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The Detroit Lions are a professional American football team based in Detroit, Michigan. They are members of the North Division of the National Football Conference (NFC) in the National Football League (NFL), and play their home games at Ford Field in downtown Detroit. Originally based in Portsmouth, Ohio and called the Portsmouth Spartans, the team began play in 1929 as an independent professional team, one of many such teams in the Ohio and Scioto River valleys. For the 1930 season, the Spartans formally joined the NFL as the other area independents folded because of the Great Depression. Despite success within the NFL, they could not survive in Portsmouth, then the NFL's smallest city. The team was purchased and moved to Detroit for the 1934 season. The Lions have won four NFL Championships, the last in 1957, giving the club the second-longest NFL championship drought behind the Arizona Cardinals, who last won in 1947 (as the Chicago Cardinals). The Lions are one of four current NFL teams that have yet to qualify for the Super Bowl, the only one with an unbroken NFL existence dating to before 1995, and the only one in the NFC. The team has qualified for the playoffs only nine times in the more than 50 years since winning the 1957 championship. The Lions hold the second longest regular season losing streak in NFL history, losing 19 straight games from the final week of the 2007 season and ending on September 27, 2009, when the Lions defeated the Washington Redskins 19 - 14. It is second only to the 1976 � 77 Tampa Bay Buccaneers' losing streak of 26. Also since the NFL's expansion to 32 teams in 2002, the Lions are the only NFC team to not make the playoffs. The 2008 Detroit Lions became the only team in NFL history to lose all 16 regular season games. They had won all their preseason games that year, and were the only team to do so. They are only the second team to go winless without a tie (next to the 0 - 14 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers) since the AFL-NFL merger in 1970. They went 2 - 14 in 2009. On November 14, 2010 in Buffalo, the Lions lost their 25th straight road game, setting a new NFL record for consecutive road losses. The previous record of 24 was also set by the Lions from 2001 to 2003. The streak reached 26 games before being broken on December 19, 2010, when the Lions won at Tampa Bay. The win against Tampa Bay was the second in a four game winning streak starting with the Green Bay Packers. |