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. 

Ah Crap, Guys, I'm Excited About Justin Fields

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:

The Historically Boring Numbers of Daniel Jones

That's right folks, it's time for me to once again piss all over the insanely stupid decision by a New York franchise to draft a mediocre college passer who shouldn't have sniffed the first half of the draft, let alone the top ten. No I'm not picking on Buffalo and Josh Allen again*, today I'm tackling the indefensible decision by the New York Football Giants to draft East Coast Clayton Thorsen. Any time you can draft a guy who managed to put up Shane Matthews numbers in the ACC you gotta do it (NFL Shane Matthews, not college Shane Matthews, whom it should be noted was a much, much, much better college QB than Daniel Jones). To be blunt, statistically speaking, Daniel Jones might be the most indefensible first round pick at QB in the last twenty plus years, and yes, that does include my well-known hatred of the aforementioned Josh Allen pick.

Just how bad is the Daniel Jones pick, historically? As I mentioned in my article on drafting QBs a few months ago, I have compiled basically every relevant statistic on every QB drafted in the first round since 1998. With the three 2019 draftees this list now spans 63 quarterbacks who combined for over 66,000 college passing attempts. No matter the category, however, Daniel Jones ranks middling at best to jaw-droppingly awful at worst. Without further introductions I'll just dive right in:

1) Jones can't throw deep, at all, in any capacity.
For his career Jones averaged 6.4 yards per attempt. That's absolutely terrible, and out of all 63 QBs drafted in the first round in the last 21 drafts that figure puts him 62nd overall, ahead of only the notoriously awful Kyle Boller.There have been just 5 QBs before Jones who were drafted in the first round and failed to hit 7 yards per attempt in college (generally consider the Mendoza Line of acceptable production for a QB):

Jake Locker, Matt Ryan, JP Losman, Kyle Boller, and Patrick Ramsey.

Aside from Ryan, whom I will discuss more in detail further down since I'm quite sure he'll be the most frequently used comp among Jones apologists in the near future, that is obviously quite the terrible selection of QBs.

Raw yards per attempt can sometimes be misleading, however, as one can sometimes arrive at a respectable YPA by completing an insanely high % of short passes (like Sam Bradford, who completed 71.3% of his passes for the Vikings in 2016 and managed a respectable 7.3 yards per attempt while only averaging a paltry 9.8 yards per completion), or by hitting on a smaller percentage of deep pass plays. For this reason I decided to look at Jones yards per completion as well, and that was just as staggeringly awful. For his career Jones averaged a mere 10.7 yards per completion. For perspective, Case Keenum ranked 26th in the NFL last year with a 10.7 YPC. This points to an almost laughable inability to complete the long ball. Jones is one of only two first round quarterbacks total to have managed fewer than 11 yards per completion in college after Tim Couch.

2) Okay, so he can't throw deep, he's accurate, though, right?
Actually, no, not really! Jones was one of just 19 QBs out of 63 who completed less than 60% of their total college pass attempts. His 59.9% average ranked 45th in the pack. While there are some successful QBs who have completed less than 60% of their total college pass attempts and gone onto NFL success (namely Matt Ryan, Jay Cutler, Carson Palmer, Donovan McNabb, and Matthew Stafford), all of those successful QBs managed higher yards per attempt and yards per completion than Jones, meaning that while Palmer, McNabb, Stafford, and Cutler especially can blame some of their low % on the fact that they often went deep and connected often enough on big plays to make it worthwhile, Jones has no such excuse.

Even more concerning than Jones' mediocre career completion % is the fact that his first season as a starter was actually his best in that regard, as his 62.8% as a sophomore saw a massive drop to 56.7 as a junior and only a modest rebound to 60.5% as a senior. Most of the successful QBs listed above started as overwhelmed freshman before seeing their completion % increase to more than 60% in their final year. Jones regression (or his stalled progress, at best) does not bode well for any ability to improve steadily at a more difficult level of football.

Even more depressing is that Jones managed that mediocre % while, as noted above, managing the second-lowest yards per completion of any QB in the sample. At least when Tim Couch only managed 10.6 yards per completion he was a high volume passer, completing 67.1% of those attempts and 72.3% in his final campaign. Then again I'm sure that Jones' apologists will point out Jones played with a terrible supporting cast at Duke and Tim Couch had the all-star talent one normally finds on the football program at, uh, *checks notes*...Kentucky.

Grades and Growth: Mitch Trubisky and the People v Pro Football Focus

If you have been paying much attention to Bears twitter (or you've dared to tweet something positive about Mitch Trubisky only to find Goddamn Detroit Lions Fans of all people invading your mentions to screech "bUt HiS PfF gRaDe") since around the time Mitch Trubisky's second season began to show some promise in week 4 against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, you'll have no doubt encountered the famous problem of Trubisky's deplorable PFF grade failing to align with his mostly very good traditional or even non-PFF advanced analytics. Lest Bears fans spend even a minute thinking that having a QB who was above average in terms of completion %, yards per attempt, adjusted net yards per attempt, touchdown %, sack %, QB rating, Total QBR, and expected points added is a good thing, someone (and, again, it's always a goddamn Lions fan) will come bursting through the wall like the world's most depressing Kool-Aid man to once more cite the sacred texts and tell you that actually a bunch of dude's in Ireland figured out how to chart football players on a play by play basis and we have determined their findings are law and render all of the above null and void. Trubisky, if you didn't know, ranked 33rd in the league in terms of overall PFF grade at QB, behind such luminaries as the deposed Blake Bortles and beloved Start Kyle Orton punching bag Josh Allen. You are not to question the inherent absurdity of this statement and how incongruous it is with, y'know, every other available form of measuring a quarterback's performance. You are to accept that you have been owned, and to scurry back into your hole in shame. Once you get there you'll still find that same fucking Detroit Lions fan, though. He lives there. It's all he's ever known. Dragging others into the hole is all he's got man.

Bears fans, however, have never been known to go quietly into the night or really go quietly anywhere. They have gathered their swords and sprung to their quarterback's defense with arguments ranging from tinfoil hattery ("they are biased against Mitch!") to more well thought-out critiques of PFF and their grading methods. You wouldn't be reading this site (if you're reading it at all, which you probably aren't. It appears taking a break of a mere *checks notes* four years did some damage to my overall readership) if you weren't looking for more of the latter, so here goes nothing: Pro Football Focus grade of Mitch isn't wrong, nor does it reflect any kind of bias on their part. It's also pretty much irrelevant.

Imagine, if you will, that a football season is a 16 week college course. Each week there is a test, worth exactly 6.25% of your grade. You need a 70% overall to pass the course, but in the first three weeks of the season your drunk ass failed to show up to class and you got a zero. Week 4 starts and you've already completely wasted 18.75% of the available points. You've basically got to be perfect in every single week from then on in order to ensure a  passing grade. You do your best, but there are some weeks you get an A and then there are some weeks you get Cs. Those last 13 weeks of the year you average out to being more or less a B student. You get 80% of the remaining points overall, but at the end of the year, thanks to those three zeros in the first three classes, you get a 65 in the course. You're a failure, your dad's mad he spent a dime sending you to school, and pretty much anybody looking at your semester from a distance would deem it a failure.

And yet...you did improve, didn't you? You were a B student for a greater % of the weeks you were in class than you were an F student. You learned a lot, you actually understood the point of the class, but alas, the transcript never lies, does it? If you were to take the class next fall, though, and you managed perfect attendance, would it be wise for someone to bet that you'll fail it again?

Josh Rosen vs Josh Allen, or When "Stats vs Scouts" Ends in a Draw

Football in recent years has started, in fits and starts, to go through its own analytics revolution, similar to the one that overtook baseball in the early to mid 2000s. While the rise of sites like Football Outsiders, Pro Football Focus, and the introduction of the NFL's own house analytics page Next Gen stats, heralds a new and more informed way for fans to take in the game of football, it is clear that this revolution will not be as complete as baseball's. Football's requirement for teamwork more than individual excellence means that numbers alone will never tell anything close to the full stories. Quarterbacks are amplified or hindered by schemes, offensive lines, or butter fingered receivers. Cornerbacks benefit from elite pass rushers causing panicked and hurried throws or suffer from tepid pass rushes that allow QBs ample time to wait for the coverage to breakdown. While a number of new metrics try and break football down piece by piece to determine individual responsibility and performance on every play, it is clear there will always be a gray area when it comes to the story stats are telling about a football players performance, and how to project future performance from those stats. This is especially true when it comes to translating college performance to future NFL success.

No debate demonstrated the conflict between the rising tide of football analytics and the traditional methods of football scouting than the debate in the 2018 draft between quarterbacks Josh Rosen and Josh Allen. As previously noted on this blog there was zero, and I mean zero, statistical argument for drafting Josh Allen. Statistically he may have been the single worst QB taken in the first round in the last 20 years, at least since Kyle Boller. Scouts loved him, however, citing his underrated mobility, his zeus-hurling-thunderbolts level arm strength (he most definitely has what long-time readers of this blog will remember I once coined an "armcock"), his "leadership" and intangibles. Mel Kiper declared of course that "stats are for losers" and that Allen, most definitely, is a winner.

This avalanche of counterfactual, cliche-leaden, antiquated nonsense regarding what was clearly an unusually flawed prospect understandably appalled the more analytical minds of football media. In response they, too, found a cause to champion: Josh Rosen of UCLA. Rosen was himself a controversial prospect in the eyes of scouts, not because of his on field performance, but because off the field he was an outspoken liberal, a guy who appeared to value life outside of football, a unique personality willing to speak his mind and criticize coaches and teammates when he deemed it necessary. On the field Rosen was clearly Allen's statistical better in every category.

And so the stage was set: the grizzly old scouts, mouths full of chewing tobacco, car filled with old takeout containers from lifetimes spent traveling constantly to various backfields, evaluating players with gut instincts and finely honed senses locked into a culture war with basement-dwelling nerds who'd never picked up a ball thinking the entire game can be determined by spreadsheets. Whose Josh would win?

So What the Hell is Mitch Trubisky?

Holy shit, I remembered the password

*chokes on dust, pushes skeleton of TEC out of the way and begins typing at desk of long abandoned Start Kyle Orton headquarters*

First off this is not a permanent unretirement. I got better things to do than the Bears and they no longer have any power over me.

For the first time in years however I am actually watching them, and one question keeps coming up: what the fuck is Mitch Trubisky?

I've seen a lot of quarterbacks fail for a lot of reasons. Jay Cutler never was going to stop turning the ball over. Rex Grossman was never gonna stop doing that either. Cade McNown was never going to throw the ball with any kind of zip or stop being a petulant turd waffle. Trubisky seems something else.

This is, ostensibly, a QB with a full toolbox. He's not Kyle Orton, there's a real arm there. He's not a gunslinger, what turnovers he's had tend to be bad throws and not bad decisions. So where does that leave us? Why does he, uh, suck? And will he get better?

A lot of people object to that last question. "Of course he'll get better he's young blah blah." Well one of the uncomfortable hidden truths of sport is that progress isn't always linear. Some guys, far more than you think actually, pretty much stay the same guy they were when they got to the pros. If you don't believe me ask Joe Flacco.

Jay Cutler was the Most Bears Player of Them All

The first thing you must understand as a Bears fan that is younger than 40 is that the entire franchise is full of shit. It is a dumpster fire of an organization owned by a mostly apathetic family with no real inclination to change anything regardless of the results on the field. When Mike Glennon and whatever failson Ryan Pace wastes a top five pick on this year inevitably go belly up and he's fired they'll probably keep Ted Phillips around to oversee his fourth pathetic GM hire, and that's still an improvement over the way this franchise was run before 1999, when the owner had to fire her own son as Team President because he announced the hiring of a head coach who hadn't actually agreed to be head coach of this trash football team (that head coach would have been trash anyway, as evidenced by his fine job with the Arizona Cardinals), forcing them to settle for hiring Dick Jauron, another trash coach.

I digress, because me saying the Bears franchise is full of shit is not just a reference to their incompetence, it is a reference to the myths they tell about what being a Bear means. If you asked someone to describe the ideal Chicago Bear  they'd either describe someone like Walter Payton or someone like Dick Butkus (or Urlacher, or Singletary), and sure, that seems logical. Neither of them represents the Chicago Bears, though, not as they've been in my lifetime anyway (although Butkus being a growly tough guy who never played a single playoff game is apt).

No, if you want to summarize the post-1985 Bears in one person, you'll come up with Jay Cutler, however much both he and the franchise would like to pretend otherwise.

Jay Cutler, on paper, looked fantastic, he had prototypical size, surprisingly good speed, and an arm you could dream on for years and years (and I did). All of the skill one could possibly hope for in a QB, and the ability for greatness, if he and the franchise around him cared enough to try to reach it (they didn't, usually).

The Bears, on paper, looked fantastic. Proud and historically competent, with 9 titles to lean on, a big, national fan base, and ample money and resources to build a winning organization if they cared to try (they don't, usually).

Both of them had outstanding success just recently enough to be within memory and far enough away to be completely irrelevant to your experience as a fan (a superbowl three years before my birth, a Pro-Bowl in 2008, for a completely different franchise).

Every now and then the stars would align and both of them would have a season that surprised you and would come just agonizingly close enough to success that you thought they'd turned the corner. Even in those years (2006, 2010) there was always a sense that they were not, in fact, the favorite, that they were still somehow outmanned, outgunned, and outmatched. It was all destined to fall apart, and it inevitably would.

Those years when Jay put the team on his back, threw to a cavalcade of mediocre and height-challenged wideouts, and seemingly pulled every yard gained from his ass only to fall short in the end were better than the years where he was handed his hand-picked wide receiver (along with an equally good, equally big receiver as his partner), a now Superbowl-winning tight end and the franchise's second best ever runningback only to fall flat on his face and take to feuding with the head coach, wide receiver, coordinator, and media yet again, however.

In a nutshell, that was Jay, and that is these Bears. When good, they were never as good as you thought they needed to be, when bad, they were ugly, and through it all they remain infuriatingly, mystifyingly resistant to change. Jay can play for six different offensive coordinators, in six different schemes, and somehow put up the exact same numbers and forever have it be somebody else's fault. An owner and a president can hire three different GMs and four different coaches, see them all fail, and forever have it be somebody else's fault. The Bears will tell you they are defined as a franchise by a player like Payton or Butkus: a tough, no-nonsense player who will hit the opponent right in the mouth and overcome them with strength and determination.

Really, though, they are defined by Jay Cutler: an infuriating, mercurial, apathetic disappointment who was alternately better and worse than he should have any right to be, and most of all unwilling to change that regardless of how you, the idiot who watches this shit year after year after year, felt.

Fittingly, the Bears ended the Cutler Era with a record of 51-51 in games started by Jay, and a 7-18 record in the games he missed. They're not very good with him, and yet they'll be worse without him, because Jay Cutler is the Bears, and the Bears are Jay Cutler.