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Lions fans receive playoff tickets one day after team is eliminated from postseason

It will not be the happiest of holidays for the Lions ... or their fans. (Paul Sancya/AP) It was bad enough that fans of the Detroit Lions had to watch their
Doug Farrar|
Lions fans receive playoff tickets one day after team is eliminated from postseason
Lions fans receive playoff tickets one day after team is eliminated from postseason

It will not be the happiest of holidays for the Lions ... or their fans. (Paul Sancya/AP)

It was bad enough that fans of the Detroit Lions had to watch their team get eliminated from the 2013 NFL postseason with Sunday's overtime loss to the New York Giants, with head coach Jim Schwartz yelling at some of them when they booed the team. Some of those Lions fans went home, woke up the next day and found ... playoff tickets in the mail.

Ouch.

The team had mailed playoff ticket invoices to season-ticket holders in November. At that time, the Lions were 6-5, and tied for first place in the NFC North. They moved their record up to 7-5 with a 40-10 win over the Green Bay Packers on Thanksgiving, and then the Lions fell completely apart. They've lost their last three games, and the big talk is no longer about the playoffs -- it's about how much longer Schwartz will have a job, and whether the team will shut Calvin Johnson down for Sunday's season finale against the Minnesota Vikings.

The tickets came in two-game blocks, and per the Detroit Free Press, all 2013 playoff ticket purchases will be credited to 2014 season ticket renewals.

Which, we imagine, comes as little consolation to those fans who received them. The hope was that after 2012's 4-12 record -- which followed a 2011 season featuring the first playoff berth since 1999 -- things were about to turn around.

“We’ve come up short the last two years," Schwartz concluded on Monday. "I don’t think there’s any question of that. Last year was a lot different situation than this year. Last year, injuries really mounted and things like that. Even though last year I say that, it was a lot different. I think if you go back and look, I’d be surprised, I don’t remember, maybe even going back to my first year, I don’t remember any game that we weren’t within a score in the fourth quarter. I think that’s been sort of the hallmark of our team. We’ve battled every single game, we haven’t come up with enough of those to be wins.”

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Doug Farrar
DOUG FARRAR

SI.com contributing NFL writer and Seattle resident Doug Farrar started writing about football locally in 2002, and became Football Outsiders' West Coast NFL guy in 2006. He was fascinated by FO's idea to combine Bill James with Dr. Z, and wrote for the site for six years. He wrote a game-tape column called "Cover-2" for a number of years, and contributed to six editions of "Pro Football Prospectus" and the "Football Outsiders Almanac." In 2009,  Doug was invited to join Yahoo Sports' NFL team, and covered Senior Bowls, scouting combines, Super Bowls, and all sorts of other things for Yahoo Sports and the Shutdown Corner blog through June, 2013. Doug received the proverbial offer he couldn't refuse from SI.com in 2013, and that was that. Doug has also written for the Seattle Times, the Washington Post, the New York Sun, FOX Sports, ESPN.com, and ESPN The Magazine.  He also makes regular appearances on several local and national radio shows, and has hosted several podcasts over the years. He counts Dan Jenkins, Thomas Boswell, Frank Deford, Ralph Wiley, Peter King, and Bill Simmons as the writers who made him want to do this for a living. In his rare off-time, Doug can be found reading, hiking, working out, searching for new Hendrix, Who, and MC5 bootlegs, and wondering if the Mariners will ever be good again.

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