Stafford looking like all the rest

By Dan Nied

Matthew Stafford is not Joey Harrington.

Except that he is. Just like he is Chuck Long, Andre Ware, Rodney Peete and Scott Mitchell.

Among the most difficult tasks in the sporting world these days is to actually distinguish between the latest saviors of the Detroit Lions.

No Lions quarterback has gone to the Pro Bowl since Greg Landry in 1971. The Lions wasted the Barry Sanders era with a revolving door of would-be capable quarterbacks and one playoff win.

The Lions drafted Harrington in 2002 and mangled his development so badly, Harrington replaced Ryan Leaf as the quintessential high draft quarterback bust.

Before Stafford each new Lions quarterback was greeted as the savior and run out of town in shame.

Rusty Hilger, Jeff Komlo, Gary Danielson, Josh McCown, Jeff Garcia. An endless string of names that either buckled under the pressure of reviving a downtrodden franchise or never had enough resources to make such a revival possible.

So here comes Stafford, the top overall pick out of Georgia, another pretty boy savior of a hopeless cause. Why is Stafford any different? Maybe he’s not.

Halfway through his rookie season, Stafford looks like all the rest. A few missed games with injuries, more than a few rookie mistakes, plenty of heat already from a restless fan base.

And during last Sunday’s loss to Seattle, Stafford took a break from throwing five interceptions to get in a shouting match with top receiver Calvin Johnson.

Half a season in, Stafford is Joey Harrington with a little more fire.

Sure, the kid looks like a world-beater at times. A gorgeous scoring pass to Bryant Johnson Sunday made him look like The One.

But when Harrington tossed two perfect touchdown passes to Charles Rogers in the 2003 opener, he looked like The One as well.

It was Harrington’s lone bit of glory and the start of a nasty downward spiral.

It’s not that Stafford should be written off as a Harrington clone. It’s just that we’ve seen this story before. It starts with hope, and it ends with the former golden boy slinking off to a series of backup jobs around the NFL, and the Lions replacing him with the latest doomed quarterback prodigy.

For his part, Stafford seems to have thicker skin than Harrington. And he is definitely more polished than Ware, who couldn’t even win a starting job from Peete and Erik Kramer in the early 1990s.

And maybe that mental toughness will separate Stafford from the rest of this sorry list. Maybe that’s the ingredient that was missing all this time. In Johnson, Stafford has his go-to receiver. In Kevin Smith, he has a serviceable running back. In Jim Schwartz, he has a coach that actually seems to know how to handle a football team.

But the Lions have a way of taking talent out of the equation. A player or coach tends to get dragged into the losing culture, and talent is no match for an overriding sense of failure.

Stafford has eight games left in his rookie season, and sadly he can do nothing in those eight games to relieve the stigma that comes with quarterbacking the Lions.

The answers will come in the next two seasons. He’ll need that thick skin to allow time for the game to slow down, for a porous offensive line to become solidified, to develop a real chemistry with Johnson.

Because the people of Detroit demand results now. And who can blame them after the last 20 years? In Sanders they saw the greatest running back of all time squandered in losing causes. In Harrington, they bought into unrealistic expectations only to see him flounder repeatedly. In Matt Millen, they saw a general manager too inept to learn from his own mistakes and too stubborn to quit.

And then they saw an 0-16 season.

One player can’t change that history. But Stafford is the only one who can lead the charge.

But until he somehow separates himself from the rest of the sorry quarterbacks in Lions history, Stafford will be just another Joey Harrington. Another Andre Ware. Another Scott Mitchell.

Just the latest in a long lineage of losers.