My assignment on that unseasonably warm January afternoon was to write about the losing team, so I found myself in a windowless room in the bowels of RFK Stadium in Washington, DC, where I watched a portly football coach clamber onto a platform for a press conference.
Writing about losing teams is never fun, let alone a team that just got defeated in their first (and until this Sunday, only) appearance in an NFC championship game. But Wayne Fontes was that portly coach. He was fun, exuberant and always had something interesting to say.
Fontes looked at the microphone, then exhaled deeply before exclaiming, “Wow! God! Was that like the last game or something?
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Four months before Fontes and the Detroit Lions were battered by Washington 41-10 in the 1991 NFC title game, they had been hammered 45-0 by the same team in the season opener. But between those two games, so many things had gone right for Detroit. They had hope.
The Lions won their last six regular-season games before defeating the Dallas Cowboys 38-6 in their playoff opener at home. These were the emerging Cowboys of Jerry Jones, Jimmy Johnson, Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith and Michael Irvin. A year later they would win it all.
At halftime against Washington, Detroit trailed only 17-10. But the Lions were more or less overrun in the second half, with Washington scoring 24 unanswered points and winning with ease. Barry Sanders, Detroit’s spectacular running back, gained 44 yards rushing and lost two yards on his final carry.
“The holes just weren’t there,” Sanders said later at his locker.
Fontes had already apologized to Metro Detroit “for our poor efforts,” and Washington was a great team that won Super Bowl XXVI two weeks later by beating the Buffalo Bills outright. Despite the loss, the Lions were considered a team on the rise.
That was January 12, 1992 – 32 years ago, half a lifetime for me – and the Lions didn’t get back into the NFC championship game until last Sunday, when they beat Tampa Bay in a different and newer stadium in Detroit than the one where they had Dallas laughed at. It has been a while.
The Lions are one of only four active NFL teams to have never appeared in a Super Bowl, but, founded in 1928 in Ohio as the Portsmouth Spartans, they have been around much 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 headlined: Meet the NFL team that might never make it to the Super Bowl.
At the time it seemed that the lions were cursed. Look what happened to poor old Fontes: He led the Lions to the playoffs in 1993, 1994 and 1995, but they lost three wild-card games, the first two to Brett Favre and the Packers, the third a dismal defeat at the hands of the Eagles, who blew a 51-7 lead at Veterans Stadium en route to a 58-37 drubbing.
Sanders retired in 1998 at the age of 30, and the Lions entered obscurity, appearing in the playoffs only three times between 2000 and 2022. Detroit lost at least ten games in 14 of those 23 seasons, hitting a low by losing all sixteen games. games they played in 2008 – an NFL first at the time.
Even current head coach Dan Campbell struggled for success after taking the job in 2021, losing his first eight games and only avoiding defeat in a 16-16 draw with Pittsburgh in his first 11 games as coach. The 2021 Lions won their first game 5th of December.
“To win, we have to play damn perfect, and that’s on us,” Campbell said after Detroit fell to 0-8 following an abysmal 44-6 loss to the Eagles on Oct. 31, 2021.
When Campbell, a hard-working Texan, took the Detroit job, he surprised some NFL followers and made others giggle (or wince) when he said, “If you knock us down, we’ll get up, and move on.” We bit off a kneecap on the way up.”
Fontes took a different approach when he became Detroit’s permanent head coach in 1988. He took care of his players, ordered pasta for lunch and installed a TV in the locker room (this was back in the day). He treated the lions as if they were first class.
Fontes also made them play better. 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 didn’t lose again until they faced Washington at RFK Stadium in January.
Fontes, now 83, was contacted by a Detroit radio station last week 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 got the monkey off my back,” Fontes said.
He told the hosts of WWJ Newsradio how he had noticed an increase in interest in the Lions at the sports bar where he saw them play this year – and how bettors would be wise to take the Lions to beat Tampa Bay, even if this meant losing six and a half points. (Detroit would win, 31-23.)
How similar the stories are: an energetic, popular coach, with plenty of help from a quarterback once considered a dropout (Jared Goff, the current QB, was a No. 1 overall draft pick of the Rams), propels a team into one Super Bowl win.
Sunday’s NFC title game will take place in San Francisco against the determined 49ers, and the Lions are not favored to win this game either. Perhaps this game eludes Detroit just as it did 32 years ago, when Washington took a big lead in the first 20 minutes of the second half.
The Lions are just seven-point underdogs, not 14-point longshots like they were when they played in front of 55,585 (with no no-shows) at RFK Stadium on that sunny afternoon in 1992. But Detroit has looked solid so far this season, and the Niners came close to losing to the Packers last week. This time, the Lions’ head coach may not have to regret a poor performance or apologize after the fact.
I’m rooting for them – not just Campbell, Goff and the current team, but also Fontes, Kramer, Sanders (who now has a statue outside Ford Field), plus the folks in the Motor City who have been waiting for some time to see the professional team in town will be good again.