Fire Mooch! Gut The Team! And Hurry Up -- There's A Game Sunday

I know what most of you Lions fans want to do this morning.

Fire Steve Mariucci. Tar and feather offensive coordinator Ted Tollner. Put the linebackers’ faces on a milk carton. Send out all-points bulletins on the running game. Show Matt Millen the door, and tell him not to let it hit him between the back pockets as he steps through it.

Then you’ll start thinking about the Arizona Cardinals, and how the Lions need a win to get back to 4-5 and still make a race of it in the NFC North, otherwise known as The Bears and Three Chumps.

Back on August 29, when I attended a portion of the Lions’ Monday night exhibition against the St. Louis Rams, I saw a football performance so hideous in its ineffectiveness that I thought it would be a minor miracle if the Honolulu Blue Boys won as many as four games all season. To say my mind hasn’t changed would be not only accurate, but would qualify you for Understatement of the Year.

What else can you say about a team that cannot run the ball, block, throw downfield, stop below average running attacks when there is a relic starting at quarterback for the first time since the Nixon administration, and constantly comes out flat in games that are just begging to be won, especially in a year when all the usual suspects in the division are down and out?

The Lions are a team bereft of hope, playing boring, feeble, pathetically impotent football in a year when both the Vikings and Packers are down, flopping around the floor like fish out of water. They may never have an opportunity quite like this one for quite some time -- snatching a division by its short hairs and not letting go. But they are letting it slip away.

The Chicago Bears aren’t.

Da Bears are 5-3, mainly because they are beating teams that are beatable (re: the Lions) and they obviously sense that the NFC North is there for the conquering. They are doing it with a rookie quarterback, a bruising middle linebacker, a serviceable running back, and not much else. No fancy-shmancy first round wide receivers. No hotshot QB taken in the top three of the entire draft. No supposed Pro Bowl-caliber running back. No sought-after head coach.

But there they sit -- 5-3 and ahead in the division by two games.

The Lions, on the other hand, still throw three-yard passes on fourth-and-seven.

They still cannot open up a hole for Kevin Jones wider than a donut.

They still have no imagination offensively.

They still have no concept of what winning football is all about, even though they have some players who have been to the promised land.

They still have no leadership.

But you will all be there, in front of the television, or -- gasp -- in Ford Field, watching with baited breath. Me, too.

It’s like what Jim Bouton said at the end of his famous book, "Ball Four" (just pretend the baseball is the Lions): "You see, you spend most of your life gripping a baseball, and then you realize it was the other way around the whole time."

So, who’s got that scouting report on the Cardinals? Anyone? Anyone?