With last week’s loss to the Dallas Cowboys, the Lions have dropped six of their past seven games and sit at a pedestrian 3-6-1 record.
And even if they take care of business this afternoon against the hapless 1-9 Washington Redskins, their chances of making the playoffs are hanging by the absolute thinnest of threads – and that comes with a huge caveat.
Not only must the Lions defeat the Redskins, but they must win out in order to participate in the playoffs. That would require wins over Chicago, Minnesota, Tampa Bay, Denver and Green Bay.
And even then, they’d still only have a 16% chance. AND that’s on top of potentially not having quarterback Matthew Stafford for the rest of the season.
And even yet, there’s a less than 1% chance of them hosting a hypothetical Wild Card game. One more loss to any opponent automatically drops their playoff chances to that same 1%.
Makes you think of Jim Mora’s infamous “Playoffs” rant!
Those numbers come courtesy of 97,743 simulations run by the New York Times.
“We want to win every game,” Lions receiver Danny Amendola said earlier this week. “That’s the only thing we can worry about, is one week at a time, winning one game at a time, and going 1-0 each week. Can’t look ahead. You can learn from your mistakes but you can’t harp on the bad and negative things that have happened, but you definitely have to learn from them and get better and improve and progress as a football player.”
