The Last Best Hope

    I really pondered for a while whether to post this here, on this old blog, just above the three year old post expressing the failed hope for Justin Fields, not far from one of the old posts expressing tepid optimism about Mitch Trubisky, and a few posts above the bitter farewell to Jay Cutler. Maybe I'd be better off posting this somewhere new with fresh eyes on it and free of the messy past. That woudn't be very fun though, would it? Not terribly fitting either, given what this is about: hope. The last best hope, to paraphrase Abe Lincoln. So, once more unto the breach dear friends:

    I was a nose guard and backup C in high school. I won’t pretend to have been particularly adept at either but I have the scar tissue and bone fragments in my left knee as evidence that I tried. We ran the Delaware I. The playbook predated my own head coach as he’d inherited it from his father. Our pass attempts per season ranked in the single digits and we ran the same two plays, RIP 34 TRAP and LIZ 33 DIVE, so frequently that almost twenty years later I can still hear them and repeat them in a perfect imitation of Coach’s cadence. Every year our greatest rival was the one team in our tiny midwestern conference that dared to run a pass-first offense and our coach treated them with the kind of disdain my railroad union grandfather had for scabs and owners. Throwing the ball was elitist nonsense, the height of privilege. These guys didn’t get in the trenches and work for it the way we did. 

By an accident of birth and geographic misfortune I was raised to root for the Chicago Bears and raised on a frequently recited list of linebackers and tailbacks akin to the Litany of Saints (all you holy Sayers and Paytons Pray for Us).  For years I’ve lived in the broadcast region of the Iowa Hawkeyes and while I’ve never forgotten my Illinois roots I’ve consumed countless hours of the perverse torture that Kirk Ferentz calls winning football. 

In sum: for most of my time on earth the football I’ve played, consumed, and passionately rooted for has been built on the ardent, timeless, hard-nosed belief that winning football teams run the football, stop the run, and outwork their pampered, effete, pass-heavy “finesse” opponents. The only other thing these teams of mine from high school to college to the pros have had in common beyond this mantra is a complete lack of fucking championship rings during my entire goddamn lifetime. 

I have been a heretic to this religion all my life. In Madden games I cheated on the Dick Jauron Bears with the Greatest Show on Turf Rams or the Andy Reid Eagles. In NCAA Football I was always the Florida Gators, shredding defenses with the Fun N Gun. In the early days of the football internet I consumed every bit of Xs and Os regarding the passing game I could find. I traced the evolution of the Air Raid offense from the Tim Couch days at Kentucky to Mike Leach’s triumphant victory over Texas in 2008. I read Smart Football’s history of the Run N Shoot more times than I can count. I began yearly quarterback rankings for the draft, matching my predictions with the experts and tweaking my methodology every year to improve for the next. It’s not unfair to say that I have been obsessed with the passing game for decades. 

The cruel irony of saying this as a Chicago Bears fan is not lost on me. Being a fan of throwing the football as a concept and yet rooting specifically for the Chicago Bears is not unlike being a Star Wars fan who can only watch Episode II: Attack of the Clones. You can certainly recognize that this thing is supposed to be the thing you like, but it seems to miss the point entirely or badly botches the execution when it doesn’t. If you were to show someone Attack of the Clones as their first foray into the Star Wars universe they’d rightly respond with “what the fuck is this garbage?” This is also what it’s like whenever the Bears are nationally televised and casual football fans are treated to their attempt to run an offense. 

Most football fans dream of their team winning the Superbowl (and I won’t say I don’t) but I truly think at this point if I could go back and time and grant the Bears the title in Super Bowl 41 or ensure that Caleb Williams becomes the Bears own Dan Marino, a Hall of Famer with a ringless career, I’d choose the latter. I have consumed so much boring, listless, hopeless, lifeless football. Even the few winning seasons scattered throughout the years have been tightrope acts featuring gritty, ugly wins that were largely unenjoyable until the final whistle. All of those winning seasons were haunted by the specter of a January matchup where regardless of record the Bears would undoubtedly be underdogs to any team with a real quarterback under center. 

This should be the most exciting time in Bears history, at least since the last day the Superbowl Shuffle spent on the Billboard charts. Colts fans were boiling over with excitement for Andrew Luck. The fans of probably 20 NFL franchises right now would already have their parades going simply for earning the Caleb Williams pick. The Bears didn’t even truly earn it, they’ve lucked into it, an earth-shattering stroke of good fortune meaning they have an almost unprecedented opportunity to plant an elite-tier QB prospect onto a roster that’s mostly ready to win and support him. This is easily the most advantageous position the franchise has seen in over three decades.

How have Bears fans responded to this unexpected winning lotto ticket? Chaos. Bloodshed. A civil war between folks who wanted to stare the gift horse right down the throat and roll with the new millenium’s answer to Bobby Douglass and the rest of us who spent that time screaming “what is wrong with you people?” Even now that the Bears have clearly chosen to take the kid the mood is far from celebratory. But why?

The truth is for all that I’ve vented and argued with the Bears fans who didn’t even want to use this pick, even as I asked what was wrong with them, I understood them. We’re all scared shitless, even the ones who pretend not to be. If this doesn’t work, if this last best hope doesn’t land us a franchise quarterback, what hope is left? 

We’ve seen the Bears trade for an established Pro Bowl QB in Jay Cutler just to squander his best years behind an abysmal offensive line throwing to wide receivers mostly too short to ride Space Mountain. The first time they took a QB in the top five of the draft in 35 years they traded up to take the worst quarterback in a first round that included potentially the greatest quarterback of all time. Other failed attempts of note include a guy who managed to suffer three consecutive season-killing injuries that guaranteed the team only discovered he sucked as he was torpedoing their title shot. Or the twerp so loathsome his own offensive linemen went to the press about their scheme to let him take hits on purpose. Or the time they traded a first round pick to the Seattle Seahawks for the novel purpose of acquiring a quarterback who had already achieved first round bust status (it didn’t work). Most recently they acquired the single most physically gifted (albeit flawed) prospect in their long franchise history and shackled him to the corpse of the Pace and Nagy regime, then left him twisting in the wind as Ryan Poles made the necessary but cruel decision to tear things down to the studs around him. 

We’ve talked ourselves into each and every one of these moves and yet it has felt each time like we are placing a bet and our stack gets smaller with every hand. The jackpot is on the table, and we are cashing in our last chip. If we blow this one it’s going to be very hard to sit back down at the table any time soon. The fear is very understandable, and I sympathize with those who’d have rather stayed at the penny slots with Justin Fields, winning some, losing some, risking nothing too great and just hoping to have a good time. 

There’s one other thing I remember clearly from my high school football days. A streak of injured players had left us short in practice, and I was pressed into duty as a scout team tight end. A pass came over the middle and I went up to get it. The ball arrived at the exact same time as our All-Conference linebacker and I was left on my back, gasping and wheezing and seeing stars. There was thunderous laughter at the sight of me getting ragdolled. Coach lent me a hand to help me up. “Nothing you can do about that except get up. Even if it’s just to get your ass kicked again.” 

Go Bears.