After suffering through the freezing temperatures and near Nor’easter in Philadelphia on Sunday, Lions receiver Nate Burleson didn’t return to his cozy home for a day of rest and relaxation on Monday. Instead, he spent his day serving some of Detroit’s homeless at a local shelter. However, his reception at the shelter didn’t go quite as he might have expected.
During his time in the city on Monday, Burleson encountered a few avid Lions supporters among the homeless folks he was feeding, including one fan who wasn’t too happy with the team’s performance of late.
“I just got back from feeding some homeless in downtown Detroit,” Burleson said during an interview with 105.1 FM. “Not saying that to get a pat on the back, but I was sitting there — it was a happy moment, you see smiles on peoples’ faces, giving hugs and taking pictures — and one guy who was there getting some food said, ‘Man, you guys are sorry. Same old Lions.’”
The comment shouldn’t come as too much of a shock to Burleson, considering the Lions have looked sluggish of late, winning just one of the last four games and dropping to 7-6 on the season after a promising 6-3 start. The ugly stretch likely reminds longtime Lions fans of the miserable run they endured from 2001 to 2010, in which Detroit went a dismal 39-121 and failed to finish with a winning record in any of the 10 seasons. Burleson was around for just one of those seasons (2010), but he was also part of the team that trudged to a 4-12 mark in 2012, one year after breaking the dreaded playoff curse.
This has already been arguably the strangest season of Burleson’s 11-year career, considering a late-night pizza run cost him seven games and a broken arm earlier in the year. Monday’s incident probably isn’t the first time Burleson has been mocked as a member of the Lions, and likely not the last, but it certainly adds yet another noteworthy chapter to his already unusual season.
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