Entering the 2025 NFL Super Bowl playoffs, the Detroit Lions have the best record (15-2) and the No. 1 seed in the National Football Conference.
Fans all across the “mitten state” are hoping and praying that this will be the year in which the Lions roar.
The last time Detroit won the old NFL Championship Game was in 1957, when the Lions defeated the Cleveland Browns.
Expect to be reading and hearing a lot about the “Bobby Layne Curse” as the reason why the Detroit football organization has been so anemic and pitiful all these years.
Layne, who came out of the University of Texas, was considered by many to be the best quarterback to ever wear a Detroit uniform. He is a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.
Seemingly out of the blue, coach George Wilson traded Layne abruptly early in the 1958 season. Wilson told Layne about the trade in a telephone conversation, not face-to-face. Layne was visibly shaken and angry. Detroit Lions fans were livid; players were distraught. Sports journalists shifted into high gear.
Joe Schmidt, the Lions’ stellar middle linebacker, was quoted as saying: “I think it’s a big mistake. He’s…a damned good quarterback.” Layne had carried Detroit to titles in 1952 and 1953 and to the final game in 1954.
“I think Bobby had the attitude that, hey, ‘I brought championships to you, and now you’re going to broom me?’” Schmidt said.
Did he really say that? Bobby Layne’s son, Alan Layne, once told a sports journalist: “My dad had a temper.” That translates to “he just might have.”
What became clear is that the Lions went from dismal and disgusting to destitute.
Detroit fans were eager for the 2008 season to arrive, to witness the expiration of the 50-year curse. It didn’t happen. Rather, the hex intensified. The Lions became a team of infamy – the first club to go winless (0-16) for an entire season in 2008.
On the bright side, Detroit got the first pick in the 2009 NFL draft. Fans crossed their fingers and toes that the end of the curse was in sight.
The Lions selected Matthew Stafford, a hot-shot quarterback out of the University of Georgia. Was magic in the air? Stafford and Layne went to the same high school in Dallas, Texas.
Yet, there were no fireworks in the sky over Detroit. From 2009-20, Stafford built a solid reputation as a capable performer as the quarterback of a sub-par team…extending the misery in the Motor City for yet another decade.
The trade winds blew in 2021, and Stafford was moved to the Los Angeles Rams in exchange for Jared Goff, who played his college ball at the University of California, Berkeley. Initially, Goff fell right into place among the “cursees” – leading the Lions deeper into mediocrity.
But, Stafford – once out from under the weight of the curse – carried the Rams to a stunning Super Bowl victory in 2021.
Goff, give him credit, has persevered and emerged as a true leader among the current group of Lions and has had a spectacular 2024-25 season…thus far.
More thoughts
related to the ‘Bobby Lane Curse’
Commenting on that 1958 Bobby Layne trade so many years ago, contemporary sports writer Mike Tanier delved into the subject for Bleacher Report.
“The Lions were the defending NFL champs. The trade was simply inexplicable,” Tanier reported.
“The football gods heard Layne’s decree” about 50 years of losing “and passed judgment on the Lions. The team underwent more than six decades of “wandering in a wilderness of losing seasons, playoff failures and quarterback controversies,” Tanier said.
“Layne was one of the league’s most recognizable stars. He was the Brett Favre of the 1950s and the NFL’s best quarterback in the first half of the decade. The Lions, also, were one of the NFL’s best in the ’50s. Yes, the NFL was once completely dominated by the mighty Lions and Cleveland Browns,” Tanier wrote.
“When Bobby Layne said ‘block,’ you blocked, and when he said ‘drink,’ you drank,” teammate Yale Lary said of Layne in an oft-repeated quote. Usually, that meant consuming about six highballs on the night before a game.
Other
notable Detroit players from that era included Doak Walker, Leon Hart, Jack
Christiansen, Dick LeBeau and Wayne Walker.
Bobby Layne should have seen that his future with Detroit was in a precarious state. Prior to the 1957 season, the team added Tobin Rote, a veteran quarterback out of Rice, in a blockbuster trade with the Green Bay Packers.
Rote and Layne were platooned at quarterback that year, but when Layne broke his ankle midway through the 11th game, it was Rote who guided the team to Detroit’s 1957 NFL title.
In exchange for Layne, the Steelers gave Detroit the rights to Earl Morrall, a local boy from Muskegon, Mich., who built an outstanding resume as a collegian at Michigan State University, excelling as a football quarterback and as a baseball infielder. Morrall was offered the opportunity to play professional baseball but chose pto football instead.
The plan with the Lions was for Morrall to be Rote’s backup.
Detroit Free Press sportswriter George Puscas was one who bought into the “curse.” He wrote: “Did you ever see a team with Morrall and no morale?”
(For the record, during his 21-year NFL playing career, Morrall became one of the best backup quarterbacks in league history, most notably stepping into the spotlight to relieve Johnny Unitas of the Baltimore Colts in 1968 and Bob Griese of the Miami Dolphins in 1972 during their Super Bowl runs. Morrall earned three Super Bowl championship team rings.)
“In the 1990s, the Lions were a very good team; Barry Sanders led them to the postseason five times in 10 years,” Tanier said. “But they kept losing in the playoffs.”
Tanier said that Mitch Albom (shown below), a Detroit columnist before he became a bestselling author, weighed in on the subject: “As the years went past, the curse got more body to it. It was a whisper once and then it was like, maybe this thing is really happening. And then it just became an explanation.”
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