Monday open thread: What excites you most about the 2023 Detroit Lions?

I miss football... bad.

I don’t know if it was the turning of the offseason calendar beyond the NFL Draft or the Michigan Panthers falling hard to reality, but I am missing the Detroit Lions and the NFL in horrible, horrible ways.

Unfortunately, even with rookie minicamp coming later this week, and OTAs and mandatory minicamp not far behind, real football is still a long four months away. But let’s spend this Monday getting ourselves a little more hyped for when those days finally come.

Today’s Question of the Day is:

What are you looking forward to most for the Detroit Lions’ 2023 season?

My answer: Simple: increased expectations.

One of the most interesting speeches caught on “Hard Knocks” was when defensive coordinator Aaron Glenn was talking about changing the culture in Detroit. He asked several players about their college careers and the expectation they had to win every single week. Several players who came from huge college football programs explained that there was not a week they took the field that they expected to lose. Winning was not only expected but likely on a week-to-week basis.

That expectation has not existed in Detroit in quite some time. While every now and then a gutsy writer picks the Lions to make the playoff or win the division, it has never been the consensus expectation in the past 25 years or so.

But that’s where things stand right now, less than a year from that Glenn speech. The Lions are significant NFC North favorites, their betting win total is 9.5, and they’ve got the fourth-best odds to win the entire conference—something they have literally never done in the Super Bowl era.

Increased expectations could always lead to massive disappointment, and for many of us Lions fans, that’s all we know. But even these expectations feel unprecedented on some level, and for that reason, I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Your turn.