Atlanta — What happened Sunday to the Lions at Mercedes-Benz Field was a metaphor for the past 60-plus years of pro football in Detroit.
Effort? Nothing but salutes for how a team tussled and sweated and nearly ambushed the Falcons before losing in, of course, the final minute, 20-16.
Coaching? Who’s upset with head man Dan Campbell, who’s a portrait of what he wants his team to be and what, fairly can be said the Lions are with two more games to play and a 2-12-1 record stating the obvious?
Campbell’s a straight strand of barbed wire who wears his authority and NFL status well.
What it all confirms for the thousandth time is that intangibles and sideline generals haven’t been the Lions’ forever issue.
Rather, where are the players who can win a game that Sunday was waiting to be won by a team from Detroit? Where will the Lions find enough of those kinds of players — difference-makers — no matter how this over-fixation on April’s draft becomes the story as the Lions jostle with the Jaguars and Jets for that first-overall turn in 2022?
More: Justin Rogers’ Lions grades: Backup Tim Boyle better, but mistakes prove costly
This has been the common failing for six decades: not enough overall roster talent. It’s a reality unlikely to change whether it’s Aidan Hutchinson, or Kayvon Thibodeaux, or Kyle Hamilton the Lions snag with their first choice in April.
What will help, maybe the only thing that can help, if this weary cycle is to ever be given the heave-ho, is for a front office that knows personnel to maximize its draft-day haul.
Trading down won’t be easy, not with sexy quarterbacks pretty much a no-show in 2022. But the Lions badly need to parlay those two first-rounders and anything behind it into a half-dozen draft chips who can give Campbell’s roster a chance to win games the Lions now, following tradition, so often manage to lose.
Hutchinson isn’t changing the dynamic of Detroit’s 2022 lineup. Not by himself, Nor is Thibodeaux. Nor, even if a Heisman hotshot was sitting there, would a potential franchise quarterback. As much was proven during Matthew Stafford’s days in Detroit.
The Lions have too many needs on two sides of the football.
It is why under the heading easier-said-than-done some of us hoped Detroit at November’s trade deadline might have spun off T.J. Hockenson, or Jack Fox, or any of their trade-worthy flesh for as many draft picks as could be stuffed into the 2022 draft.
It’s the best way, the only way, to defeat more than two generations of wheel-spinning. The Lions need to flood Allen Park with a mini-deluge of young stallions who can tip the balance on game day.
Notice how even those two teams with whom the Lions are doing their draft-day square dance have shown how shallow can be the advantage in picking early.
►Jacksonville: Seven of the Jaguars’ last nine draft turns have been in the top five. Eight have been in the top nine. The Jags have won two games.
►New York Jets: Five times in the past seven drafts the Jets have had a top-six turn. Two of those picks (Sam Darnold and Zach Wilson) were quarterbacks.
The Jets have won three games.
It’s possible the Lions are, in fact, getting close without needing to go crazy with trade-downs in April, not that they figure to have an abundance of invitations there.
They had a backup quarterback from Eastern Kentucky working Sunday and Tim Boyle did a nice job — until throwing an ugly interception just as the Lions looked as if they were going to suckerpunch Atlanta.
Boyle did his best Jared Goff impression, working short routes for a couple of clock-sapping drives of more than seven minutes and another for more than 10.
He got nice help from that sudden star and fourth-round pick, Amon-Ra St. Brown, who is one more reason why the new front office could end up being a winner.
But for all the hard labor the offensive line devoted Sunday (when it wasn’t getting slammed for false starts), and for all the upside shown there in making this team an embodiment of Campbell’s personality and influence, the Lions didn’t do enough to win.
Hockenson was gone, of course, and so was D’Andre Swift. That’s life in the NFL. Other teams that also have a separate hospital ward dedicated to them by December of each NFL season are all dealing with the same reality. And so often, beating Detroit.
The lazy refrain you hear from one fan segment is that the Lions are “tanking.”
Not for a moment. Energy and effort aren’t lacking on the field, or on Campbell’s sideline, or in GM Brad Holmes’ office in Allen Park.
Nor would the Lions have been “tanking” had they peeled off a couple of trades with the 2022 draft in mind.
What they would have been showing is foresight. What they would have been telling fans is that, yes, we get this. We’ve been caught reading from the same script for an astounding number of years.
We’re going to change the program, pump extra picks into April’s lottery, and stock this roster at long last with the broader personnel Motown’s NFL team has lacked since the 1950s.
If this can’t be done, at some point very quickly, then this isn’t a front office that will fare any better than the earlier gangs who tried to change the culture of an old and exasperating team from Detroit.
Neither a man as gifted as Hutchinson, the quarterback killer from Michigan, or his edge-rushing twin from the University of Oregon, Thibodeaux, or any player by himself, is going to do any more to change fortunes with the Lions than did Stafford, or Calvin Johnson, or Barry Sanders, or Ndamukong Suh.
So, it matters not what happens in these final two games against Seattle and Green Bay. Not for the Lions. Nor does it depend on how ugly things get for the Jaguars and Jets in settling who gets that fat consolation prize for being the NFL’s worst.
Just do whatever is required, Lions, to change schemes this spring. It can be argued that the Lions are better waiting for 2023 when a hotter QB is available and options will be there to make a deeper and more dramatic impact on Detroit’s overall body of talent.
But the waiting for a single player has been no more profitable than thinking this perpetual story can be altered in dribs and drabs.
If there’s half a chance to parlay those first-round picks and any others into more of a multiple-choice draft, do it, Lions, and put an end to games as creditable and, unfortunately, as deflating as Sunday’s.
Lynn Henning is a freelancer writer and former Detroit News sports reporter.