The Lions Had An Awful Lot Of Excuses About The Wind Yesterday

You could chalk the Lions' embarrassing loss to Chicago up to many things. Turnovers, an inability to get the run game going, Matthew Stafford...but no matter how many things don't go your way, it remains all-but-impossible for an NFL team to win when the wind itself is a Bears fan. Here, some selected postgame quotes from both coach and QB.

Jim Schwartz:

"[Stafford] had a good grip on the ball, it was more of the wind then it was anything else. The ball was moving… the one interception that he threw, moved about three yards on him when he threw it. It was very unpredictable, the wind, it seemed like it was gusting at all the wrong times. The same thing with the kicking game. All of a sudden it came time for a field goal attempt and it seemed like for them the wind died down and for us it would kick up, but there's no excuses."

They were playing a lot of man-to-man coverage...Not as much zone, a lot of man, but that was more of the game because of the wind and things like that. We did a lot of the same things on defense."

"We didn't do a good job in our return game either. We let the gunners get down field and get in space the whole game. It was very unpredictable with some of them going short and some of them going long; but it's one thing trying to get the ball out there and it's another when you don't have a good handle in the wind or know where it is or how much it's going to gust doing that."

Matthew Stafford:

"Finger, not that much, I think wind more than anything. We just put ourselves in a tough spot. We had to come out in the second half, throw the ball and try to get back in the game. Wind was blowing the ball around. They had a tough time throwing it and we had a tough time throwing it."

"It you look in the first half, on the one that didn't get picked, I was trying to throw one away. I rolled out and threw it and I turned around and it went two yards and just kind of got blown. It was tough. It was tough to throw the ball out there today."

"The first one was pretty bad wind. I threw it and it started right out in front of Tony (Scheffler) and just completely went. It went right behind him and the guy made a good play."

"It was tough. Obviously, in the wind, the throws that you can drive, you have a little bit more control. The stop routes and the slants and things like that, even today there were some tough gusts in there."

The Lions and Bears are now both 6-3, but if the season ended today the Bears would get the higher seed by having the advantage of the very pressure gradient of the Earth itself.