Detroit Lions Weblog

AAFL Team Michigan, Michigan History Magazine article and 53 Deep

The All-American Football League held it’s inaugural draft this weekend. The AAFL is a spring professional football league that requires all of it’s players to possess college degrees and wants to bring collegiate-style rivalries to professional football.

Joe DeLamielleure, NFL Hall of Famer and Michigan State grad, is quite active in the league, and Team Michigan is coached by John Fontes–yes, brother of the “Big Buck”, and former Lions coach, Wayne Fontes.

For long suffering Lions fans, this may provide a more reasonable option than the Arena League to serve as a substitute for the continually disappointing Lions, ala the USFL’s Michigan Panthers. I want to monitor the upstart league as well as I possibly can, and may even blog it.

I also recently discovered an excellent blog entitled 53 Deep, which covers personnel and draft matters. The author of this blog projects that the Lions will select Pittsburgh OT Jeff Otah in the ‘08 draft, a move I would support heartily.

Otah, has incredible upside, and would eventually replace Jeff Backus at left tackle, in my opinion. The Lions have so many needs, that it is increasingly difficult to determine what is most pressing as far as their needs go.

Michigan History magazine(www.michiganhistorymagazine.com) features an excellent article in their current issue about the tumultuous, but championship winning 1957 Lions.

The fabled ‘57 Lions were the last championship winning NFL team in Michigan. The article talks about the resignation of Buddy Parker and the dynamic QB duo of Bobby Layne and Tobin Rote.

The article even revisits the infamous Bobby Layne curse, or the supposed derogatory and prophetic exit comments by Layne that stated that the Lions would not “return to a championship in 50 seasons after he left town.” Layne was many things, but no one knew he was a prophet. Their site also has an excellent article about the Lions called “When the Lions First Roared”.