Five Signature Moments from Detroit Lions History

Including several GOOD moments! And they weren't that hard to find!

Detroit’s made up of great people. Really good people. This community is strong. This place has been kicked, it’s been battered, it’s been bruised. And I can sit up here and give you coachspeak all day long … none of that matters, and you guys don’t want to hear it anyway. You’ve had enough of that shit; excuse my language.

This team is going to take on the identity of this city. And, this city’s been down, and it found a way to get up. It’s found a way to overcome adversity. So, this team’s going to be built on: we’re going to kick you in the teeth, all right, and when you punch us back, we’re going to smile at you and when you knock us down, we’re going to get up. And, on the way up, we’re going to bite a kneecap off.

And, we’re going to stand up, and then it’s going to take two more shots to knock us down. And, on the way up, we’re going to take your other kneecap, and we’re going to get up and then it’s going to take three shots to get us down. And, when we do, we’re going to take another hunk out of you. Before long, we’re going to be the last one standing. – Dan Campbell, January 21st, 2021.

We are living through the greatest era of Detroit Lions football in modern history.

The 2024 Lions were the best Lions team of the Super Bowl era. The 2023 Lions were only the second team in franchise history to reach the conference finals; the first one lost 41-10 when they got there. The only serious challengers to Dan Campbell’s Lions, besides those semi-legendary 1950s teams, were the run-’n’-shoot Lions of the early 1990s. Campbell would have ripped out Wayne Fontes’ still-beating heart and fed it to Penei Sewell.

Have you ever read the full “kneecap” speech? Ever seen the first half, where Campbell gets teary talking about the Detroit community? It sure does change the context of his quote. Campbell isn’t championing toughness and aggression for their own sake, but perseverance and civic pride, sports as a balm to a healing community.

So let’s start by celebrating Detroit’s present and its potential, then work our way back through the dark times until we reach the end of its Gilded Age.

5. Kerby Joseph runs Aaron Rodgers out of Green Bay

Date: January 8th, 2023.

The Lions went 4-19-1 in their first 24 games under Dan Campbell, losing two of the last three by a combined score of 53-6. From a distance, Campbell looked and sounded like a cross between Matt Patricia and Matt Millen. It appeared that he would not survive the 2022 season. The Lions turned things around later in that year, but lots of awful teams “turn things around” when everyone’s job is in jeopardy. They needed to end the season with a true statement of purpose.

Kerby Joseph delivered it.

Trying to orchestrate a fourth-quarter comeback, Rodgers was picked off by Lions rookie safety Kerby Joseph. It was actually the second time Joseph got him in the game, but the first was erased by a penalty that hadn't affected the play. But with the latter takeaway, Joseph became just the second player, joining former Bears linebacker Brian Urlacher, to intercept Rodgers three times. The other two came in Detroit's 15-9 victory in Week 9.

Oozing with confidence, Joseph gave away the secret to his success.

"You know, Aaron Rodgers was my favorite quarterback growing up," Joseph said. "The Packers were my favorite team. So I've been watching him my whole life. That's kind of how I be knowing how to get in his head and see his eyes and stuff."

As for the possibility of Rodgers retiring, Joseph doesn't buy it. And, to be blunt, he's hoping Rodgers doesn't.

"That's crazy," Joseph said. "If that's his last pass, I'm saving that ball and I'm going to send it to him so he can sign it. But if he don't sign it, I understand. But I doubt he's going to retire. He's probably going to try to come back, and if he comes back, more plays for me." – Justin Rogers, Detroit News, January 9th, 2023.

Joseph’s interception gave the Lions their first winning season in five years. It was also the last play of Aaron Rodgers’ Packers career, which had obvious symbolic value for a franchise that has spent over 60 years in the Packers’ shadow.

The Lions have enjoyed plenty of memorable moments in the last two seasons. But they are still waiting for the moment that fulfills the promise of this one.

(The Justin Rogers article excerpted above is behind a rather insistent paywall; hence no link. If you like Rogers’ Lions coverage, consider subscribing to his Substack.)

4. Megatron’s 329-yard game

Date: October 27th, 2013.

In the lead-up to the game, Cowboys receiver Dez Bryant made a Monday radio appearance on 103.3 FM ESPN in Dallas. Although Bryant meant no disrespect, he told listeners he wasn't willing to call [Calvin] Johnson the NFL's best wide receiver ahead of their clash at Ford Field that Sunday.

"I believe I can do whatever he can do," Bryant said. "It's just a pride thing. When it comes to football, just being on the field, it's a mindset and having a mentality.

"I honestly believe when I'm there, I'll be feeling like there's nothing I can't do. Whatever the coaches ask me to do, I'm going to do it. I always feel like there's more."

Those comments quickly traveled back to the Lions' Allen Park practice facility. Though outwardly, Johnson appeared to pay them no mind, even after catching wind of them through members of the local media. Instead, Johnson anticipated Dallas' game plan, visualizing how they would defend him and how he would attack physical Cowboys cornerback Brandon Carr, who would be tasked with covering Johnson most of the day.

"I just remember Calvin in practice. He was real quiet," Lions left guard Rob Sims said. "He didn't really say much, but he was just going about his business. Then to see him perform in that game the way he did, it was one of those moments that you realize you're truly in the presence of the G.O.A.T."

Defeating the Cowboys in Detroit was a milestone for the Lions, who improved to 5-3. The first thing Johnson could think about after was shutting up his auntie, who is a huge Cowboys fan.

Johnson also didn't have to say much about Bryant's pregame comments. He let his actions speak. Despite Bryant playing well -- scoring two touchdowns off three receptions for 72 yards -- their level of play wasn't comparable. At one point during the third quarter, Bryant flapped his arms and screamed at Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo on the sideline, after not being made the intended receiver on a play, which he later described as positive emotion.

"Of course, it adds a little gunpowder," Johnson said, laughing off Bryant's statement. "It just adds a fuel to the fire and it makes that fire that much bigger when they've got to deal with it.” – Excerpted from Eric Woodyard, ESPN, August 6th, 2021.

Calvin Johnson’s 329-yard game … wasn’t great? I mean, of course it was great. But it should have been better.

Watch the video above. A ball bounces off Johnson’s chest straight to defender Sean Lee for a Cowboys interception. He fumbles after a later catch, and the ball pops right into the hands of cornerback Brendon Carr. That’s two turnovers on passes delivered straight to him. He gets tackled at the one-yard line twice, the second time with 28 seconds left and the Lions trailing. The Lions end up with touchdowns both times, but the goal-line stops decreased their margin for error.

Johnson made some impossible-looking plays that afternoon. He was the best player on the field. The Lions would not have come close to beating the Cowboys without him. But they would have beaten them a little easier if not for the mistakes. There’s something uniquely “Lions” about a milestone game that contains several major mistakes and is barely enough to produce a victory.

Lions history is defined by breathtaking athletes who were denied a chance to even sniff the championship stage. We know them by their highlights and their stats. But do we really know them? We’ll get to Barry Sanders in a few paragraphs. Billy Sims looked like an all-time great before his knee exploded. Lem Barney, one of the most dynamic players of the early Super Bowl era, is little more than a Pro Football Reference page to folks under 60. Bubba Baker unofficially recorded 56.5 sacks in his first three seasons. Here’s what little remains of his accomplishments.

It’s tempting to doubt the capital-G greatness of such players – to describe them as “exciting” or “talented,” which tacitly suggests that their accomplishments never matched their potential – when their teams inevitably fell well short of even approaching the Super Bowl.

Megatron will be remembered decades from now for this game and for The Calvin Johnson Rule, a moment of fundamentalist rules-mongering run amok. It’s not a tarnished legacy, but a tantalizing and frustrating one. In another set of circumstances, Johnson (Sanders, Barney) could have been the GOAT, and the NFL might have been inclined to bend the rules to accommodate him rather than deny him.

3. Orlovsky’s Blooper

Date: October 12th, 2008.

The Lions were a dreary franchise for most of the second half of the 20th century, but not a comically hopeless one. They had some strong seasons in the 1960s, were .500 for most of the 1970s, had a flicker of life in the early 1980s and made the playoffs six times in the 1990s. Even in their worst years, the Lions were more likely to be ignored than laughed at.

Then they hired general manager/showrunner Matt Millen, a bellicose linebacker-turned-color-commentator whose personality was a cross between weak-tea John Madden and wannabe Bill Parcells. Millen, dictatorially inept in every phase of management, plunged the Lions into the worst era in the franchise’s history. The Lions went 31-97 under Millen’s leadership, culminating in an 0-16 2008 season. Millen was fired in Week 3 of that year. Orlovsky, a former fifth-round pick pressed into service after an injury to Jon Kitna, was making his first career start when he did … this:

The thing Orlovsky was known most for as an NFL quarterback isn’t the thing fans bother to ask about when they see him out and about. According to Orlovsky, people don’t really bring up his infamous running out the back of the end zone safety anymore.

Which is kind of surprising.

Orlovsky joined The Dan Patrick Show Friday morning while making his way to Baltimore for the Ravens Saturday afternoon home game with the Cleveland Browns via Amtrak. It prompted Patrick to wonder what other people on the train are likely to approach Orlovsky with when they see him.

“Most people that come up to me say one of three things. Number one, ‘I love how much you and Stephen A. argue.’ That’s a huge thing,” Orlovsky said. “Two, they say, ‘Love your show’ or ‘Love your work’ which I’m super grateful for. Or three, they’ll bring up, ‘Hey, that really wasn’t a fart on McAfee show, was it?’ Those are like the three most prevalent things.”

Sure, it’s been more than 16 years. But the infamous safety doesn’t even make the top three? Who would have guessed that?

“They’re not bringing up stepping out of the end zone anymore?” Patrick asked with surprise.

“Not much, it really doesn’t happen,” Orlovsky claimed. “Now, mainly because I’ve probably had a couple more embarrassing things happen since then. But no, the running out of the end zone has not come up often. Here and there, but not nearly as much as it did two or three years ago.” – Brandon Contes, Awful Announcing, January 3rd, 2025.

Backup catchers ended up becoming some of major league baseball’s most beloved broadcast personalities. Bob Uecker. Joe Garagiola. Tim McCarver (a former starter who spent years as a backup in Philly). Backup catchers who enjoyed long careers were usually light hitters who excelled at managing pitchers. They combined the skills of an advance scout (knowing the tendencies of every hitter in the league) with those of an effective psychologist (McCarver spent years in Philly preventing Steve Carlton from going full Aaron Rodgers). They understood “inside baseball” and could communicate it to laymen.

Orlovsky is the modern NFL’s Uecker. He’s self-aware about how unimpressive his career was. He isn’t afraid to ham it up for the cameras. But he knows the game like only someone who had to endure an 0-16 season – who had to sit through the meetings, go to the practices, study the gameplans – truly can.

Orlavsksy’s safety wasn’t even a major part of the game story in the Lions’ 12-10 loss to the Vikings in 2008: a What’s-a-Catch call (sigh) turned an apparent Calvin Johnson reception into a fumble, and a 42-yard pass interference penalty set up a game-winning Vikings field goal. Also forgotten: Megatron dropped a catchable deep ball, which would have gotten the Lions out of peril, one play before Orlovsky’s safety. But by the end of that season, the Vikings loss was just one of 16, and Orlovsky was just a guy thrust by managerial incompetence into an awful situation.

The 2008 Lions were both terrible and unlucky. Orlovsky’s blooper was hilarious, but it might have been forgotten if the Lions ended up as just another 2-14 team. But then, Orlovsky might have been forgotten, too.

2. Barry Sanders Punctuates a Playoff Blowout

Date: January 5th, 1992.

[Wayne] Fontes: “We’re up 30 or whatever it was. And I went up to [offensive coordinator] Dave Levy, I said, ‘Look, let’s just give the ball to Barry.’ And he said, ‘They got nine to 10 guys up front. We can throw the ball all day long.’ I said just give it to him anyway. And I remember giving him the ball, and he must have made 11 guys miss. I mean, it was amazing. And he went right, he went left, he went right, he went middle, he went back and forth. And finally he went whatever it was, (47) yards for a touchdown.”

[Kicker Eddie] Murray: “I was fortunate to see Barry make runs like that at practice, and he would just nonchalantly throw the ball back to the ballboy, and we would go ‘What the heck was that?’ And that’s kind of what that play was. It was like, ‘Oh, my God, how the heck did he get out of that pile?’ And everybody like froze. It was just one of those things, it was a Barry moment, and you just come away shaking your head and appreciate and respect just how good of a player Barry was. He really didn’t do much until then, but that one play just solidified the iconic player that he ended up becoming for the Lions.”

Fontes: “I remember him coming back to the sideline — I said, ‘Barry, that’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’ And all he did was smile like that’s what he’s supposed to do. He was amazing.” – as told to Dave Birkett, Detroit Free Press, October 15th, 2016.

Birkett interviewed Fontes, Murray and other 1991 Lions in 2016 because that 38-6 drubbing of the Cowboys was the team’s last playoff win at that time. Yes, 25 years had passed between playoff victories. And another seven would pass after that. Beating the Cowboys in the playoffs was a landmark moment for a franchise with very few of them in the last three-quarters of a century. And while Sanders had many runs which were more important from an in-game standpoint, his touchdown to pound a stake through the heart of the Cowboys was as breathtaking a mix of power and grace as any of them.

I watched this play from a bar in Orchard Park, New York. A pal and I tried and failed to score tickets to the Bills blowout of the Chiefs earlier that day; we settled in at a nearby tavern to gorge on beer and wings among jubilant fans. The Wowboys were just emerging from the wreckage of their mid-1980s collapse. They would soon torment the Bills and everyone else, consigning the Sanders-era Lions, their run-’n’-shoot offense and Chris Berman’s “Rasputin” jokes to history’s I Love the 90s discount rack.

But on that Sunday evening, the Lions were the far better team, their victory warmed the heart of a tipsy young Iggles fan, and it was easy to imagine Sanders leading the Lions into a decade of glory.

1. Lions Trade Bobby Layne

Date: October 6th, 1958.

According to the Free Press, Layne heard about the trade while he was at Detroit Metropolitan Airport, waiting for his wife to arrive from their Texas home. "I thought I would see him earlier in the day when he stopped in the office for his paycheck, but he didn't show," [head coach George] Wilson said. "Luckily, I was able to reach him at the airport just before the announcement of the trade was made."

Layne eventually spoke to the press while packing for a late-night flight to Pittsburgh. "It's just one of those things," he said. "I guess they always work out for the best."

"But actually, it hurts me," Layne added. "It hurts quite a bit. … I haven't got much complaint I guess…but regardless of what people think of me, I gave my heart and soul to play football. I really tried to play my best." (The breaks in the quote are from the original newspaper story.)

"I've got an awful lot of friends here and I hate to leave," Layne added.

Teammates reacted with shock and dismay. "It makes me sick," linebacker Joe Schmidt said. "I think it's a big mistake. He's still a damned good quarterback." – Me, Bleacher Report, October 12th, 2016.

You can read that old Bleacher Report feature for more of my Bobby Layne musings. The tldr: Layne was injury-plagued, and his drinking had become a major detriment to the team. The Layne trade was the 1950s equivalent of the Broncos’ Russell Wilson trade, with booze subbing for Wilson’s fame-brained loopiness: Layne, who physically poked the cops who arrested him for drunk driving, probably gave himself a few imaginary High Fives after closing time. The Curse of Bobby Layne was a column hook from the early-2000s that became retconned into Lions fan lore. There are layers upon layers of hogwash covering the truth of what happened in 1958.

And yet the Layne trade is an undeniable pivot point in Lions history. They were one of the NFL’s best franchises before it. They were Rust Belt nobodies for several generations after it.

We’ve been talking a lot about ghosts throughout this series. The Giants are now haunted by the Bill Parcells/Tom Coughlin eras, desperately trying to replicate their past instead of moving on. The Eagles – and all of Philly sports – were haunted by Chuck Bednarik for decades. Washington football escaped Sammy Baugh’s shadow in the 1980s and is now trying to escape decades of Dan Snyder’s mismanagement and malfeasance. George Halas’ descendants still stumble in his footsteps in Chicago.

Layne, however, may be the orneriest of the specters haunting a current franchise. He represents a golden age for a city that would crumble a few decades later and has only started to reinvigorate itself. He’s semi-mythical, a character from a tall tale whose tragic flaws look charming in black-and-white. I sincerely hope that Dan Campbell and the current Lions exorcise him, and Matt Millen and all their other demons, and rewrite the last 60 years of Lions history as one long preamble to a new, modern, real Golden Age.

But until they do, the Layne trade remains the Lions equivalent of the sacking of Rome.

Too Deep Housekeeping

Want to hear Matt Lombardo and I discuss “baseball naps” and argue about the best and worst summertime sporting events? Check out the latest Between the Hashmarks podcast!

The Summer Sports We HATE

I’m planning an Independence Week mailbag. Look for an email and chat thread soliciting questions soon!

The Signature Moments series will march on with the Packers and Vikings after that. Unless there’s Trey Hendrickson trade-level news, I don’t plan to force-feed current NFL chatter to your Inbox. We’ll have training camp for that.

Training camps open on — dear lord — July 15th for some teams, and Too Deep Zone will get you pumped up with a two-part Walkthrough Giant-Sized Annual right about then. Aaron Schatz’s FTN Football Almanac 2025 should be available right about then as well. You can preorder yours now!

Now I am off to the pool, or maybe the shore, or maybe just drinking a beer on the front porch. Early summer is a precious time for an NFL writer with a schoolteacher spouse. Catch you in a few days!