Sometimes, a curse is the only answer. How else do you account for such misery? How else do you rationalize a forever-failing football team? How else do you explain the Detroit Lions?
"I can't go there," Dan Campbell said Friday.
In October of 1958, the Lions traded Bobby Layne to the Steelers one year after the star quarterback had led them to their third NFL title in six seasons. As legend has it, Layne was so incensed that he claimed the Lions would never win another championship.
"It hurt me, naturally, when I was traded to the Steelers from the Lions," the Hall of Famer would say later. "We had been very successful with Detroit. I tried what they referred to as a hex."
The Lions have one playoff win in 64 years since. They have never won a Super Bowl. The Curse of Bobby Layne has taken on a life of its own, to the point that Peyton Manning came to Detroit in the latest episode of Peyton's Places in an attempt to snuff it out with the help of lifelong Lions fans and Hollywood actors Jeff Daniels and Keegan-Michael Key.
"It really was it," Daniels says in the episode, which can be seen on ESPN+. "It has to be it. There is a curse. If you take the curse out, we have to accept the fact that we're this bad. It's easier for us who are diehard Lions fans to go, 'There is a curse.'"
Campbell, who played for the Lions from 2006-08 during which time they recorded the first winless season in NFL history, won't go down that path.
"I'm not going to allow myself to go there because I feel like for me as a coach and for us as players, that's an excuse," he said. "I think you create your own vibe, your own mojo. You create your own energy. And the more you buy into that and believe it, that's what you become. So no, I'm not buying that."
Real or fake, the curse won't be lifted by Layne, who passed away at the age of 60 in 1986. The Lions will have to overcome it themselves.
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