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I don’t want to completely write off the Lions 2010 season already, but let’s not kid ourselves: You don’t bounce back from seven years of Matt Millen overnight. I hope I’m wrong, but there’s a good chance the Lions will be a sub-.500 team again in 2010, and thus, there’s also a good chance that their streak of savage beatings on Thanksgiving Day will continue.

Especially since they’ll be playing the Patriots.

Pro Football Talk figures it out with some deductive reasoning:

The fact that the Jets will be hosting a Thanksgiving night game means that the Patriots will be traveling to Detroit earlier in the day. Because CBS will be televising the game hosted by the Lions, the road team must be from the AFC, and the only AFC teams playing in Ford Field this season will be the Pats and the Jets.

The Lions haven’t won a Thanksgiving Day game since 2003, and have lost their six previous Turkey Day games by an average of 23.2 points. At no point in those six years have they even been within 10 points at the end of a Thanksgiving Day game.

The glass-half-full way to look at things if you’re a Lions fan? Their last Thanksgiving win before 2003 came against — drum roll, please — the New England Patriots. That was Bill Belichick’s first and only losing season as head coach of the Patriots. That’s right: Once upon a time, Charlie Batch(notes) went up against Bill Belichick and handed him his ass. It was a precursor of absolutely nothing to come.

Anyway, for those of you who start working on early on excuses for why you can’t hang out with Uncle Ned, Aunt Judy and their hyperactive children, you’ll probably need to come up with something other than, “I’m sorry, I’m watching this super-competitive football game.”

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