With plenty of down time and nowhere to go during training camp, some Detroit Lions are decompressing by chasing "mythical characters" in the hallways of their Allen Park training facility.
Hold your Super Bowl jokes, please.
Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford said on the "Mike & Mike" radio show Tuesday that the Pokemon Go craze has infiltrated the Lions' locker room and joked that "a surprising number" of his teammates are playing the augmented-reality game.
"I wish not that many would be _ it's kind of disappointing, honestly," Stafford said, lightheartedly. "I'm walking around, I see guys trying to find Pokemon in the hot tub or the cold tub, or whatever that is. I have no idea what it is _ I don't have any social media or any of those apps or any of that kind of stuff. But it's a disappointing amount (of players participating). Too many for my liking, to tell you the truth."
Lions guard Larry Warford said Monday that he downloaded the app and played the game for a few days this summer but quickly deleted it when he saw how many people were caught up in the game.
"I deleted it because I was like, 'This is some mind-control stuff,' " Warford said. "I don't like it."
Stafford, who deleted his Twitter account and eschews most social media, said he doesn't play Pokemon, either.
"I don't get it, but whatever," Stafford said in his radio interview.
According to the analytics service App Annie, Pokemon Go has been downloaded more than 100 million times since its release last month. In the game, users discover and capture virtual Pokemon characters in real-world surroundings such as museums, parks and even Ford Field.
Stafford said he was out to dinner with his wife, Kelly, before training camp, when the two noticed the game's reach.
"My wife and I went to Ann Arbor, where the University of Michigan is, right before camp, just to have a dinner and kind of hang out," Stafford said. "And we sat outside this restaurant and watched, I'm not kidding, just hundreds of people on a Saturday night, walking around with their phones out, not even looking up, not a care in the world, just trying to find these little mythical characters, I guess. I don't even know what they are."
When Stafford was told that pop star Justin Bieber recently went unnoticed by Pokemon players, he didn't sound the least bit surprised.
"The world's going right by these people," Stafford said. "They don't even know."
