Tom E. Curran • E-mail

Detroit’s having America over for Thanksgiving.

Start planning now for a burnt turkey, backed-up toilet, driveway fender-bender, red wine on the carpet, a kid putting an arrow through the flat screen and the 14-year-old niece to announce during dessert that she's "in a family way."

That J. Geils song, “Detroit Breakdown” ... it’s in full effect.

The automotive industry’s hanging by a cuticle, the mayor’s in jail and the Michigan Wolverines are enduring their worst season in 129 years of football. Meanwhile, the Detroit Lions are trying to trump all of them.

The Lions are 0-11 and facing the 10-1 Titans for their traditional Thanksgiving Day Game this Thursday. After blowing a 17-0 lead against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Sunday and losing 38-20. The Lions are now a tremendous threat to go 0-16. They go from the Titans to the Vikings, Colts, Saints and Packers over the final weeks of the season. The combined records of those teams is 34-20.

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Lions kicker Jason Hanson sees clearly that his team is on the brink of becoming the first team to go 0-16.

“That’s worse than frustrating,” Hanson told the Detroit Free-Press after the loss to Tampa Bay. “It’s embarrassing. ... We’ve played so bad that we actually have something to play for now. Everybody should be nervous about it and angry about what we’ve done ... We should look like a playoff team just trying to get a win.”

If the Lions don’t win this year, they will be the first NFL team since the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers to go winless. But when Tampa went 0-14 it was in their first year of existence. The Lions have been around since 1930. And this is a team that – can you believe it – started the 2007 season by winning six of its first eight games under their lovably real and grounded head coach Rod Marinelli.

They needed a perfect storm of bad luck, bad decisions and bad players to make blessed imperfection so attainable. And it’s hard sometimes to even identify what was bad luck or bad decisions as they’ve lost 18 of 19 after that 6-2 start last season.

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In the offseason, they jettisoned offensive coordinator Mike Martz and his pass-happy schemes. They traded defensive tackle Shaun Rogers – an inconsistent performer in Detroit – to the Browns. Their history of poor drafting under deposed team president Matt Millen came home to roost. Veteran quarterback Jon Kitna got hurt. His replacement, Dan Orlovsky (whose stint included a mind-boggling safety he took while sprinting along the back line of the end zone looking for a receiver) got hurt as well. Daunte Culpepper was plucked from retirement to run the Lions offense and he’s played like a guy plucked from retirement.

But Free Press columnist Michael Rosenberg, author of the terrific new book, “War As They Knew It: Woody Hayes, Bo Schembechler, and America in a Time of Unrest” said that the Lions’ travails pale in comparison to the region’s economic outlook.

“You always think of sports as a diversion in tough times but times are so tough here that people are not making as big a deal as they would have five years ago,” explains Rosenberg. “Whatever happens elsewhere in the country with the recession, if the bailout of the auto industry doesn’t happen, it will be a depression here. It’s been said that one in three jobs here are tied to the auto industry. People have bigger problems right now. And really, how much anger can you have if the team’s 0-11 as opposed to its normal 3-8?

The face of the Lions disastrous 2008 is Marinelli. A tough but tender grandfatherly type, Marinelli’s the type who could see two headlights coming at him in a dark tunnel and assume it's motorcycles riding side by side and not an 18-wheeler about to flatten him.

“Who wants to look at a leader who’s a grouch or a pouter,” Marinelli asked after the Lions got to 0-10. “There’s too much of that around anyway. When things are bad a leader’s supposed to step up and lead from the front. Some people fake. That’s all you see is fake, fake, fake. I’m not fake. I am who I am. And you know that. Everything you see and I tell you right here is from my heart. I can’t fake it. Some people are great fakers. They’re pretty good at it. I’m not.”

That being the case, you have to admire Marinelli’s relentless optimism that the sun will come out on Thanksgiving.

On Monday of this week he said that the game with the Titans is, “really good for us right now to have a chance to get under the spotlight. I’m really looking forward to that, where everybody is scrutinizing everything about us right now.”

So what if dinner’s ruined, you have to go out back to pee, the car’s going to need some fixing, the rug’s got a spot and the TV’s on the fritz? You’re going to be an uncle!