What if the Detroit Lions had drafted JaMarcus Russell?

Part 4 | The Repeat

So, there it is. The Lions went 0-16 in 2007 with JaMarcus Russell at the helm. Can they replicate their failure by doing it again, this time matching their real-life winless season from 2008?

Of course they can.

—wait

what was that 49ers score again?

Russell: 13/18, 268 yards, two touchdowns

no way

no way. no no no no no

There is no way.

The team with the worst record in NFL history drafts one of the worst first-round quarterbacks in NFL history and that quarterback leads them to a victory in a season where the actual team didn’t win a game?

Honestly, once I got to this point in the simulation, I was pretty confident that I knew where it was heading. The team would go 0-16, we’d all have a good laugh and that would be it.

But it said “no.” Frankenstein defied its master. It refused to be what its creator said it would be. It didn’t limit itself to expectations and rather decided that it would be something more.

Obviously, there are reasons for this. The simulation is based on stats and Russell’s 2008 13:8 touchdown to interception ratio is significantly better than his 2007 statline. The simulated 49ers were quarterbacked by Shaun Hill instead of real-life starter J.T. O’Sullivan (which Lions fans will recognize clearly as the better decision anyway). The real-life Lions lost five of their games by only a single possession, so they just as easily could have ended up 1-15 or 2-14 in the first place.

But still, at the end of the day, this game is just a simulation. A set of one and zeroes made to calculate odds and predict outcomes based on those odds and even though these Lions might have been the worst professional football team ever assembled, occasionally the odds would still favor them because that is the nature of things.

If we do live in a simluation, as Elon Musk suggests, we will sometimes win no matter how incapable we are. The universe is unfair, and we are thankful.

This is not to suggest, as Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide posits despite repeated suffering, that we live in “the best of all possible worlds,” nor that the world is good or even balanced, but rather that sometimes it throws us a bone, even when it has no reason to.

Failure is easy, but repeated failure is hard, and that’s what makes it special. The 2008 Lions aren’t venerated because they were bad at football, they are remembered for their unique ability to fail, over and over again, to defy the odds in a manner that could never be celebrated. But even they eventually turned it around. No winless streak can last forever.

Sometimes I think about Paris Lenon. He was a linebacker on that winless 2008 Lions team. He started all 16 games and led the team in tackles. After the season he signed with the Rams, who lost their first seven games in 2009. After 23 straight losses, he finally got a win in week eight of the 2009 season… against the Detroit Lions.

I decided to end the simluation here, because all simulations have a measure of mercy.

Next: Remembering 1966's 'Game of the Century'

Special thanks goes to Jon Bois, whose voice and style, especially in his Breaking Madden series, were an inspiration for this piece. If you like this, please click the link above for another story and follow us on Twitter at @DetroitJockCity. Thanks.