Anti-Dynasty #39: 1946-1949 Detroit Lions

Peak Anti-Dynasty Points: 37
Record: 10-37 (.213)
Average DVOA: -21.0%
Bottom-Five DVOA: -16.8%
Two last-place finishes in the NFL, Three last-place finishes in the NFL West
Head Coaches: Gus Dorias, Bo McMillin
Key Players: HB Bill Dudley, E John Greene, E Ted Cremer, T Russ Thomas, G Howie Brown
Z-Score: -2.74

It’s hard to contend when a competing league keeps stealing all your guys, as the late-1940s Lions found out to their chagrin.

Y.A. Tittle is a Hall of Famer, one of the greatest passers of the 1950s and 1960s. The Lions took him sixth overall in the 1948 NFL draft, but Tittle went to the All-America Football Conference, where he proceeded to throw for the fourth-most yards in professional football that year, watching the Lions struggle to go 2-10. Moral of the story: make sure you can sign a guy if you're going to draft him.

Imagining Tittle on the late-1940s Lions isn't just your general "hey, if good player had come, that bad team would have been good" theory. The early-1940s Lions were nearly as bad as the late-1940s group until head coach Gus Dorais came over from the University of Detroit. Dorais took the team from an 0-11 record to six- and seven-win seasons in just two years. Specifically, Dorais was credited by experts at the time as having designed the best pass patterns in the NFL—he had practically invented the things, working with Knute Rockne to make the forward pass a regular part of Notre Dame's offenses as a player in the 1910s. His "razzle-dazzle T-formation offensive" worked while he had a half-decent back, such as 1944 MVP Frankie Sinkwich. And remember, this was the 1940s—Sinkwich passed 148 times and ran 150 times; he was a tailback who threw the ball rather than a modern quarterback who ran the ball. But Sinkwich left to join the Air Force and blew out his knee—not in combat, mind you, but playing for the Second Air Force Superbombers football team. This left the Lions in a bit of a bind.

In the mid-1940s, there were only a half-dozen or so players you could identify as a quarterback by any modern standards—you had your Sid Luckmans, your Sammy Baughs, your Bob Waterfields, and so on, but about half the teams out there were still trotting out tailbacks and halfbacks and occasionally letting them throw the ball. There certainly weren't backup quarterbacks freely available, so with Sinkwich out, Dorais didn't have a player who could actually run his offense, with Dave Ryan, Clyde LeForce and Roy Zimmerman all faceplanting. Give those 1940s Lions a Luckman—or a Y.A. Tittle—and we're maybe talking about them as one of the best teams of the 1940s.

Instead, they went 1-10 in 1946 with an estimated DVOA of -36.7%, and things weren't much better the next season. Dorais was fired and replaced by Indiana's Bo McMillin, who went so far as to change the Lions' color scheme from Detroit's familiar Honolulu blue to Indiana's maroon. Somehow, that didn't do the trick. Instead, it was the 1950 trades for Bobby Layne and Doak Walker, former high school teammates, that ended up driving the Lions out of their funk; those two would end up taking Detroit to three consecutive NFL Championship Games.