I was at the Lions’ last NFC title game in 1992. It did not end well

Photograph: Doug Mills/AP

My assignment on that unseasonably warm January afternoon was to write about the losing team, which is why I found myself in a windowless room in the bowels at RFK Stadium in Washington DC, watching a portly football coach clamber atop a platform for a news conference.

Writing about losing teams is never much fun, let alone about a team that had just been routed in their first (and, until this Sunday, only) appearance in an NFC championship game. But Wayne Fontes was that portly coach. He was fun, ebullient, always with something interesting to say.

Fontes faced the microphone, then exhaled, deeply, before exclaiming, “Wow! God! Did that look like the last game, or what?”

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Four months before Fontes and the Detroit Lions were battered in the 1991 NFC title game by Washington, 41-10, they’d been hammered by the same team in the season opener, 45-0. But so many things had gone right for Detroit between those two games. They had hope.

The Lions won their last six regular-season games, then trounced the Dallas Cowboys, 38-6, in their playoff opener at home. These were the ascendant Cowboys of Jerry Jones, Jimmy Johnson, Troy Aikman, Emmitt Smith and Michael Irvin. They’d win it all a year later.

At half-time against Washington, Detroit only trailed 17-10. But the Lions were more or less overrun in the second half, with Washington scoring 24 unanswered points to win with ease. Barry Sanders, Detroit’s spectacular running back, gained 44 yards rushing, losing two yards on his last carry.

“The holes just weren’t there,” Sanders said later at his locker.

Fontes had already apologized to Metro Detroit “for our poor effort,” and Washington were a tremendous team that won Super Bowl XXVI two weeks later by roundly defeating the Buffalo Bills. The loss notwithstanding, the Lions were regarded as a team on the rise.

That was 12 January 1992 – 32 years ago,…

Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/lions-last-nfc-title-game-090003674.html

Author : The Guardian

Publish date : 2024-01-24 09:00:03

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