Welcome to another installment of my Detroit Lions predictions roundup for the upcoming NFL season. I’m going rapid-fire in this edition, squeezing in as many prognosticators as I can before game 1 this Sunday against the Arizona Cardinals. To qualify there has to be some rationale behind the prediction, not just a record thrown out there with no context.

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USA Today (Nate Davis): 3-13

We’ll start from the bottom and work our way up. Davis has the Lions taking a three-win step back this season. Only a brief doom and gloom view of the schedule is given as analysis. At least he partially backs up his thought process with his opinion of the rest of the division. He has the Vikings, Bears, and Packers winning 32 games combined in 2019, the most by any three teams in the same division by a mile.

The problem is, even if the Lions go 0-6 in the NFC North this season, they would still need to go 3-7 outside of the division for this prediction to come true. Did you know the Lions are 22-14 in the division since 2013? Excuse me for a second…

Sorry, just had to get that one out. That division record actually made me proud to be a Lions fan for a second. Anyway, back to this Davis character. According to his own predictions, the Lions play 6 (!) games against teams that will finish with 5 or fewer wins this season. So much for that daunting schedule. Something just doesn’t add up here. If they merely split those 6 games, they would still need to go winless in the rest of their games to hit 3-13. Not buying it. Schedule talk. Good times.

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Sports Illustrated (Conor Orr): 4-12

Orr acknowledges the improvements made to the TE position, and complements the offensive line talent. But yet again, we have a national pundit who thinks the NFC North will be a murderers row that will manhandle the Lions. I don’t think this division will be nearly as strong as Orr and many other outlets believe, so I set out to find some info to cool off this NFC North hype.

A while back I was listening to The Dan Lebatard Show with Stugotz, as I do every day. I love that show in ways I can’t describe. Anyway, I remember them interviewing someone from Football Outsiders. I believe it was Aaron Schatz. When asked about the team most due for a regression this upcoming season, his answer was the Chicago Bears. After paying Football Outsiders a visit I found something even more interesting. In the site’s latest playoff odds report, all four NFC North teams were given an average win total between 8.3 and 8.0, based on the results of 50,000 season simulations. The Lions led the way at 8.3, for the record. FIRST DIVISION TITLE SINCE 93′ BABYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!

Man, it feels good to be on top. All kidding aside, I do feel like this division could be a jumbled mess from top to bottom. I’ll frame it another way: The Lions are more likely to win the division than to finish 4-12. 

Detroit Free Press (Dave Birkett): 8-8

Now that’s my kind of prediction! I will close my analysis with a little hometown perspective. Birkett did a game-by-game breakdown of how he thinks the upcoming season will go, and it’s about as reasonable as I’ve seen as far as predictions are concerned. No wacky upsets. No “same old Lions” nonsense. Just a team with a second-year head coach and a modestly improved roster taking that next step. 

Birkett’s predictions are a callback to a mindset I have always taken with middle-of-the-pack type teams such as this year’s Lions. There are always going to be a handful of games you are expected to win, and a handful of games you are expected to lose. The in-between games are what make or break your season.

Birkett has the Lions taking care of business against the likes of Arizona, Tampa Bay, Washington, and the Giants. I concur. He also doesn’t get cute and pick the Lions to upset Philadelphia or Kansas City. Nor does he expect the Lions to win any road games in the division. No argument here. That puts the team at 4-5 in the above assumptions.

Now, how many of the remaining seven games will they manage to win? These are all games that will likely be spreads of less than five points. Can the Lions steal one from a much more talented Chargers team in the home opener as they deal with injuries and holdouts to their star players? Can they survive a trip to Denver just before Christmas and make it home in time to wrap all the stuff they bought on Amazon?

I like the in-between games exercise. It keeps you from worrying too much when you lose to the really good teams, because you expected that to happen. It also makes it easier to stay in perspective after beating a bad team, because you expected that too. The in-between games are almost like a playoff series dispersed across the season. If you lose one, you have to win one to get back to even. If you win more of those than you lose, you probably had a season in which you exceeded expectations. When the dust settles on the season, I think 8-8 sounds about right for this team. Ah, mediocrity. You don’t know what you got till it’s gone.

I wanted to fire a little more rapidly with my rapid-fire analysis, but so it goes. That concludes my debut series of articles here at The Warm Take, and I thank you for reading. This site is a work in progress, but I am quite proud of how it has come along. I started this process green to everything on the technical side of building a web site. All I knew was that I love sports, I love to write, and I needed to find a way to make this project happen.

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