Quick Slant: The Most Explosive Game of the Week
Rams at Lions, Sunday @ 8:20 PM EST
The Rams and Lions were pleasant surprises in 2023, each in their own way. The Rams had gone all-in on their successful Super Bowl run, trading their resources and maxing out their cap. Matthew Stafford was battling injury – even contemplating retirement – and Sean McVay was rumored to be more interested in jumping to TV than staying to clean up the mess. Metaphorically, if they had sold their souls to Mephistopheles for a 2021 title, 2022 was when they lay alone and blind on the floor of their self-made utopia as the bill came due. However, in this version, Faust was saved by a tiny late-round scat back from Notre Dame and a WR nicknamed “chubby” in Samoan as a kid, which just kind of stuck.
The Lions had long been a laughingstock, insult to injury for a once-proud blue-collar metropolis – a captain of industry in the form of a city – whose luck had gone cooler than the winds off Lake Michigan. Enter a brawny Texan, Dan Campbell, arriving in 2021 with talk of biting kneecaps and kicking in teeth – an obvious cliché – the platonic ideal of a meathead. But we all learned about judgment; Campbell revealed himself as intelligent, modern, and committed to analytics. The Lions rose from the ashes and became its city’s perfect paragon.
The two meet on Sunday in a rematch of their Wild Card Round tussle – a game with the weekend’s highest over/under.
