What Now, Lovie?

All morning on Sunday, I was looking forward to a full slate of football games. The Bears’ previous Sunday night loss to Atlanta left a bad taste in my mouth (TWSS), so I couldn’t wait for them to get back on the field to atone for it. They’d be on the road in Cincy to face the Bengals, who up to that point had a decent enough record at 4-2, but I wasn’t really worried. I honestly, truly, thought the Bears were the better team. Five minutes before kickoff, I received a text from a neighbor:

Bengals 27, Bears 24

I responded back:

If the beers cant beat the Bengals, they should just pack up their ship right now because the Bengals arent an elite team and if you cant beat the Bengals, then what the fucks the point?

I had a few spelling errors in there and my phone took the liberty of changing the word “shit” to “ship”, but I think you understand what my point was. If the Bears couldn’t beat a 10 or 11 win team like the Bengals, they certainly aren’t goint to beat a 13 or 14 win team like New Orleans or Indy down the road in the playoffs or, ahem, the Super Bowl. So on Sunday, at least from my perspective, it was win or bust for the Bears. Win and they’d be good enough to keep playing. Lose and they might as well pack up their ship (whatever that means). Never did I imagine that they’d get their ass handed to them.

I’m not usually one to put a lot of stock in one game (except for when I call a Week 7 matchup with the Bengals “win or bust”), but Sunday’s performance by the Bears showed me everything I needed to know; they’re simply not good enough. Their defense gave up a TD on the Bengals’ first 4 offensive possessions. On the next 3 possessions, the Bengals followed that up with a FG and 2 more TD’s. So recapping, that’s 7 offensive possessions, 7 scores, 6 of which were touchdowns. These scores were not a bunch of flukes resulting from ill-timed turnovers either. No, these were clock-consuming extended drives with 1st down after 1st down. I had never seen anything like it. I’ve been watching Bears games since the early 80’s and if there’s been one constant in 25+ years of mostly crappy football teams, it’s been that their defense would usually perform well enough for the team to win. Maybe they haven’t always been great, but they’ve always been good enough to win. On Sunday they got pushed around like a Big Ten team in the Rose Bowl.

I guess the question now becomes, what do they do about it? To be honest, I don’t think they even know. And that’s the problem with a middling football team. The difference between being a good team in the NFL and being a bad team in the NFL isn’t that much. A few lucky or unlucky breaks within a season can mean the difference between finishing 10-6 and finishing 6-10. Ah, but the difference between being a good team and being an elite team is something that few teams ever figure out. It’s a lot harder to go from good to elite than it is to go from bad to good. The Bears have been stuck in that bad to good range for a few years now and it’s not looking like they’ll emerge any time soon.

A team like the Bears will toy with you. One week their defense will dominate and you’ll be watching the game thinking, “holy shit how does a team ever score on them?” Then the next week they’ll give up 450 yards of total offense. Every week, either the offense or the defense or the special teams will click, but none of them will do it at the same time. And every week, one of those three will look like complete shit. Around and around they go. Week to week, the blame doesn’t remain the same, so you never know what needs to be done to fix it. You can point to the offensive line and say “replace them all”, but that’s not realistic, especially for a team that won’t draft until the 3rd round next April. You can mix and match in-season by moving Chris Williams to the left side where he belongs and moving Omiyale to RT and filling in with Josh Beekman and Shaffer at the guard positions and…no, you know what? All that’s gonna do is get Cutler killed. Unfortunately, I think they’re stuck with what they have on the OL.

Okay, you can point to the defensive scheme and say it doesn’t work anymore. Can they change it on the fly? Again, I think the answer is no. If they change the scheme now, it’ll be at least 5 years before they’ll be good again. I’m not saying it’s a good idea to keep running the same bullshit every week. I’d love it if they’d find themselves a D-lineman who didn’t look like a linebacker. No, I’m merely saying that there’s no way in hell they actually scrap it. Lovie Smith and Jerry Angelo have invested too much time and money into selling it. Every defensive player on that roster is built for the scheme they’re currently running, including the guy that just cost them their 2010 2nd round pick (Gaines Adams).

So what does all this mean for the Bears in the near future? Unfortunately, it means another 9-7 season.

Lather, rinse, repeat.