Detroit Lions, American professional football team based in Detroit. The Lions play in the National Football Conference (NFC) of the National Football League (NFL) and have won four NFL championships (1935, 1952, 1953, and 1957). However, the team has never played in a Super Bowl.
The championship years
The franchise was founded in 1930 and was based in Portsmouth, Ohio. Known as the Spartans, the team was one of two (with the Green Bay Packers) small-town members of the early NFL. The Spartans were moderately successful and played in the first playoff game in league history—a 9–0 loss to the Chicago Bears at the end of the 1932 season. In 1934 the franchise was sold and relocated to Detroit, where it took on the name “Lions” to complement baseball’s Detroit Tigers. In the Lions’ first season in Detroit, team ownership instituted a long-standing tradition when they scheduled a game on Thanksgiving Day, which has featured a Lions’ home game every year since (except during World War II). In 1935 the Lions won their first NFL championship, behind the play of single-wing tailback Earl (“Dutch”) Clark.
The Lions struggled throughout most of the 1940s, with only two winning seasons in the decade. The team’s most notable player of this period was running back (and future U.S. Supreme Court justice) Byron R. (“Whizzer”) White, who played in Detroit from 1940 to 1941. Before the 1950 season Detroit added quarterback Bobby Layne and running back Doak Walker—two future Hall of Famers—and the Lions became one of the better teams in the league by the following year. Detroit beat the Cleveland Browns in the NFL championship game in both 1952 and 1953, and the two teams faced off again in the 1954 championship, in which the Browns defeated the Lions. The Lions played the Browns for the NFL title a fourth time, in 1957, with Detroit handily beating Cleveland by 45 points to win its third championship in a six-year span.
From Alex Karras to Barry Sanders
The 1960s brought less success, as the team finished second in its division to the Green Bay Packers from 1960 to 1962 and missed the playoffs throughout the decade, despite a ferocious defense that featured defensive back Dick (“Night Train”) Lane, tackle Alex Karras, and linebackers Joe Schmidt and Wayne Walker. The Lions from this period are perhaps best remembered for writer George Plimpton’s short tenure with the team as the “last-string” quarterback during the 1963 preseason, an experience recounted in his book Paper Lion (1966) and later in a movie of the same name. Detroit qualified for only one playoff appearance in the 24 years between 1958 and 1981, though the team was often far from terrible, usually finishing their seasons with winning percentages around .500 during this prolonged period of mediocrity.
