The Detroit Lions Can Ruin Any Holiday If You Let Them

It is to our sorrow that even though the magnificent and manic Timberwolves-Nuggets hoop orgy started later and had a 50-point(!) overtime to sustain its value as post-holiday entertainment, the news of the day was earlier, far more mundane, and could not even cover you through peak family burden time. In that way, at least, the NBA regained the upper hand on Christmas from the ever-rapacious NFL.

This probably isn't sustainable, to be fair, because the NFL is a remake of The Blob, swallowing and smothering every part of every broadcast and streaming day—a far more terrifying version of Stranger Things: The Musical. But the league tripled down on Christmas this year with its tentpole not being the ever-tedious Dallas Cowboys but everyone's preseason darlings, the Detroit Lions. What they got instead were the drab, almost paralytic pre-Campbell Lions of yesteryear, the equivalent of wool socks with the elastic stretched beyond utility. Despite being granted the coveted watch-during-family-dinner spot on Netflix, the Lions were forcibly removed from our sight by the profoundly inertial Minnesota Vikings in a 23-10 wastebucket of a game that seemed to undo all the good will the Lions had earned the previous two calendar years.