1950s
Detroit enjoyed its greatest success in the 1950s. Led by quarterback Bobby Layne, the Lions made it to the NFL Championship for the first time in 17 years in 1952 and defeated Paul Brown's Cleveland Browns by a score of 17-7 on December 28. The next season saw a rematch of the two teams, in which Layne found Jim Doran for a 33-yard game-winning touchdown in the closing moments to win 17-16. In 1954, the two teams would meet again, with the Browns getting the upper hand with a 56-10 victory. Three years later, in the 1957 Western Conference Championship Game, Tobin Rote, starting for an injured Layne, rallied the team back from a 27-7 halftime deficit to the San Francisco 49ers with 24 unanswered points to win 31–27. The next week, in the National Championship Game, Rote threw for four touchdowns and ran in another as the Lions routed Cleveland 59-14 and claimed their third championship in six years.
In 1958, after he had led the Lions to three NFL championship games and provided Detroit nearly a decade of Hall of Fame play, the Lions traded Bobby Layne. Bobby was injured during the last championship season, and the Lions thought he was through and wanted to get what they could for him. According to legend, as he was leaving for Pittsburgh, Bobby said that Detroit "would not win for 50 years." Since this time, the Lions have not won another championship and have only a single playoff game win. The franchise's subsequent 51 years of (mostly) futility has been labelled "The Curse of Bobby Layne". The Lions have only one playoff win since then, against the Dallas Cowboys in the 1991 season.
Minority owner Ralph Wilson split off from the team in 1959 to take an American Football League franchise; initially planning to place it in Miami, he instead placed it in Buffalo, New York, where it would become the Buffalo Bills. For the first three years of its existence, the AFL's Bills and NFL's Lions had identical blue and silver colors, possibly second-hand from old Lions equipment.
Read more about this topic: History Of The Detroit Lions