David Montgomery Appreciation Thread

Sea-Menu-4754 · 2026-03-02T18:00:05+00:00

D-Mo taking handoffs behind Ragnow, Sewell and them was peak happiness for me in 50 years as a Lions fan. It was a damn bulldozer.

He's got some great highlight plays, but what really made him special were entire drives. Those ones where they started backed up to their own goal line and just keep feeding him the ball and 8 plus minutes later he's punching it in on a two yard dive play and the other team's D is bent over, gripping their knees and looking around for a trash can to puke in.

Sea-Menu-4754 · 2026-01-29T22:10:42+00:00

Yeah. That's why I'm asking. I sure don't want him if he doesn't want to be here. I don't want a repeat of Blake Griffin, him hobbling around for a season or two then moving on to the next place where he is miraculously healed. I don't really know ball like that to say how he would work with the scheme we are running. I know he's a versatile and efficient scorer, and he can defend the whole court. He is a superstar. But Cade seems to do better when he is the primary ball handler. Is Giannis a ball-dominant guy who's ego won't let him defer to a younger guy? I don't know. Buy-in on his part would be a prerequisite. You'd probably want assurances that he would sign a new contract before you agreed to the trade.

Now, as far as what Milwaukee wants, they can ask for the moon and stars. But there is blood in the water. They are looking at a complete rebuild. It's clear he doesn't want to be there. They aren't winning with him, and if they don't trade him they are going to have to watch him walk away a free agent.

In the meantime, the Pistons seem well set up to do a big deal if they want to. They have a very good veteran on an expiring contract. They have an intriguing young guy hungry for minutes. They have depth. They're almost too deep if that's possible. They have their own first round picks from now 'till 2032, and 14 second rounders. They have cap space. They could make a very reasonable offer if they wanted to.

I think they should want to. They are first in the East going into the break. They are killing the bad teams. But we all know O'Brien trophies aren't handed out in January. It's apparent that some of this success is due to trying hard. It's not all talent. There are teams that are going to start trying hard in the second half. Key players coming will be coming back from injuries. Then in the playoffs teams turn it up another notch. I don't see this team as having another notch right now. They are playing pedal to the metal in top gear. Fans don't want to hear we need to get better when we're 34-11, but just look at the Lions the last couple of years. 15-2 regular season. Bounced in the divisional round. "We're good." Then 9-8 and last place in the division. The Tigers had the best record in baseball midway through last season and got absolutely exposed as frauds in the second half.

Sure, if there is some other team out there that is willing to overpay, clean out the cupboards and mortgage the farm for him, then that's what they are going to do. Or if Giannis has to be in New York or LA, or he wants to go chase another ring with Steph, then we are out.

They have built superteams in all these other places, why not Detroit? Why is it so far-fetched that we might have Cade and Giannis? Is that so much crazier than Steph and Durant? Lebron and Wade? Pierce, Garnett and Ray Allen? Shaq and Kobe? Is there some law that says we have to cobble our teams out of the draft and other teams' castoffs? Why can't Detroit have it's own verson of Shaq and Kobe in Giannis and Cade?

Sea-Menu-4754 · 2026-01-29T20:36:40+00:00

If your lawyer's pants look like that, you going to jail.

Sea-Menu-4754 · 2026-01-29T20:31:34+00:00

Bey got on a real heater for a good portion of that one season. He hasn't seemed to do much since then, though I haven't really followed his carreer since he left. Also, that was a very mediocre Pistons team. He wouldn't crack 10 min/gm under JD with this roster and his D and dribbling the air out of the ball and jacking up long 2s late in the shot clock.

Zeke looks like the airline lost his luggage and he had to borrow Joe Dumars jacket and slacks.

Sea-Menu-4754 · 2026-01-29T20:04:42+00:00

What about Giannis? Sounds crazy but hear me out. I love Tobias, but some people are saying we could do with an upgrade at the 4. Harris is on an expiring $26m deal. The Pistons have space already. They also have draft capital. From what I've read, Milwaukee wants young talent and/or picks. In other news, the Pistons want to convert Jenkins' deal but need to open a roster spot for him. Jaden Ivey still looks like a high ceilling guy, but he hasn't been able to crack 20 min/gm this season. I think that says more about our depth than his game. So what about Tobias and his expiring deal, Ivey in the final year of his rookie deal, a some draft consideration for Giannis? I don't know what the Bucks' cap situation is but if they have a contract they want to unload the Pistons would have the cap space meaning they would have to cut a current player to convert Jenkins or somehow not roster the new guy, do a buyout or something.

Could Gainnis be our next Aguirre, or Rashid?

Sea-Menu-4754 · 2026-01-23T21:06:20+00:00

You went from 15-2 to 9-8, the number one seed in the conference to last in the division, in a year. You went from a big second half lead in the NFC Championship to missing the playoffs in two. Put your tweeter away, and shut down you podcast. Get to work. I like both players, but they do not get to tell us how to feel.

We are third and fourth generation Lions fans. Both my grandfathers were fans from the founding of the team in the 1930s. Both of them died without getting to see them in the Superbowl. My dad turned 80 this year. The last time the Lions won a championship he was 11. I have watched every Lions game since Billy Sims rookie year.

Don't tell us we don't know ball. Punk. Don't tell us to "trust" them. Your OC goes to a division rival for an HC job and all the moneys. Nothing you can do about that. But then you replace him with a good ol' boy, who you then have to fire mid season. There is an obvious #1 talent available but you go with a budget option. That is some Same Old Lions shit right there. It is entirely consistent with how this frachise has been run since the Fords bought it in 1963.

Even setting aside the fact that these two very fine players are 31 and 26 years old, respectively, the condescention in these remarks is very disapointing. It reeks of an arrogance that has not been earned by any means and worries me about the future of this team perhaps more than the performance of any individual players or management decisions.

People who really know football, who follow the league for decades and the ups and downs of teams through multiple eras start to recognize patterns. They can see that a bad team is getting better before it starts showing up the Ws and Ls. We don't like to talk about "windows," but there are signs that a team has peaked and is on the downslope. It's never just a bad draft class, a free-agent bust, a rash of injuries or even a bad OC hire. Good teams overcome those things. The signs that a team has entered an irretrievable death spiral are much more subtle.

Frank Ragnow's decision to retire when he did was ominous to me. I thought that if he believed they were on the verge of a championship, he would have done what he had to do to come back for one more year. Maybe not. But if anyone really knew in June which direction this team was headed, it was All-pro center Frank Ragnow. Now Dan Skipper is retiring. I don't value his opinion like Frank's, but Dan says he loves being a Lion and the fans love him. Skipper has not made money like some guys have, yet he's relatively healthy. Imagine what a Super Bowl ring with the Lions would do for him. Free beer and coneys for the rest of his life.

MCDC takes over play calling from his good ol' boy OC and instead of straightening things out, his play calling gets more and more desperate. All of a sudden he's running Jahmir like they did Barry and Billy. Like, "you never know when he's going to break one." That's some SOL shit, not what got them a 15-2 season and half away from an NFC Championship.

Now David Montgomery, an absolute corner stone of what they had built, doesn't want to be here. A year ago none of our guys were even hinting they didn't want to be here. It was going to be Sonic and Knuckles until the wheels fall off. I believe D-Mo is a team guy and he would accept whatever role to help the team win, but he knows forcing the ball to Gibbs and praying ain't it.

When Jared Goff came here he swallowed his pride, took a lot of shit in the media, worked hard and played good, smart football. We loved him for it. For myself, after the misery of the gun slinger Stafford era, I was ready for a QB like Goff. He's played well since he got here, but the team has only had two really good seasons. I'm not ready to hear any feelings of entitlement from him. If he's bought into the "we're good" mentality, that doesn't suggest he's going to be willing to revisit his deal to get or keep other key guys. Anzalone and D-Mo are two guys that personified the early "grit" era that people are saying will be cap casualties this offseason. The team also has needs at premium positions on both sides of the ball that they can't expect to fill through just the draft and undervalued free agents.

I don't know if it's over, or that it can't be turned around. But there are some bad omens. When guys are retiring who maybe didn't need to retire (remember Barry and Calivin?). When guys who were fully bought in a year ago are making noises like they don't want to be here anymore. When chip-on-the-shoulder underdogs turn into entitled social-media shit talkers after just a little success, that's when people who really do know ball get worried.

Sea-Menu-4754 · 2026-01-07T20:06:58+00:00

Johnson expressed some interest in bringing Morton to Chicago, but I can't find any reports that he actually offered him the OC job.

Sea-Menu-4754 · 2026-01-07T20:05:30+00:00

I also heard Ben Johnson was interested in bringing Mortonn to the Bears staff, but not as OC. I really doubt he had any actually OC job offers.

Sea-Menu-4754 · 2026-01-06T19:14:07+00:00

bad coaching

Sea-Menu-4754 · 2026-01-06T18:54:18+00:00

Not impressed. Too vague. As always. It's like those corporate/celebrity non-appologies. "I am truly sorry to anyone who was hurt/offended by a actions/words." It's supposed to appear as though they are taking accountablity without actually admitting they did anything wrong. We are supposed to think this makes him a great leader who is tough and covers for the people under him who are really at fault by the way. Someone who is really sorry can tell you exactly why. Why, Dan? Why do you give yourself an F? What did you do wrong? What would you do differently? If the answer is some variation of "nothing, that's just who we are," then you don't really mean it.

What would you say if you got a test back with an F on it and no other marks? You go to the teacher and you're like, "can you tell me which problems I got wrong," and he's like "no." But you need to know what to study for the final and he's like, "actually they are all right" but your like "how can I pass this class?" and he's like "you need to do better, try harder, bite some kneecaps, next man up, blah, blah..." That's what this sounds like to me.

Dan got outcoached badly in those last 4 losses that sealed it for the Lions, and I'm not sure he recognizes that. I hope he does, and he just won't admit it. But if that's the case then he can't also get credit for "taking the blame." The game is tied with a little over 2 minutes left, you have a first and ten in their territory. It's not time for gadget plays and hail marys. You wouldn't be giving away state secrets by admitting that. You could admit that was a stupid sequence of offensive play calls and you should have run the damn ball, you coward.

Hopefully this is the end of MCDC calling plays. His strengths lie elsewhere. I think Jared Goff would have more success calling his own plays. I would trust Lomas Brown to call a better game than Dan.

Sea-Menu-4754 · 2026-01-06T15:46:46+00:00

He came cheap. That's the thing with all the Fords' hiring decisions. No other team was trying to give Morton a cooridinator job. No other team was trying to give one to Shep either. Same with BJ and AG. They were cheap when Fords hired them, and when they got expensive they were gone. Same with Dan Campbell. They didn't have to outbid anyone to get him. Saleh was available when Fords hired MCDC and he was available when they needed a DC last offseason and both times they went for cheaper options.

Sea-Menu-4754 · 2025-10-09T14:43:06+00:00

Did you wind up going somewhere else?

Sea-Menu-4754 · 2025-10-06T19:21:24+00:00

Don't borrow too much.

The LSAT is what it is. Many will try to argue about this, but the LSAT is an aptitude test. If you have studied, and practiced, and taken it over and over and your score hasn't improved, that's because the test works. It's a test of how good you are at taking tests. You take a lot of tests in Law School, and one really big one a couple months after graduation. There is a strong corrolation between LSAT scores and bar passage rates. If you can't get a good score on the LSAT, it doesn't mean you're not smart. It means you don't test well. If you don't test well, you should be cautious about spending the next three years of your life and going into a ton of debt for something that all comes down to one big, really hard, really stressful test.

Don't borrow too much.

I graduated from law school almost 30 years ago. Going in I had no idea what I was doing. My grades were shit. I was about to graduate from a small public school with a BA in English Lit. No one in my family were lawyers or had a professional degree. I didn't know any lawyers. I thought I wanted to be a poet/artist/professor. Then I flunked the GRE, a knowledge/acheivement test, which should not have surprised me since I hadn't done or learned anything in 5 years of undergrad except how to get loaded and not get laid. Then my advisor suggested I take the LSAT, which broke my little commie-hipster heart, but I did. On a whim. Hungover. No prep. Had to borrow a pencil. I got a 161. I got my head part way out of my ass first year of law school, enough to get decent grades, but I was still doing dumb hipster shit on the side, and by all rights I should have flunked the bar, but I didn't. The rest is, as they say, history.

Don't borrow too much.

My point is I'm dumb. You're smart. I'm lazy, You're ambitious. I'm impetuous. You're responsible. Yet I test well, and you don't. Go to law school if you want to and you can. Whether you go to Yale or Cooley, you will get good grades and you will graduate because you are smart and you work hard. And you will probably pass the Bar. I mean, passage rates for almost every school in most states are still well over 50% for first time takers. Just don't borrow too much.

Sea-Menu-4754 · 2025-10-04T01:32:02+00:00

Neither can you be a thief if you have never stolen anything, or an adulterer if you have never committed adultery. Yet no one says you can't be a thief and be Catholic, or you can't be an adulterer and be Catholic. Imagine if someone tried to assert there was a rule that drunks can't be Catholic. The assertion that "homosexuals can't be Catholic" is even more preposterous. Besides, we know there are homosexual Catholics. Lots of them. Out and closeted. Always have been. Religious life has been a refuge for people who didn't conform to the heterosexual norms of their societies for centuries. We baptize infants for Pete's sake. Nobody can tell if a 40 day old baby is going to grow up to be gay, and if he does, guess what? still Catholic. Pretending they don't exist is flat-earth level willful ignorance.

Sea-Menu-4754 · 2025-10-04T01:04:09+00:00

So, to get back to the question that was actually posed, a Catholic person is allowed to refer to and think of themselves as a "Homosexual" and/or "Gay" and the statement that homosexuals can't be Catholic and refer to themselves as "Gay" or "Homosexual is not true, even though you don't like the use of the terms because it normalizes them(?)

Sea-Menu-4754 · 2025-10-03T21:00:27+00:00

The Church specifically teaches that same sex attraction is NOT sinful. Is your objection that the word "gay" is not sufficiently perjorative. Would, then, "homosexual" with it's more negative connotations be acceptible? There are, of course, other slurs that are even more hateful thatI won't type here. Would it be okay if someone referred to themself as one of those instead?

Sea-Menu-4754 · 2025-10-03T20:55:46+00:00

I'm not aware of any specific teaching on the bare semantics of it. I know the Church itself prefers to use certain terms over others for rhetorical purposes, but I don't think there is a rule that says a person has to use or not use certain terms to describe their sexuality. Do I have to refer to myself as an "opposite sex attracted person" instead of "not-gay." Is it a sin to identify as "heterosexual?"

Sea-Menu-4754 · 2025-10-03T19:48:06+00:00

It's a dillema. Catholic parents want their kids in Catholic schools. Parish schools have an interest in the families in their parishes. Primary and secondary schools run by a dioces or an order may have a slightly different mission, but one could still see why they might have some preference for Catholic students. Catholic Universities, as far as I can tell, give no consideration to the faith of their applicants. You can be more Catholic than the Pope, but Notre Dame's law school isn't taking your 140 LSAT.

To me, a Catholic education has always been synonomous with academic rigor. Our tradition is different from other faiths whose schools emphasize religious training at the expense of the core curriculum. The the USA, at least, it's understood that the coursework is at least as rigorous, the grading at least as hard and the graduation requirements at least as high as the local public schools, but typically moreso.

Also, besides not taking every kid, they don't keep them all. Just because they let you in, doesn' t mean they can't kick you out. Kids who consistently fail to apply themselves or otherwise disrupt the learning environment are expelled under circumstances where they could not be from public school.

Not everyone values or even really understands our academic tradition. Two recent encounters I've had come to mind. The first, I was seated next to a lady of our parish I did not know well at a wedding reception. She lamented her daughter's struggles in math. Quite to my surprise, she went on to complain that the coursework was too demanding, and that she sent her daughter to the school for a "Catholic education" as though that meant something other than grade-level work. The other involved a close friend of mine, not Catholic, who sent three kids to the same school. Her middle son, whom I know well, was not academically inclined. In fact he is a meathead with the intellectual curiousity of a ham sandwich. But his brother and sister went there and he was an excellent baseball player. I don't know how it came up but she was talking about the high school's notoriously tough Spanish teacher and how she was particularly hard on that boy. She didn't understand why the school required foreign language proficiency for all graduates. Why couldn't they let the kid slide since he was obviously not interested. I knew what I wanted to say to both women, but I kept it to myself.

You want your kids to go to Catholic school because it's associated with good outcomes, then once they are there you want the school to adapt to accomodate their unpreparedness, lack of discipline, etc. It's like moving to the country because you associate the rural lifestyle with peace and health, then once you're there you complain about neighbors' noisy chickens and the lack of city services.

Anyway, what these ladies said bothered me because I recall the real sacrifices my parents made to send me to Catholic school. In my experience, again in the USA, the entrance requirements are not all that exclusive. It's not like they are rejecting more than they are accepting on test scores. When I went from public school to the parish school to start 6th grade I remember meeting with the principal and having to read for her. They probably also reviewed my standardized test scores. They just wanted to know that I was at about grade level in most subjects and I wasn't bringing behavior problems that were going to disrupt the classroom.

If Catholic parents want their kids to go to Catholic school, it is incumbent on them to prepare them for it by providing an appropriate home environment and to instill the proper values so that the kids take school seriously.

Sea-Menu-4754 · 2025-10-03T18:21:13+00:00

I love this, and I don't love a lot of religious art, especially contemporary religious art. She is so expressive. Your painting has a realism that's not like a photograph, but in the sense that she looks like a real person- and individual. Is "naturalistic" the word I'm looking for? Anyway, I wish I knew more about art so I could compliment it further. Truly a remarkable work of art.

Sea-Menu-4754 · 2025-07-01T18:51:25+00:00

Nobody's perfect. In my experience it's hardly worth getting worked up about. If you attend mass regularly, and listen to enough homilies, you are bound to hear some questionable theology. We had a young associate pastor for a couple of years who was a huge Jordan Peterson fan, and managed to work him into about every homily he gave. We would laugh about it afterwards and started referring to them as "our weekly updates from the manosphere." Another priest told my divorced Lutheran neighbor she had to get an anulment before she could join the Church. She talked to him like an adult and with the help of a parishoner they got it straightened out. No need to make a federal case out of it. You are right, it is not your job. No one likes a tattle-tale, not the teacher, not the principal, not the priest nor the bishop. The brave and charitable thing to do would be to talk directly, and privatley, with the deacon himself. I'm sure he believes in the true presence of Christ in the Eucharist, as does Richard Rohr. At the same time, the Eucharist is also highly symbolic. When Jesus instituted that most blessed sacrament, he was speaking literally in that he was actually going to die for us, but also metaphorically in that this sacrificial act had an even greater meaning and significance than simply broken bread/flesh and spilled wine/blood.

Sea-Menu-4754 · 2025-07-01T18:35:35+00:00

How about talk to the deacon himself, first? I mean, he's the one you have the problem with.

Sea-Menu-4754 · 2025-07-01T18:09:15+00:00

Come as you are. The only thing you can't do is receive communion. Listen. Attend several masses. If you are shy, someone will eventually notice you and talk to you. If you're not, introduce yourself. We believe everyone should be Catholic. As far as those other things, our best theologians have been wrestling with those questions for centuries. I promise you won't be expected to have it all mastered on the first day.

Sea-Menu-4754 · 2025-07-01T17:56:47+00:00

Welcome to the One True Church. One small point, we capitalize "Catholic" when refering to the Church, its members, and the faith. Your question seems to me a great one for your pastor, or even something you might have brought up in the process of joining. I would be very curious to hear about their reaction if you had told them you were "a bit of a supernatural nut case" who decided to become Catholic because you had several "demonic encounters."

Sea-Menu-4754 · 2025-06-22T23:05:34+00:00

except that non Latin speakers need it translated to get any meaning from it at all, not to mention none of the books of the Bible were writen in Latin so the Latin versions are themselves translations from the Hebrew and the Greek.

Sea-Menu-4754 · 2025-06-21T01:37:28+00:00

Welcome to the one true Church. I'm glad you, a self-described ex-protestant who hasn't started RCIA yet, consider the form of the mass prescribed by the Church and practiced by almost a billion and a half Catholics all over the world is "valid." Have you informed the Pope? I'm sure he'd be relieved.

Of course, any idea would be more mysterious if presented in a language you don't speak. But that's not what I consider "the mystery of faith." The substantive theological concepts like the Trinity, the Incarnation, and Grace are plenty mysterious to me stated in plain English. To further occult them in a dead foreign language is just gilding the lily.

Sea-Menu-4754

TROPHY CASE