Each week whether the lions win or lose there is no shortage of media articles and fan posts about the dirty play of the Detroit Lions. I am personally a big fan of the lions "take no prisoners" style of play, and I am disappointed with the media for portraying it as dirty in order to garner more interest for their articles. As such I invite them to step inside Mr. Peabody's wayback machine and set the dial to few years ago, where what the lions are currently doing on the field would simply be called "playing football". It amazes me how quickly people forget that the same hard nosed smash mouth style of football the lions are playing is what this league was built on.

Recently after reading one of these sensationalized articles, I decided to do some digging myself to see if there was in fact any truth to these claims. In order to do this I looked only at penalties that generally get considered as dirty play, for example roughing the passer and unnecessary roughness. I decided to add these stats together to form what I dubbed the dirty meter. I immediately noticed two things. First the lions were not at the top of this list, and second many of the teams that were near or above the Lions on the dirty meter are widely considered to have some of the best defenses in the league (this is you 49'ers and Texans fans). The difference is these other teams aren't awash in a wave of media each week crying foul of their play on the field. So if the lions are dirty then I don't want to be clean, in fact I have  asked my friends to now refer to me as Pigpen.