Anyone who knows me or notices the long gaps of inactivity on this blog will probably gather that I gave up on the Bears the minute it was clear that the Jay Cutler Era, the black hole into which I had poured all of my blood, sweat, and tears for years, was going to end in tragedy. For the first time in my life I found other things to do with my Sundays. I followed on twitter on draft night in 2017 as the Bears did the predictable thing and passed on what I felt was the obvious choice at QB and drafted Mitch Trubisky. Like many other of Trubisky's skeptics I briefly thought I may have been wrong about him after his hot start in 2018, but while watching him blunder his way through the opener in 2019 against the Packers I realized he was who he was, a mediocre QB, and once again my interest in the Bears waned with the realization that no matter how else the rest of the roster shaped up they would, as they had for most of my life, be stuck trying to win in a passing league without an elite passer. You can call me a bandwagon fan at this point, I guess, but after 30 years of watching Krenzels and Morenos and Hanies, there's a lot of comfort to be found in just not letting the Bears have any control over your daily emotions, it saves you from caring when they do shit like lose Kyle Fuller because they needed the cash for Andy f'ing Dalton.
So it was that I entered the night of the NFL Draft not hosting a draft live chat, as we once did around these parts, or taking my family to a sports bar to watch it on TV, as I sometimes did as well, but instead following it only as a bystander, trying to keep a safe distance from the agonized tweets of my Bears fan pals who had yet to find the ability to stop caring. Then twitter lit up, the tweets came fast and furious, the rumors swirling, and the Bears, the mother fucking Bears, were up at #11 with Justin Fields still on the board, and I laughed. Oh no, they won't do that, no no. They couldn't. Not my Bears. Sorry, I mean, not THE Bears. Definitely not my Bears anymore. I don't care. No siiiiHOLY SHIT IT'S JUSTIN FIELDS.
Fuck, they're my Bears again. I'm back. I've got to see how this plays out. Because I have the feeling that this time, for all their thundering idiocy (and no, I don't think Ryan Pace and Matt Nagy have gotten any less stupid), they have a shot, because they have a quarterback. How do I know they have a quarterback? Haven't I thought I knew before? Well, let's break it down:
