Niyo: With everything against them, Lions must win now
Seattle — Their fans are wailing. The media, too.
But the Lions spent the week whispering while they worked. And tonight we’ll find out what they have to say for themselves, and their season, facing the defending NFC champs in the NFL’s loudest venue.
The Seattle Seahawks will bring the noise, you can count on that at CenturyLink Field, where the crowd has set world records for stadium noise and last winter approximated an earthquake in that comeback win in the NFC Championship game.
And if the Lions can’t handle it, if they can’t handle the resurgent Seahawks or their notorious 12th Man fans, they just might find the clamor unbearable when they return home.
Winless in Seattle is no place you want to be. But that’s exactly where this team is right now. And if you thought the odds were stacked against the Lions now, consider that only one team in NFL history has started the season 0-4 and still made the playoffs. That was the Bobby Ross-led San Diego Chargers in 1992, the year after the Lions got their first — and only — playoff win in the Super Bowl era.
“It’s not dire,” insisted Lions safety Glover Quin, easily the team’s best player thus far this season. “There’s still a lot of football left. We’ve just got to find a way to get a win. I mean, that’s all it is. It’s not dire. We just gotta find a way to get a win, man.”
‘Crazy loud’
But here, in Seattle? And now, with the Seahawks – listed as 91/2-point favorites tonight — coming off a shutout win at Chicago and hosting “Monday Night Football,” where they’ve won nine in a row dating to 2004?
“I always tell people, ‘You have to put this on your bucket list,’” Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson said. “It’s one of those things that you have to go. If you love sports — even if you don’t love sports, you just love venues — it’s a place that you have to come and watch a game.”
Detroit News predictions: Lions vs. Seahawks
Easy for him to say, since the 12th Man is on his side here at a 13-year-old venue designed to be both visually impressive and audibly intimidating, what with the clamshell roof overhangs trapping almost all the noise.
“It’ll be crazy loud,” said Wilson, who is 23-2 as a starter at home in his career. “It will be electric in the stadium.”
And if the Lions aren’t prepared, they could be toast.
The last time the Lions visited here, they blew an early 17-0 lead as Matthew Stafford threw five interceptions in the middle of his rookie season. (The last was returned for a touchdown in the final minute by current Lions teammate Josh Wilson.)
Can’t hear you
The last time the Seahawks hosted a Monday night game, meanwhile, was in December 2013, when a 9-2 New Orleans Saints team showed up and got earholed. Seattle won it, 34-7, limiting the Saints’ offense — the same one the Lions and ex-Saints assistant Joe Lombardi are trying to run, with little success — to a paltry 188 yards.
Lombardi, the Lions’ offensive coordinator, and his players spent the week trying to tune out the noise, in the hopes of avoiding something similar.
“Every time we play on the road, we act like we can’t hear anything during practice,” Lombardi said. “They play a bunch of music, and if we’re out at walkthrough, we just whisper so you barely can hear and the quarterback has to move around and talk to everybody.”
Off the field, it’s really no different, as the Lions try to ignore all the angry analysis of their ugly start.
“Well, I’m not reading the papers a whole lot,” joked Lombardi, well aware of the calls to strip him of his play-calling duties.
Head coach Jim Caldwell has steadfastly backed him publicly, despite the league-worst rushing attack and an offense that has scored on just eight of 33 drives this season.
“Anytime you have a stretch like we’ve had, everything comes into question,” Caldwell said. “That’s the nature of our business.”
But so is this: Lose tonight, here in the Valley of Din, and the noise only gets louder.
john.niyo@detroitnews.com
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