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This Day In Sports…December 29, 1957:
The last time the Detroit Lions won an NFL championship. In one of the most one-sided NFL title games ever, the Lions routed the Cleveland Browns 59-14 to claim their fourth title and the third in six years. Detroit quarterback Tobin Rote, filling in for injured star Bobby Layne, passed just 19 times on the day and completed 12, but he threw for 280 yards and four touchdowns (and he ran for another TD).
The game that set the table for the title happened the previous week in San Francisco. The Lions and 49ers had tied for the NFL regular season title, and they faced each other in a playoff game at Kezar Stadium. The Niners built a 24-7 halftime lead and celebrated it in the locker room. Problem was, the Detroit locker room was next door, and the walls at Kezar were notoriously thin. According to a story in the Detroit Free Press, Lions coach George Wilson stood before the team and said, “I was going to say something, but that’s what they think of you.” The motivated Lions rallied for a 31-27 victory.
It was after that season that the futility began for the Lions. Layne would be traded to the Pittsburgh Steelers the following October, and legend has it that on his way out the door, Layne declared that the Lions wouldn’t win another championship for 50 years. Well, it’s been 68 years now. Detroit’s next playoff win didn’t come until the 1991 season—and the next one wasn’t until the 2023 campaign. The Lions reached the doorstep of the Super Bowl in the NFC Championship Game that season, but it was San Francisco’s revenge for 1957. This time Detroit led 24-7 at halftime before falling to the 49ers 34-31. Some still call it all the “Curse of Bobby Layne.”
The Lions and Browns are two of just four teams that have never played in a Super Bowl (the others are relatively recent expansion franchises, the Houston Texans and Jacksonville Jaguars). Detroit is the only franchise in existence since the birth of the Super Bowl to never make it to the big game—remembering that the current iteration of the Browns was born in 1999, three years after the original Browns departed Cleveland and became the Baltimore Ravens.
(Tom Scott hosts the Scott Slant segment during the football season on KTVB’s Sunday Sports Extra. He also anchors four sports segments each weekday on 95.3 FM KTIK and one on News/Talk KBOI. His Scott Slant column runs every Wednesday.)
