Did Peyton Manning Break the Curse of Bobby Layne?

Sometime in 2022, Peyton Manning and Jeff Daniels placed a bathtub filled with whiskey and salt in an endzone of Ford Field. The quarterback then handed the actor a “mystical incantation” to chant. “In the name of Motown, Eminem, and Ed McMahon,” began the writer, director, and star of “Escanaba in Da Moonlight”, “I call upon thee, oh creatures of earth and whiskey. Cleanse the Detroit Lions of the curse of Bobby Layne and restore the roar of the Lion Pride to balance and health.”

Manning staged this tongue-in-cheek ceremony for an episode of his ESPN documentary series, “Peyton’s Places,” in which he explored—and then exorcised with Daniels’ help—the supposed curse of superstar quarterback Bobby Layne, who the Lions traded to the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1958. According to legend, Layne was so upset by the move that he made a prophecy, declaring that the Lions, who were the league’s reigning champions that year and one of its winningest franchises, would not win a championship for 50 years. 

“And just like that, the Curse of Bobby Layne was lifted forever,” concluded Manning after he and Daniels performed the ceremony on Ford Field. 

It’s a good story. And like many good stories, it’s as fake as a Dan Campbell punt on 4th and 2. As the Lions march toward the playoffs this season with their greatest team in decades, let’s separate the fact from the fiction of the alleged curse of Bobby Layne.

Robert “Bobby” Layne played for the Lions from 1950-’58 and was wildly popular with Detroit fans. And for good reason. He led the team to three NFL Championships, making Detroit one of the most dominant teams of the decade. Since Layne’s trade, Detroit has won zero championships and has posted the sixth-worst win-loss record among all active NFL franchises. 

The Layne curse seemed most credible in 2008 when, exactly 50 years after the legendary curse, the Lions made league history as the first team to finish a 16-game season without a win. Detroit suffered this humiliation at Lambeau Field of all places, the home of one of its archrivals, where Packers fans chanted “Oh-Six-Teen” as time expired. 

Only four active NFL teams have failed to appear in a Super Bowl, which became the league championship game following the AFL-NFL merger in 1966. The undistinguished foursome includes the Cleveland Browns, the Jacksonville Jaguars, the Houston Texans, and the Detroit Lions. The Jags and Texans were founded in the 1990s; the Browns in the 1940s. The miserable distinction of being the oldest NFL franchise without a Super Bowl title (or even appearance) is held, uncontested, by the Detroit Lions, founded in 1930. “There is a curse,” said Daniels, a Michigander and lifelong Lions fan, in an interview with Manning. “If you take the curse out of there, we have to accept the fact we are this bad.” 

The supernatural explanation for the Lions’ haplessness, however, fails to stand up to historical scrutiny. There are no contemporary accounts of Layne declaring the curse in 1958. In fact, the newspapers are silent on whether Layne was even upset about the trade. 

Some of the mythology surrounding the curse comes from the supposed mystery of why Layne was traded at all. How could the Lions have let him go just a year after winning their third NFL Championship with him at QB? Given the franchise’s track record for making bone-headed personnel decisions in subsequent decades, the premise that the Lions summoned a curse themselves by tossing away one of its greatest players is only too believable. “The Lions never explained why [they traded Layne],” declared the Detroit Free Press in 1997.

From an organizational standpoint, however, the deal is not too difficult to figure out. At the time of the trade, Layne was actually splitting time in a two-quarterback system with fellow All-Pro Tobin Rote. After breaking his leg in three places, Layne was forced to miss the playoffs in the 1957 season. Thus, it was Rote—not the injured Layne—who led the Lions to a 59-7 victory over the Cleveland Browns in the 1957 NFL Championship. 

Additionally, Layne was getting up there in years. He was 31 at the beginning of the 1958 season. This was relatively old for a football star of the era, especially for someone who played—and drank—as hard as Layne did. (On “Peyton’s Places,” Manning spends a good amount of the episode paying tribute to Layne’s legendary drinking feats—including the bathtub of whiskey—even joking that Layne still holds many NFL passing records for playing drunk.) The Associated Press reported the day of the trade that Layne “had lost his old time zing.” The Lions’ head coach, George Wilson, said he saw a chance to get value for Layne before the Lions legend retired. 

So is there any actual evidence of the curse?

The first reference to a “curse” associated with Bobby Layne that I could find in a newspaper is dated Oct. 23, 1995. The Lions had just dropped to 2-5. With a headline shouting “CURSES,” the Detroit Free Press ran a story comparing Detroit’s plight to the Curse of the Bambino, arguably the most famous sports curse that (allegedly) kept the Boston Red Sox from a World Series title for more than 80 years. 

After noting that the Lions hadn’t won an NFL title since trading Layne, the Free Press continued, “Are Detroit’s luckless Lions victims of a similar hex? Perhaps it’s the Curse of Bobby Layne.” In other words, the article suggested the Lions had suffered from a curse since trading Bobby Layne but said nothing about Layne himself casting it. 

As the team’s misery deepened, the curse’s legend solidified. “CURSES!” ran another Detroit Free Press headline on Sept. 5, 2007: “Legend has it that after being traded to the Steelers in 1958, the quarterback said the Lions wouldn’t win the big one for 50 years.” At the time, the Lions were embarking on their seventh losing season in a row—a streak that would continue through the end of 2010.  

Curt Sylvester, the Free Press’s beat writer for the Lions from 1978 to the mid-2000s, said he had never heard of the curse until later in his career. 

“I have my doubts he actually said it,” Sylvester said in a phone interview with Michigan Enjoyer. “It’s one of those things where the story is better than the truth.” Sylvester said he doubts Layne said it because the curse would have been picked up by any newspaper that got wind of it.

“If he had said what some of the stories now say he said, being that he was Bobby Layne, I think that would have gotten a lot of attention,” Sylvester added. “If it was something that really came out and happened, I think certainly the Detroit papers would have been all over it. It would have been a lot easier to find.”

Sylvester paused, “But if someone has an old yellow clipping to prove us wrong, that would be another helluva story.”

While contemporary news accounts are silent on a curse, sports reporters did speculate about the trade. An Associated Press story at the time suggested that Layne was traded because he showed up drunk to a team meeting in Green Bay and had been feuding with head coach George Wilson and some teammates. “There’s nothing to it,” Wilson told the newspapers in 1958. “Bobby and I have always been the best of friends. We’ve never had any trouble and the only feud going on is the result of someone’s imagination.”

At the time, Layne himself downplayed the narrative that he was unhappy with the trade. The move reunited him with Pittsburgh head coach Buddy Parker, who Layne had played for in Detroit from 1951-56. “This isn’t bad,” Layne told the New York Times in a story dated Oct. 30, 1958. “In a few weeks, I’ll know the receivers and they’ll know me. Then we’ll begin to move.”

In 2017, Layne’s son, Alan Layne, told the Detroit Free Press there were no “sour grapes” with his father and the Lions. “He never said anything derogatory around me or my brother,” Alan said. “It was just water under the bridge.” 

There is this snippet in the ESPN episode where Layne says, “I really didn’t know what to think. I tried what they referred to as a hex…” But the clip stops mid-sentence. There is no context about what question Layne was answering or even if he was talking about the trade.

The first season after his retirement in 1962, Bobby Layne was honored at halftime of a Lions-Steelers game, during which “Bobby Layne Day” was declared. 

An alternative, and much more pedestrian, explanation for the misery of Lions’ fans over the past 60-plus years is simply mismanagement of the team. At the time of Bobby Layne’s trade, the Lions were attempting to navigate a challenge inevitably faced by all great sports dynasties: an aging roster. Long periods of success are often followed by painful fallow periods (see the post-Brady New England Patriots), and the 1950s Lions were no exception. Ultimately, the most determinative event of that era, while much less romantic than a curse, was probably the purchase of the team by the Ford family. 

When ESPN aired its episode of “Peyton’s Places” on the Curse of Bobby Layne, partway through the 2022 NFL season, the Lions were 1-3 and still recovering from the indignities of the Matt Patricia era. Since then, they have posted 30 regular season wins to 11 loses, won their first playoff victories in 32 years, and only barely missed their first Super Bowl berth. 

The 2024 Lions are a legitimately great football team and appear poised to make a deep playoff run. Possible explanations of this success include the leadership of Sheila Ford Hemp (who took over the team in 2020), an excellent coaching staff led by brawler head coach Dan Campbell and mastermind offensive coordinator Ben Johnson, the resurgence of Jared Goff, or… maybe Peyton Manning really did break the curse of Bobby Layne?

Tom Gantert is a contributing writer for Michigan Enjoyer.