Sure, if you ignore how much more impactful a quarterback is than a center in hockey. You’re talking about the general of the team that touches and commands the offense on 50% of the plays.
But if you want to run with that argument, sure let’s do it. Larkin is a problem in the sense that he is good but not good enough to pull a team out of the depths. If the goal is to make and win playoff games, being just “good” is not the same as “good enough”. If you aren’t “good enough” does that not make you part of the problem?
We can get philosophical on this as long as you’d like. At the end of the day, I’ve watched every single game the Lions have played in Stafford’s career and he’s cost them in plenty of big moments. Again, I’ll never say he was bad. He just wasn’t the fix for this team. He’s plenty good enough to be the fix for another team. The organization is still the biggest part of the problem.
You're looking at it from the wrong angle, which I attempted and apparently failed to illustrate with the Larkin comparison.
Outside of generational talents, you can make a case that every player on every team in every sport is "part of the problem." But at that point, you've diluted the phrase "part of the problem" down to the point where it is simply meaningless.
Like Larkin, Stafford is not a generational talent. But he is plenty good enough to win with. Calling these guys "part of the problem" is silly, because they aren't one of the primary reasons, or even secondary reasons, that their team is being held back. I'd theorize there's probably a point where watching the Lions
too much leaves you unable to see the forest from the trees on this. The organization's ineptitude over the years has been many, many magnitudes worse than any deficiencies you can pluck from Stafford's game. Stafford over the years has been hampered by combinations of poor managing, poor head coaching, poor lines, poor receivers, poor playcalling. Over and over. His talent and compete level has actually made a lot of those massive deficiencies look not as bad at times.
The Lions suck. They've always sucked. In so many ways at once most of the time. But they've had legit players at times. Winners. Gamers. Guys who never escaped Detroit and never had a chance to shine on the biggest stage (or even kinda sorta large stages). Barry. Megatron. And while Stafford is not on the level of the former two, I'm happy to see him get out and show what he can do with a franchise that isn't a laughingstock. The Lions didn't deserve Stafford (and definitely didn't deserve Barry or Megatron). The Lions deserve Jared Goff.
For the 30+ years I've followed the Lions, the best they've offered fans is a handful of premier players, several instances of false hope, and a move from Pontiac to Detroit. At worst, they've offered misery and embarrassment. The fans deserve better, but the bar is so low that they get regularly excited about nothingburgers now, like draft picks and mediocre coaches. Until the organization can raise the bar to
some form of respectability, f*** the Lions and their decades-long campaign to spin their wheels.
