Jar-Jar Tate

The ability to speak does not make you intelligent.

- Qui-Gon Jinn, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace

Congratulations, Golden Tate. You managed to alienate the Detroit Lions fan base with your insipid comments after Sunday's horrendous display of football even more than Detroit's horrendous display of football managed to do ... and that's quite an accomplishment.

"Today I felt like at times our fan base kind of turned their back on us," Tate said in yesterday's post-game interviews following the Arizona Cardinals' 42-17 shellacking of the Pontiac Pussycats, dropping the Honolulu Blue and Silver to a depressing 0-5 and increasing the odds of yet another Owen 16 season in the Motor City. Personally, after the way this year has started, I'm pulling for a bookend to join the 2008 winless season.

Y'awl can do this, Lions!

Granted, Tate's comments were sandwiched between compliments of the fan base ("I think our fans are amazing, and they've been patient for a long time" was one side of the Oreo; "We have a lot of confidence in our fan base, and we can't do this without our fan base" was the other side). But it was the creamy white "blame the fans" filling which got the bulk of the attention, and rightfully so.

Look, Golden - we understand you don't have a real grasp of the painful and seemingly pathetic (and, to a degree, sadomasochistic) kind of love-hate relationship Detroit's fans have with their allegedly professional football franchise. You're from Tennessee, played college ball at Notre Dame, and then went off to the Seattle Seahawks, even being part of a Super Bowl-winning team before coming to Detroit.

We even understand your frustration, being part of the dysfunctional world that is Lions Football. Trust us, we've been there/done that, as fans, for damn near 60 years - longer than I've been on this planet.

But if you're going to lash out at the fan base - who collectively are incredibly and overly sensitive to being thrown under the proverbial bus by members of their grossly-overpaid weekend entertainment, especially given the tons of dead presidents Detroiters have spent to support this historic mess of a franchise - then we, collectively, are going to take your comments and tell you to shove them where the sun don't shine. And having gone from just one horribly-blown call in Dallas away from actually winning a second playoff game since the mid-1950s last season, to this unwatchable and boring - yes, boring - collection of turnovers, penalties, and stupidity, just adds salt to the wound.

"Our fan base kind of turned their backs on us."

You know what? That stings.

I'm looking at the box score, which is no easier to digest than what I witnessed while eating at Duffy's of Greenacres and watching the massacre on the big screen. We, the fans, didn't commit six turnovers. We, the fans, didn't get hit with nine stupid penalties. We, the fans, didn't blow an early 7-0 lead by allowing 35 unanswered points against Arizona.

ARIZONA! Owned by that sorry excuse of a human being Bill Bidwell!

How bad are things now? You guys are making the 2015 Detroit Tigers' last-place American League East finish look like a sports championship level team. And in case you didn't catch it, the Tigers' season was horrid in infinite ways.

You're making an upcoming lost cause disguised as a Detroit Pistons campaign look like a refreshingly wonderful change of pace.

{At least we have the Detroit Red Wings to be thankful for!}

Jar-Jar Tate, the fans you alienated have suffered through every possible type of professional football hell for the better part of six decades. You want "creative ways to lose"? The Lions defined this perfectly, and since then have redefined it on a yearly (sometimes multiple times yearly) basis. To wit:

The Lions are 1-11 in post-season play since 1958.

They've won roughly 40 percent of their games since the AFL-NFL merger in 1970.

They've lost on a game-ending 63-yard field goal by New Orleans' Tom Dempsey.

They've lost when quarterback Dan Orlovsky stepped out of the end zone for a safety against Minnesota, and when Packers QB Matt Flynn set Green Bay franchise records with 480 yards passing and six touchdowns ... as a backup.

They've lost when long snapper Don Muhlbach botched his job after a long, dramatic touchdown drive against the Vikings, and when coach Marty Mornhinweg chose which side of the field he wanted to defend (rather than take the ball) to start overtime in Chicago.

They've lost when the refs picked up a pass interference flag in Dallas, and when the refs screwed up by not calling an intentional bat out of the end zone last week in Seattle, and because of the Calvin Johnson rule to Chicago.

They've lost by perhaps the most irrational football score ever (5-0) to Dallas in 1970.

They've lost when they attempted a fake punt from their own 12-yard-line against New Orleans (and I wrote about this in 1988, while in my last semester of undergraduate coursework at Central Michigan University).

They've had perhaps the greatest running back in the history of the game, Barry Sanders, retire after 10 seasons, days before training camp opened, because he was sick of losing all the damn time.

They've had Matt Millen, Andre Ware, Charlie Rogers, Ikaika Alama-Francis, Stockar McDougle, Reggie Rogers, Jeff Komlo, the Pontiac Silverdome, and a zillion other shades of hopelessly bad associated with the Ford Football Franchise.

Now, we recognize this is an epic failure on multiple levels. Just as no one individual would receive credit if Detroit actually won (a) a division, or (b) a playoff game, or (c) a football championship, this year's steaming pile of fecal matter is a team effort. To turn Howard Jones on his back, "Everybody is to blame." We have a coddled, run-of-the-mill quarterback who hasn't a clue how to GPS his passes to one of the elite receivers in the game (that would be Megatron, not you). We have more turnovers than Pepperidge Farms. More yellow flags than the United Nations. More vanilla, predictable plays called from the sidelines. The most passive, clueless ownership of any sports franchise in North America.

And yes, it would be easy to point at the loss of Ndamukong Suh on the defensive side of the ball, except his year (so far) in Miami has been amazingly worse than what we are seeing in Detroit.

There are cries for Martha Ford to sell the team, just as there were cries for her late husband William Clay Ford to do so; that ain't gonna happen. We are saddled with "Found On Road Dead" as a football franchise, barring some weird alignment of planets that Neil deGrasse Tyson has yet to announce, for much of the foreseeable future. Matthew Stafford (salary) is not going anywhere. Kicking front office brains Martin Mayhew and Tom Lewand out the door would be nice, but the Ford family is known for loyalty to lousy football management, so we're probably stuck with them as well.

The one change I see on the immediate horizon is the letting go of offensive coordinator Joe Lombardi, but even that is too late to salvage the season.

Meanwhile, here's my suggestion to Tate and the men who suit up to represent the Motor City and southeast Michigan on football Sundays: Shut the hell up. Do your damn job. And maybe - just maybe - we'll have your back.