Sportsfrog.com

I suppose I shouldn’t let the end of the Matt Millen era in Detroit go without mention.

Living in Las Vegas, you’re at a crossroads of NFL fandom. It’s weird, but there’s not even close to a team here which could be considered a “hometown team”. The Chargers are likely the most popular, but even then are probably only the favorite among no more than 10 or 15 percent of Las Vegans.

So this is neutral ground and there is no sense of shared experience, but best of all, no real rivalries. You’re far more liable to hear a Broncos fan commiserate with a Chiefs fan over the sorry state of football in Kansas City than you would anywhere within 300 miles of Denver. (Which I actually heard twice last week.)

So when meeting someone for the first time and the topic of favorite NFL teams come up and I admit that I’m a lifelong Lions fans, inevitably the first thing the other person does is give me the kind of sad look similar to if I had said I had recently had a death in the family. The second was almost always, “What’s the deal with keeping Matt Millen around?”

To which I never really had an adequate response. I mean, what can you say? Fans tried boycotts, protests, civil disobedience, there was an infamous game against Cincinnati at the end of the 2005 season where Lions fans wore orange to try and shame the Ford family into firing Millen. Nothing worked. Eventually, you have to come to terms with the fact that fans don’t own the team, owners own the team. Either you suffer with that or you don’t, but real fans suffer. There are a lot of real fans in Detroit.

And now, with my favorite football team no better off than it was yesterday despite Millen’s ouster, at least I never have to answer THAT question again. And maybe there’s hope. A new GM will be hired in the next few months. If he’s anything like the last few the Lions will continue to suck, but there’s always that chance of catching lightning in a bottle.

For the first time last weekend, I went to the Lions “NFL bar” in Las Vegas. Another cool thing about being a neutral NFL city is that bars all over town adopt an NFL team and show only their teams games when they’re on. So you can go somewhere and feel like you’re watching the game at a bar in Detroit, even 2,000 miles away from your home. The Lions bar is a small hole in the wall, but manned every Sunday by diehards who show up every week without fail and hope for the best.

Given the news that Millen got the boot, I think it might have been kismet that I watched the latest debacle on Sunday with them because I felt the loss a lot harder.

When watching Lions games at a bar with a whole of lot of other games on and a whole lot of other fans from other teams, it’s easier to keep a brave detachment from how you really feel. And when the nicer fans of some successful team offer their condolences on another shitty performance, you put on a brave face and laugh off the poor “Lie-downs” when really all that’s running through your mind is that your life is half over and there’s a very good chance you might go your entire life without seeing the team you love win a championship.

So this past Sunday, it felt really good to be able to vent with a whole bunch of strangers who care as much as I do. We didn’t know it at the time, but it really was the last straw in the Millen era and I’m glad I got to share it with them. Hopefully, it was the absolute nadir of an era that saw the Lions turned into a national laughingstock. And when I see them again in two weeks for the Oct. 5 game against Chicago, we’ll finally have the gift of hope, which will make what is likely to be another cruel season at least somewhat bearable.