OAKLAND, Calif. -- Don't ask a boy to do a man's job. Hell, don't even ask a man. Ask a man-plus, supersized freak, a guy who is taller and faster than everybody else.
Ask Calvin Johnson.
You can talk about defending Johnson, and you can game-plan for him and bump him at the line and try to pressure Matthew Stafford so he can't get the ball to him, but at the end of the day, or the end of the game, the math never changes: taller + faster > smaller + slower.
Johnson finished with nine catches for 214 yards, and he deserves nine game balls. This was a performance for the ages, the kind that should shut up Johnson's three remaining doubters, two of whom just moved to a cave in South America.
A single player does not win a football game. But man, Johnson came close on that last, epic Lions drive. He caught a pass on the sidelines, one of the most artful plays in football -- catch, keep the toes down, fall out of bounds without dropping the ball.
Then came the preposterous: Johnson, doing a double move in the middle of the field, somehow turning triple coverage into no coverage at all. Stafford chucked the ball deep off his back foot. It was not a great pass. It didn't have to be. The Lions were in range.
It's a performance like this that makes me want to allow Calvin to bang my future wife so that I could raise a Megatron Oreo baby into an All-Pro football player. I would be like Todd Marinovich's dad. I would make that kid eat, sleep, breathe route running. I'd make him have to jump to reach his food on top of the fridge when he is 4 years old. Now that's how you develop 40"+ verticals. And then I snap back to reality knowing that my kid would do more coke and heroin than Todd Marinovich because not only is his father a slave driving, narcissistic kook, but he'd be leading a pretty weird life at that point. His real father is a multi-million dollar hall of fame athlete, his mother is not around because she left me for a young black athlete, and he realizes I've never played an organized game of football in my life and everything I've taught him has likely hurt his chances of ever being a successful football player.
That's when I come to my senses and realize if I'm going to be a slave driver-esque parent, my kid will need to play hockey.
PS Sweet game, Calvin!
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