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.

On the Cubs, Grandfathers, Fathers, and Sons

I have said many times before that while my father is a die-hard Cubs fan himself, I actually inherited my Cubs fanhood from my grandfather.

Dad is loud, boisterous, gregarious, quick to the occasional outburst but equally quick to make it up to you with kindness a thousand times over. His temperament has always been more suited to the Bears, a team he could follow once a week, with a game on the TV in the corner of the garage as he worked on yet another project, never one to sit still, certainly not for the 162 games a baseball season demands. He's probably lucky a hip surgery rendered him immobile so that he had no choice but to sit and watch the greatest postseason in Cubs history, rather than fuming off whenever things went south. So yeah, while I love the Cubs and I love my old man and my old man loves the Cubs and the first call afterwards went to Dad and we both cried on the phone together, Cubs fandom is something I share with him, but he's not the reason I care so much.

That came from Grandpa. Grandpa was the Cubs, man. Proud and old and stubborn as hell, always willing to tell you a story about life in the 1930s. He was raised in the Depression, and patience was his greatest virtue, and it suits a Cubs fan well. He'd save every nickel for rainy days, sometimes to the frustration of my Grandmother, whose kitchen came straight from the set of That 70s Show even in 1997. No one was more well equipped to handle the kind of annual disappointment and prolonging that the Cubs would throw at you than Grandpa.

I think back often to Grandpa's 74th birthday party, held on the day of game 5 of the 2003 NLCS, the Cubs up 3-1 and looking to close out the Marlins. They lost that day, stymied by a Josh Beckett gem, and yet I had all the faith in the world they'd pull it off. I had Dad and two uncles trying to ward off the pain, begging me to take heed of their scars and their pain, warning me that even Prior and Wood could lose back to back games at home. Grandpa believed, though, and he told me to do the same.

Game 6 and 7 came and went, and I earned my first true Cubs scars, exhibit A and B in the case I built to defend the pervading cynicism that would color my fanhood in the years to follow.

A funny thing happened, though. When the Cubs were swept in the playoffs in 2007 and 2008, whent hey lost the NLCS in 2015, I still cared. The more I tried to hide myself in snark and sarcasm, building a wall of scar tissue to protect my heart, I never did succeed. Some part of me believed they'd do it someday. Grandpa's voice won out. It meant they could still hurt me, sure, but it meant the joy I'd feel if they ever pulled it off would be something to behold for sure.

On Tuesday night (actually Wednesday morning), the Cubs did win it all, and man, did I feel it all.

Every bit of disappointment gone in an instant, every heartbreaking loss, every bit of snark and cynicism I'd put together as a self-defense mechanism vanished in an instant (alright let's be honest, an hour, a day, entire years I will feel this feeling because f--k you, I waited a long time for this). I sobbed, like a baby, and my wife must truly love me because somehow that's not on facebook right now for everyone to mock. I called my Dad and I don't know if he got a single word out of me other than "*sob* CUBS *sob*!"

That speech from Field of Dreams can get awfully sappy and pretentious but for a moment I truly was dipped in the magic waters James Earl Jones discusses, the memories of a lifetime of baseball with Grandpa, and Dad, and friends and family just overwhelmed me. At some point when words were manageable again I whispered aloud "Grandpa, they did it" as though he wasn't watching, riveted, from wherever he was anyway.

Then my son stirred and woke up and cried and I went and picked him up and hugged him tightly. He is just 18 months old tomorrow, but already he swings a stuffed bat at a stuffed ball on a tee whenever you'll let him. He wears a baseball cap everywhere because Dada wears a baseball cap everywhere. He says "ball" excitedly whenever the game is on TV and I sure hope that sticks. Any composure I had regained up till then broke and I cried some more holding him and thinking about how different life will be for him growing up as a Cubs fan in this brave new world. Because the only thing that should ever grip you tighter than the past, as a Cubs fan and a person in general, is the future, and that future is really bright.















-If you used to read this blog for Bears takes, I'm sorry, they broke me, and they still suck.

Sixteen More Weeks of Winter

Far Cry 3 was the game that changed everything in 2013. Which of course means "another first-person sandbox but with prettier shrubs or some other damn thing." And those shrubs were indeed gorgeous. And I guess the game was okay.

In my experience, it was a game about hunting increasingly dangerous animals like sharks and cassowaries because only their skin was fit to make me a bigger wallet even though my pockets were just overflowing with crocodile skins and deer pelts and tiger rugs and all manner of perfectly serviceable wallet-crafting animal hides. Sometimes I also climbed radio towers, and toward the end I got a wingsuit that was nowhere near as fun as the parachute in Just Cause 2.

Also I murdered like 10,000 dudes. Come to think of it, they probably had wallets I could've just stolen.

I guess the actual game was like... an Apocalypse Now type story about becoming the jungle or whatever. A bunch of white people get stranded on an island full of savages who are all black except one German guy who helps you because this is a Ubisoft game. Your name is Connor or Carter or something and a voodoo swamp witch gives you a magic tattoo that implements basic RPG leveling elements because people sure liked those Arkham games, and you have to just murder brown people until you get off the island.

The primary antagonist is Vaas, a man who I swear to Christ is modeled on and voiced by Charlie Day even though IMDB has been telling me for three years now that I'm wrong.

The gang murders a bunch of tourists.

Vaas here is always droning on about the definition of insanity, which is "doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result." In his case it relates to killing... Jason? The protagonists name is Jason? Maybe his brother was named Connor or whatever? Who cares.

He keeps trying to kill you and you keep getting saved by narratively convenient tattoos, and he keeps droning on about the definition of insanity until you murder him.

And while that was pretty irritating because I couldn't skin him to make a bigger quiver, the guy that actually said that thing he kept quoting wasn't wrong. Which brings us to the Chicago Bears and the last 9 months or so of radio silence.

The Cycle Begins Anew

Jay Cutler could still win a Super Bowl. After everything he's done to me, after everything we've seen, I still believe it. I've seen what he can do in a system that works for him and the players around him. I've seen what he can be when he decides it's time to release the dragon. Jay Cutler could still win a Super Bowl. He's just never going to, because we're getting ready to throw the next five years in the garbage before they even start.

These last few years, the Bears were conducting a grand experiment. They broke free of tradition and hired a GM who looks weird and talks weird and acts weird and drafts weird players. That guy brought in a coach who was also weird, and together they tried to turn the Chicago Bears into a modern NFL franchise.

They failed. Oh, how they failed. The first year was a given. Honestly, it went better than I expected it to. The offense worked like a charm, and I'm not going to fault any one person for the fact that the defense crumbled into dust and we had to ask Shea McClellin to be a starting defensive end.

And then this season happened. And good God, was it a shitshow. Matt Forte played well because he always does, and Kyle Fuller looks promising. That's about the enthusiasm I've got. The Trestman Experiment revealed very little other than the fact that Marc Trestman moved to Canada for a reason.

Hello. Is it crushing, systemic failure you're looking for?

I haven't watched an entire football game in seven weeks. I haven't watched a Monday Night Football game in ten.

Of all their many crimes, perhaps the worst thing the 2014 Chicago Bears have done is rob me of my enthusiasm for football. Because it is more or less impossible to watch a sport for twelve hours on a Sunday when you know the one game you should care about is just going to make you sad.

I watched some of the Thanksgiving game. I peek my head in on the Sunday games. And you know what? If anything, it looks worse.

The offense continues to lack any kind of purpose or direction. Receivers give up on routes, blockers just kind of... don't, and Jay just hurls it downfield every few plays in the hope that something is going to happen. This is almost never planned, as I don't think Trestman has called a pass longer than six yards since the Niners game.

Matt Forte, of course, continues to be one of the best Goddamn running backs in the NFL, and it somehow counts for less every week.

The defense, so surprisingly stout in some of their early contests, is right back to form. Zones so soft receivers can sleep in them, missed tackles, lethargic pass rushing from everyone but Willie Young... we've got it all right here folks.

Shit, this is the article I said we weren't going to write. "Bears still bad" isn't much of a story, I said. But I miss them. I miss you. God damn it Bears, I wish I knew how to quit you.

This is the joke I was making.

You might say there's kind-of exciting drama in the fact that Jim Harbaugh is apparently up for trade, but you know we're not even going to look twice. We like our guy. Give him more time. Despite the fact that the team has performed worse each season of his career and the one thing he was brought to town to fix is as bad as it ever was during Lovie's day, we have to be patient.

And maybe we do, but right now it would be nice to even put on a show of considering your options. Because as far as I can tell, this is who we're going to be next year, too. And when our free agents come up, and our guys who are retirement age are thinking about Miami, they'll be weighing their decision against a team that is literally sucking the life force out of everyone involved.

It seems scary and early to be throwing around the term "rebuilding phase," but I can't help but feel like that's where we are. There are two real years left in the Cutler contract, and unless he wins a title I have a hard time believing that option gets picked up. Matt Forte can't do this forever. Marshall is also on the wrong side of 30, and he's currently on pace for his first sub-1,000-yard season since he was a rookie.

There's young talent here, but not nearly enough to expect any kind of resurgence when the Old Guard moves on.

If only there were a coach who had proven adept at taking teams bogged down with bad-to-mediocre seasons and turning them into contenders. Shit, I'd settle for "respectable" or even "not a total shitpile" right now. Hey what's that Harbaugh guy doing? Sure would be nice to take a look at a guy like that.

And I'll take to my grave that this is a coaching thing. 53 grown-ass men don't all get worse at their jobs on the same day by coincidence. It's hard to blame the GM when a healthy number of his acquisitions have done well for most of their time here.

Is it Trestman? Is it Tucker? Is it a curse cast by the homeless man who was sleeping under the team bus when it so rudely departed during a rainstorm? I don't know. And I hate being this guy, but like... wouldn't it be nice to at least feel like there's a bit of a fire under their asses?

I know the reason we fired Lovie wasn't his record that season, but we did just fire a guy who went 10-6 and had almost never fielded a truly bad team. If you bring in a guy and he does worse, you could at least growl a little when you pass him in the hallway.

Anyway, I don't really have anything to say here except "The Bears still appear to suck." I just miss you all. How's everybody doing? Had a good Thanksgiving? Mine was pretty quiet.

We three will be united in the physical world this weekend, and I imagine we will spend all of it pretending football doesn't exist. The Hawks are coming off a very successful road trip, we could talk about them. I have a lot to say about that Star Wars trailer if anybody is interested in that?

You did this to me, Chicago Bears. You've robbed me of my wit, my sparkle, my very dignity. Just give me a headline that says "Bears In Talks Over Harbaugh," I don't even care if it's a rumor based on a memo found in the garbage. Just... please, give me something here. You've got me reading Morrissey.

God damn you.

Bears 23, Patriots fif... holy shit, 51: Sucker Bet

Pack it up, boys and girls, that was the season. Playoff hopes may have died last week against Miami, but yesterday was the Bears' last chance to convince me that there was going to be anything good to take away from this year. There's no more "Well, they could go on a winning streak," no more "work out their issues and finish strong."

This was the game to convince me not to just toss this season in the trash. A road game against a strong opponent, something the Bears had been inexplicably good at to this point in the season. Instead they gave up 51 points and managed to score just one touchdown while they actually had a chance to stay in it. Sure, they ended up putting up 23 points (which is still terrible); but once it's 45-7 I doubt they're really trying super hard to stop you from putting a couple away in garbage time.

I'm not gonna do good, bad, ugly because that's Kyle's thing, and almost everyone would be "ugly" anyway.

Season Two, Episode 17: THE HATENING

In keeping with this week's theme, Kyle and I spent about 40 minutes just personally insulting every player and coach in the Bears organization. Enjoy our shameful rage.



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I am Rick Morrissey. We are all Rick Morrissey.

After Sunday’s baffling, embarrassing loss to the Dolphins, reports surfaced of shouting from the Bears locker room. Of fingers pointed, fans griped at, and voices raised.

The confusing thing to me is that people are acting like that’s a bad thing. That it’s unwarranted. Because you know what? They should be mad. I’m mad.

Ever year, I get excited in the months leading up to the season. Every year, they make just enough moves to make it look like they’ve solved their problems. And every year, every Goddamn year, this doomed, underperforming shitpile of a team finds a new way to be just good enough to get my hopes up.

So yes, boys, point fingers. There’s blame enough to go around, because damn near every one of you fucked up on Sunday. Just put Ratliff, Willie and Forte in the other room and let it all out.

Dolphins 27, Bears 14- Your Team Is Bad.

Accept it. Live with it. They aren't "in a funk". Good teams don't have seven game funks. They aren't "gelling". It's the middle of fucking October. They aren't finding their rhythm, they aren't out of sync, they aren't anything but bad.

Why are they bad? I don't know. The most convenient option for most is to blame Jay because once again he threw an interception and those are bad. One interception should not sink an offense, though. It's everything surrounding that interception that's worse. They can't move the football, and that's the responsibility of 11 players and the guy who supposedly "coordinates" them.

Marc Trestman is the problem, folks. I know that's hard to get. I know he introduced us all to offensive football for the first time ever last year and it was grand, but a whole year later we've found ourselves in a rut, and he's to blame. This man does not trust himself, or his football team. In football you have two kinds of plays: base plays and constraint plays. Constraint plays are your screens, draws, etc. that you use against defenses that cheat. You take easy yards that are there to make them play honest.

Right now, no one's lying to the Bears offense. They're as honest as can be. Teams have repeatedly lined up this season in tight man coverage or basic deep zones and dared the Bears to just play football, and Trestman's turtled almost every time. This week he worked himself into such a panic over the potential damage the Dolphins defensive line posed that he never even bothered to make them establish themselves as a threat. He apparently conceded they couldn't run the ball against that front, since he made no effort to do so the entire first half (in the second half he tried it, and it worked, but by then it was too late. Shocking). He apparently doesn't trust his 6'4" wide receivers to win battles downfield, since his response nearly every single early down of the first half was a fucking screen that the defense was more than willing to sit and wait for.

There's no excuse for this offense to be this bad. None. Not one in the world. They had everyone today that they ever thought they were going to have with the exception of Marquess Wilson, and I don't think he's the savior. Trestman's response was to show so little faith in them that the Dolphins defense had won before they'd taken a single snap.

This is the Trestman we saw in glimpses last year. The one who lined up in a trick formation without Brandon or Alshon on the field to try and get a game tying 2 PT conversion vs. the Lions. The one that twice settled for field goals on second down rather than trust his offense to pick up a few more yards. The one that outthinks himself, doubts himself, doubts everyone around him. The perfectionist who fails to see how incredibly simple the answer really is sometimes. In short, it's the guy that could never get a whiff as a head coach despite all of his efforts as a coordinator. For once, it's not that hard to see why.

There is no good, bad, or ugly this week. No one had a good day (well, Jeremiah Ratliff), and many had bad, but the simple answer is that no one is being put in a position to win right now. That starts with the man at the top. I'm done defending, and hoping, and praying. Being different is not the same as being good. Marc Trestman, right now, isn't the answer. He'd better find some answers of his own pretty quick.

Season Two, Episode 16: From the Ashes

It's been so long, I can barely remember what this is like. Is... is this real? Am I dreaming? Is this thing on?

Kyle resurfaces for Victory Podcast 3 (surprise, surprise), but his shitty Internet results in an abrupt shift in audio quality when he has to switch to his cell phone. These guys would just die without me. Anyway, here's an episode in which we discuss the victory over the Falcons and Sunday's matchup with the Dolphins.




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I'm a Smart Man

There is a podcast recorded for this week, but I forgot the flash drive I put the sound file on so I won't be able to post it until tomorrow. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Bears 27, Falcons 13- The Right Stuff

For once, it all came together.

When the Falcons finally exploited the Bears banged up back seven with a brilliant screen to make it a 13-10 game right after the half, it was easy to see how things would unfurl. The Bears failure to convert another two minute drill, red zone trip into a TD was going to turn into the defense finally giving ground, the second half offense that had plagued the team since week three would re-appear, and before long the Bears would pull another defeat from the jaws of victory.

Once the Bears went 3 and out on their next drive, then allowed the game-tying FG, the panic was pure threat level midnight. And then....it went away.

Jay Cutler unleashed the armcock for a 74 yard completion to Alshon, they scored a TD, the defensive line dominated like they should against an OL starting Gabe Carimi, and the offense went right back down and scored another TD to truly wreck the Falcons hopes. It was exactly how Emery and Trestman and the rest of us envisioned this season playing out, and for once it worked.

It's hard to say what this will mean in the long run, as the Bears will need to string more complete games together to make up for the games they've pissed away, but it's all hopefully coming together, and maybe, mercifully, they'll finally start getting healthier. For now, this was as good as we could have ever hoped for, and I'll take it.

Kyle is a liar and he will serve an eternity aboard this ship.

I've made that reference twice today and I have no idea why.

Anyway, Kyle swore he was going to write a game recap and an article explaining our absence from the airwaves and then he totally didn't do it and now it's Friday afternoon so I assume he's not going to.

Travis doesn't exist anymore and Kyle had some overtime or something he probably could have explained much better if he'd actually written the article he promised to write, so we haven't all had time for a podcast that would inevitably have just been 40 minutes of Kyle's drunken sobbing anyway.

Me? I've got a different problem. I'm not going to write 2,000 words in the negative column at 2-3, I'm just not. This is a team with issues, but issues they could still theoretically fix and bounce back to a winning season. I had them losing that Carolina game in my opening day predictions anyway, so I'm not gonna write them off yet because they're a game back of where I assumed they'd be.

Unfortunately, I don't have anything in the positive column to really write about, which leaves me at something of an impasse. Kyle Fuller and Willie Young fill my heart with joy. There, I got a good sentence out. I think that's the only one in there right now. I tried again and all that came out was a little flag that said "BANG" on it.

This should not lead you to believe that I don't have 2,000 words loaded and ready to be fired at the negative column should they lose to the Falcons this Sunday. I hate "WE'VE SEEN IT ALL BEFORE MY FRENTS" as much as the next guy; but Jesus Christ you guys, this fucking team. I have a lot of very negative thoughts that I'm not going to put down in writing until I'm utterly defeated, which might be Monday morning.

So like I said, I'm not gonna write that article with 12 weeks left in the season. Talk to me in two days and I may be singing a different tune.

Anyway, if Kyle comes out of hiding and/or Travis phases back into this plane of existence for a few minutes, there will be a podcast next week for good or for ill. I'm going to write a recap if Kyle doesn't, it has traditionally been his province but apparently this whole Goddamn website is my responsibility now. You'll notice nobody took it upon themselves to start sending around the prog while I was away on business. These people.

What was I talking about?

Oh right, blogging. You're getting a big ol' mess of words from me and a podcast next week, I urge you to prevail upon Kyle via Twitter until he carries his weight. As usual, we'll see y'all on Sunday. Go Bears.

Packers 38, Bears 17- The Recap You Wait a Week For

Or not. I can't pretend I ever wanted to write this damn thing but my sense of completeness compels me and I no longer have the valid excuse of being on the interstate driving as I was Sunday night or working late the other nights of the week. It is time to discuss this.

And you know what? I'm not that mad. I'm really not. Not that the loss isn't upsetting, not that it isn't disheartening that the Bears still haven't closed the gap with the Packers, but things are far from grim. I believe the rest of the Bears schedule is shaping up to be fairly favorable, they appear to be getting somewhat healthier as a team, and, if you dig past the box score, there were some good things that happened in this game.

There were obviously more bad things, however, and that needs discussin'. I naturally spent all of last week in a healthy state of fear about the game, and once it was revealed that Jared Allen was a late scratch, well, that gave me a pretty unshakeable sense of foreboding. Not that Jared Allen alone could have prevented the massacre Rodgers committed, but even one or two sacks that stopped drives might have changed the complexion of the ball game. Without Allen and Ratliff the Bears defensive line lost the ability to constantly shift and rotate players on the DL that had been so pivotal to their success early in the season. Despite the Packers frequent struggles in pass protection over the years, they have two very, very solid guards in Josh Sitton (who may be the best pass-protecting guard in football with Evan Mathis out), and TJ Lang. If you want to get to Rodgers you need to threaten his tackles, and the Bears lacked the guy who draws the most attention out on the edge.