The Detroit Sports Revival: Are the Glory Days Finally Back?

We, as sports fans, can be pretty greedy. Your team wins five in a row, you think “How ‘bout six?” It signs a good free agent, you start looking around to see who else is available. It wins a championship? Suddenly you have aspirations of a dynasty. As a fan, it’s truly never enough.

This is especially evident if you root for multiple teams in different sports. It can be easy to gloat when your local football, basketball, and baseball teams are all good. In 2018, for example, Boston fans got to see the Patriots, Celtics, and Red Sox all in title contention. Fortunately for the rest of us, only the Sox managed to do it.

But what if your teams are bad? It’s hard to have any pride in your city when all organizations are perpetual losers. For most of the last 20 years or so, this is what the city of Detroit had to endure.

While the Pistons went to back-to-back finals in the early 2000s – winning it all in 2004 – the team has a total of six winning seasons since. The Tigers had a flurry of success from 2011-2014, including a trip the World Series, but in the four years prior and the nine after, they barely sniffed the playoffs, with the bottom of the barrel being 2019 in which they only managed 47 wins.

Then there are the Lions. The team has just eight winning seasons this century, and only the Cleveland Browns and Jacksonville Jaguars have been worse. The Lions also have the dubious honor (along with the Browns) of going 0-16 in a season.

Easily the most successful Detroit team over the last few decades is the Red Wings, which went to the playoffs a whopping 25 years in a row and won four Stanley Cups in that stretch. The Wings haven’t, however, been back to the postseason since 2017.

But now, the winds in Motown seemed to have shifted. This past season, the Pistons won 30 more games than the previous year and made it to the playoffs. For much of the MLB season, the Tigers have been the best team in baseball. And for the first time in franchise history, the Lions won double-digit games in back-to-back seasons and are one of the top teams favored to win the Super Bowl – which would be its first. (Ironically, the Red Wings are now the worst of the bunch, but hey, you can’t have them all.)

When times are lean – or even when they’re actually pretty good – being a fan can be tough. You just have to hope that things will turn around and that the higher-ups are making smart decisions that will actually pan out. When you have zero control over what happens with your team, hope is pretty much all you have.  

If you’re a tried-and-true Detroit fan and have stuck with your teams throughout all the losing, you’re now being rewarded. Here’s some advice: enjoy the ride. As many fans can attest to, success can be extremely fleeting. You just never know when something like an injury, bad personnel fit, or the loss of a key free agent could send a team into the abyss again.

Also – and as mentioned, this is a tough one – try not to get greedy. So what if they don’t win a championship? The fact that it was even possible is much better than being out of playoff contention halfway through a season.