Word: nfl
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...team's record says it all. The Lions are the first in NFL history to start a season 0-15, and by losing 31-21 in Green Bay on Sunday, they go down as the worst NFL team ever. Only the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers had previously finished a year without a win, but they did it in an era when teams played 14, not 16, regular-season games. Plus, those Bucs were an expansion team in their first year of existence; the Lions have been around since the Great Depression, which for their fans hasn't really ended...
Another word would be shocking. Football experts all agree that in today's "any given Sunday" NFL - in which every team seems to have a decent shot to win, and in which a salary-cap structure and a draft that gives the worst teams access to the best young talent in a young man's game, create leaguewide parity - going winless is awfully hard to do. "It's mind-boggling to me," says Troy Aikman, the Fox Sports analyst and Hall of Fame ex-quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys, who lived through a nightmarish 1-15 season himself...
...more than anything, terrible management is to blame. Former president Matt Millen, a former NFL linebacker who joined the team in 2001 and was finally fired this season after a multitude of public fan protests, strung together years of failed draft picks to dig Detroit into its current hole. Although every armchair football aficionado knows that defensive- and offensive-line play wins championships (or at least a game or two), Millen repeatedly spent top draft choices on low-impact wide receivers, despite not having a good quarterback to throw them the ball. The low point: in 2003 Millen used...
...promised to bring Martin Mayhew and Tom Lewland, two Millen-era execs who helped assemble the '08 disaster, back for another year. The Lions' coach, Rod Marinelli, hired his son-in-law Joe Barry to be his defensive coordinator. How has that worked out? The Lions have had the NFL's worst defense since Barry took over two years...
...other player. Still, he's angry at the Lions. "In today's game, with free agency and everything else, don't tell me you can't win one game," says Wood, who was an assistant defensive coach for the Bucs in the '90s and recently coached in the NFL's now defunct European league. "Uh-uh. That's not acceptable...