SI's Don Banks Totally Called This Amazing Detroit Lions Season! Also, He Was Wrong on Tons of Other Stuff

Then there’s Don Banks, who covers the NFL for Sports Illustrated. He took part of his Power Ranking column this week to inform us, the forgetful inhabitants of 2011, that last November he basically wrote us a dispatch from the future. As he slotted the Lions as the (fourth-best? fourth–most-powerful?) No. 4 team in the league right now, he noted, with some measure of earned bravado, that he fortune-cookied this season 11 months ago:

"I think it’s finally time to remind folks of my prescience last Nov. 30, when the Lions were 2-9 and going nowhere. I wrote: “There’s always at least one losing team that finishes strong and builds momentum for bigger and better things to come next year, and that team this season will be the … Detroit Lions. That’s right, the Lions, winners of a combined four games in the past three seasons. It takes a bit of projection, but I foresee a similar storyline emerging late this season in Detroit. Two or three Detroit wins between now and the end of the season will provide the boost the Lions need to make 2011 that long-awaited turnaround season.” Since that brilliant piece of analysis, the Lions are 9-1. If anything, I underestimated the Leos."

Emphasis mine. Now, there is something to be said for having foretold a Lions resurrection. Detroit had been staying competitive against good teams and was finally stocked with All Pro-caliber talents like Ndamukong Suh, who was tearing up the league as a rookie, and a healthy Matt Stafford lobbing jump balls to Cybertronian freak of nature Calvin Johnson. The Lions were due, but they were also lugging a decade worth of Millenmade futility with them. And this year they have been hands-down the story of the young season, 5-0 for the first time in 55 years, with the greatest point-differential in the NFL so far at +14 a game.

Their Monday night game against Chicago (which, for all those who were celebrating Canadian Thanksgiving on Monday meant the Lions are playing on two Thanksgivings this year) was a prime-time coming-out party. Detroit’s formidable d-line made Chicago’s offense look even more Cutleresque than usual while the Lions’ running game (Jahvid Best: 163 yards and a touchdown on 12 carries) made Urlacher and Briggs look like Lemmon and Matthau. The Lions have a few issues (e.g., a consistent running game) but for the first time in damn near forever, Detroit this year is a long way from dreadful.

So due props to Banks. It was just the “brilliant piece of analysis” backpatting that got me wondering about what else he predicted last year. Turns out, in the column predicting the Year of the Lion, he also prognosticated San Diego running the table (actual finish: 3-2), and the Titans maybe sneaking into the playoffs (Tennessee lost eight of its last nine to finish last in the AFC South). Then again, he did predict the Giants and Bucs would be the best NFC teams not to make the playoffs (right on: both missed the cut at 10-6) and that Donovan McNabb wouldn’t return to the Redskins. Before this season, he also predicted that “before it’s all said and done this season, Tennessee’s Jake Locker will be considered the best of this year’s rookie crop of quarterbacks,” that “it’ll be almost Halloween before Carolina’s new quarterback, Cam Newton, and new head coach, Ron Rivera, get to the celebrate their first NFL victory together” … and that Detroit would end the league’s longest playoff drought. He’s looking good on that third one, at least. Otherwise, Banks, like everyone else covering this game, is a mishmash.

You win some, you lose some. Maybe it’s worth ballyhooing when an occasional bit of brilliant analysis is unearthed. Most of the time, though, predictions are yesterday’s news, or tomorrow’s. Today’s? Less so.