When football fans talk about the worst teams in NFL history, the conversation usually begins with the expansion Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who went winless in their first year, of 1976, managed just seven victories over the next two seasons, and were chided for everything from their ugly style of play to their ugly uniforms.

But even in this alleged age of parity, another team is changing perceptions of just how bad an NFL franchise can be. The Detroit Lions fired head coach Steve Mariucci yesterday after a 27-7 loss to the Atlanta Falcons on Thanksgiving revealed to a national television audience what Detroit fans have been painfully aware of for the last five years: The Lions are in the midst of a run of futility to rival the Bucs’ in the 1970s. In fact, comparing those Bucs to these Lions might be unfair to Tampa Bay, which went 23-54-1 in its first five seasons, a better mark than Detroit’s 20-55 record since 2001.

This is the second time in 34 months that an NFL team has fired Mariucci. He lost his previous job, with the San Francisco 49ers, after a loss to Tampa Bay in the second round of the 2002 playoffs. In Detroit (or, now, in San Francisco), getting to the second round of the playoffs would be cause for celebration and a contract extension. Mariucci’s Lions never contended for the playoffs, and his final record in Detroit is 15-28.

“I believed that this was a roster that was capable of making a playoff run, and I still believe that,” team president Matt Millen said at yesterday’s press conference. The talent Millen referred to includes a quarterback (Joey Harrington) and three wide receivers (Charles Rogers, Mike Williams, and Roy Williams) chosen with Top 10 picks in the last four drafts, but the passing game, which was supposed to be a Mariucci specialty, has sputtered to say the least. Harrington is averaging a dismal 169 passing yards a game and has almost as many fumbles (7) as touchdown passes (8).Rogers and the two Williamses are combining for as many receiving yards per game as Terrell Owens was by himself before he talked his way out of Philadelphia. In all, the Lions’ 4-7 record this season doesn’t seem catastrophic until you considers that those four wins came against opponents with a combined record of 12-32.

Millen and Mariucci were friends long before the former brought the latter to Detroit. The NFL requires every team with a coaching vacancy to interview at least one minority candidate, but it was such common knowledge in 2003 that Millen wanted Mariucci – a hot coaching commodity after going 60-43 in San Francisco, not to mention a Michigan native – that Millen was unable to find a single minority coach to interview for the job.

Millen received some criticism for that, but it was nothing compared to criticism he’s taken for the Lions’ on-field problems. Detroit hasn’t had a great team since it won three league championships in the 1950s and has only one playoff victory since 195, but it has never seen depths as low as the Millen era, which began in 2001. The Lions made the playoffs six times in the 1990s and were 9-7 in 2000. If Mariucci deserves blame for his team looking raw and undisciplined, Millen deserves more blame for building a roster that looks more talented every year in April than it does in September.

Hiring close friends as assistant coaches might have been Mariucci’s greatest weakness. When Mariucci took over in San Francisco in 1997, his predecessors, Bill Walsh and George Seifert, remained with the team as consultants and had a hand in shaping the coaching staff. In Detroit, Mariucci brought in many old friends to fill spots on his staff. Millen fired offensive line coach Pat Morris and tight ends coach Andy Sugarman yesterday, both of whom are longtime Mariucci friends, and he demoted another friend of Mariucci’s, offensive coordinator Ted Tollner. Defensive coordinator Dick Jauron was named interim head coach. He becomes Detroit’s fifth head coach since 2000.

Because Mariucci still has two years remaining on his contract, the Lions owe him $1.6 million for the rest of this season,$5.5 million for next season, and $6 million for 2007. Team owner William Clay Ford can’t be happy about the prospect of paying more than $13 million to a fired coach, but he deserves the blame for his decision five years ago to turn the entire operation over to Millen, a former linebacker and television analyst with no front office experience. Despite the dismal record, Millen has a good relationship with Ford and signed a five-year contract extension before the season. Incredibly, he enjoys more job security than any of the coaches who have passed through Detroit over the years.

Barring the Lions winning all of their remaining games, Jauron is unlikely to keep the job next year. But Millen has several decisions ahead of him beyond whom he’ll hire as Detroit’s next coach. The first is who will be the next quarterback. Neither of the two quarterbacks who have started for Detroit this year are safe bets to return: Harrington has not developed the way the team expected when they chose him with the third pick in the 2002 draft, and Jeff Garcia, who was signed in the off-season because he understood Mariucci’s offense from playing for him in San Francisco, has been unimpressive to say the least in three appearances this season.

As Mariucci plans his future, he might look to the example set by Pete Carroll, who was also fired twice in the NFL, but has rebounded to turn USC into a college football juggernaut. Like Carroll, Mariucci has a laid-back style that might better suit him to coaching amateur players. There is already talk that Michigan State, which just finished a disappointing 5-6 season, might fire head coach John L. Smith and replace him with Mariucci. Despite his record in Detroit, many people around the NFL and in college football respect Mariucci as a coach. The same cannot be said for Millen as a general manager, or even the Lions as an organization since the turn of the century.

Mr. Smith is a writer for the statistical Web site FootballOutsiders.com.