in a 16-16 tie with Pittsburgh in his first 11 games as coach. The 2021 Lions won their first game on 5 December.
“For us to win, we’ve got to play damn near perfect, and that’s on us,” Campbell said after Detroit plunged to 0-8 following a desultory 44-6 loss to the Eagles on 31 October 2021. “We’re charged with that as coaches.”
Upon taking the job in Detroit, Campbell, a hard-driving Texan, surprised some NFL followers, and had made others giggle (or shudder) when he said, “When you knock us down, we’re going to get up, and on the way up, we’re going to bite a kneecap off.”
Fontes took a different approach when he became Detroit’s permanent head coach in 1988. He looked after his players, ordering pasta to be delivered for lunch, and a TV to be put in the locker room (these were the old days). He treated the Lions as if they were first-class.
Fontes got them to play better, too. He stuck with a journeyman backup quarterback named Erik Kramer, after starter Rodney Peete was injured and Kramer lost his first two starts. He worked magic: Detroit did not lose again until they faced Washington at RFK Stadium in January.
Fontes, now 83, was contacted last week by a radio station in Detroit after the Lions beat Tampa Bay for their first playoff victory in 32 years. He had his own reasons for wishing the Lions postseason success. “It finally took the monkey off my back,” Fontes said.
He told the hosts at WWJ Newsradio how he’d noticed an increase in interest in the Lions at the sports bar where he watched them play this year – and how bettors would be wise to take the Lions to beat Tampa Bay, even if it meant giving up six and a half points. (Detroit would win, 31-23.)
How similar the narratives are: an energetic, popular coach, with a lot of help from a quarterback who was once regarded as a castoff (Jared Goff, the current QB, was a No 1 overall draft pick by the Rams), propels a team within one victory of the Super Bowl.
Sunday’s NFC title game will be in San Francisco against the determined 49ers, and the Lions are not favored to win this game, either. Maybe this game gets away from Detroit as it did 32 years ago, when Washington rolled up a fat lead in the first 20 minutes of the second half.
The Lions are mere seven-point underdogs, not 14-point longshots as they were when they played before 55,585 (with zero no-shows) at RFK Stadium on that sunny afternoon in 1992. But Detroit have looked solid so far this postseason, and the Niners came close to losing to the Packers last week. This time, the Lions’ head coach may not need to rue a poor effort, or to apologize afterwards.
I am rooting for them – not just for Campbell, Goff and the current team, but for Fontes, Kramer, Sanders (who now has a statue outside Ford Field), plus the people in the Motor City, who have been waiting quite a while for the pro team in town to be good again.
