The Chicago Bears Fan Forum

Bears

• Dan Arkush at Pro Football Weekly raises a number of legitimate issues that the Bears have going into the season.  A high ranking concern which we agree on continues to be the lack of a legitimate free safety, a problem which I initially thought they had solved when they drafted D. J. Moore.  Apparently the Bears aren’t considering him there, though, perhaps because he’s a bit small (but he’s too short for corner, as well, and it will be a bigger liability there).

• However, unlike Vaughn McClure at the Chicago Tribune,  I don’t think safety in the Bears biggest concern.  The biggest issue is another one which Arkush raised farther down the list.  The team goes as the defense goes and the defense goes as Tommie Harris goes.  It sounds like an over simplification but whether the Bears are a legitimate contender in the NFC North really does come down to Harris’ health.  If he can’t play at a All Pro level it will be more or less over for the Bears until the find another dominant tackle to play the three technique.

• Arkush also questions the backups at QB.  The answer in my own mind is a flat “not good enough”.  I don’t know a lot about Brett Basanez but his lack of experience doesn’t inspire confidence.  As of the preseason last year, Caleb Hanie, who has even less experience, was nowhere near ready and I have zero confidence that the coaching staff in this particular area will ever get him there.

Elsewhere

• The New England Patriots are starting their training camp off with seven two-a-days in a row.  Meanwhile Lovie Smith will be babying every veteran on the team through camp like a mother hen.  One wonders which team will be most mentally prepared for a fast, physical start to the season.  OK, not really.

• I often hear comments from fans which run along the lines of “It is unfair to athletes that they are held to a higher standard than the rest of the population.”  My first argument against this statement is usually that legally, in a court, that simply isn’t true.  In fact, more often than not the athletes get off easy because, in addition to the obvious reasons, they have better lawyers than most people.  But the answers get hairier when you try to explain why an athlete should be suspended by the NFL in addition to the legal punishments (or lack thereof).  Concerning this aspect of the argument, kudos to Mike Florio at profootballtalk.com for providing a very good, very well thought out answer.

• Florio also astutely points out that, though the Bears have cap space which they may or may not like to use on extending Jay Cutler long-term, Cutler may not want their money yet.  Eli Manning and Philip Rivers are ready to break the bank and he might want to wait for them to raise the pay scale up a notch.  Given Cutler’s history of animosity toward Rivers, the irony of using Rivers to get himself a better deal would be dripping.

One Final Thought

Bears

Bears

• From Pro Football Weekly’s Whispers column:

• I also came across this rather odd quote from Bears LB Lance Briggs in an offseason check in from Mike Dodd and Nate Davis at USA Today:

Bears GM Jerry Angelo was asked an apparently innocuous question by Larry Mayer in a regular bi-weekly Q&A that he does with chicagobears.com:

Most people would barely glance at this but I find it to be disturbing.  I really don’t know what Angelo thinks he’s doing answering these questions, especially the ones like this. My own view was summed up perfectly by Michael Lombardi last month for the National Football Post.  After Lions GM Martin Mayhew commented upon QB Matthew Stafford’s performance at their minicamp Lombardi commented:

Lombardi is a 20 year NFL personnel man and he oversaw the personnel departments for both the Cleveland Browns and the Oakland Raiders.  He knows what he’s talking about and, in this case, he couldn’t have expressed my own thoughts more perfectly.  Though I know that Jerry Angelo runs the organization and that he constantly has to worry about problems in all on field aspects, his public role is over.  It is now up to the coaches to get the most out of the players that he has provided and he needs to step back and let them do it.  As far as the players are concerned, head coach Lovie Smith is now in charge and any public comments regarding their performance must come from him.  Former Bear head coach Dick Jauron was widely believed to have resented Angelo’s interference with the coaching staff when he ran the team early in Angelo’s tenure.  Angelo is on the border of proving him right.

Many will say that its still the offseason and Angelo should still have a public presence.  I believe that this is very debatable but few people in the NFL would argue that once the offseason ends, Smith should be the team’s only voice.  But instead of stopping these interviews with the Bears website, Angelo actually plans to increase his appearances to once weekly when the season starts.  This is a serious mistake and Jerry Angelo needs to stop now before it begins to have its effect on the team.

I read with interest comments from Vikings defensive tackle Pat Williams on Sirius NFL Radio the other day regarding QB Tarvaris Jackson’s work ethic:

“I talk to Tarvaris all the time (and) tell him you have to put in the time. This ain’t college no more. This is the NFL. You have to put in more time than you are used to putting in. If you are putting in four hours, you have to put in eight. You have to put in more time than what he’s doing. I think if he puts the right time in, he will be a great quarterback in the league.”

Jackson answered today through Rick Alonzo at The St. Paul Pioneer-Press:

“I feel like I’m doing what I’ve got to do.  I put the time in. Maybe I do have to put extra time in. I guess when you’re not doing as well, you’ve got to put the extra time in. I feel like I’m working hard. I’ve always been a hard worker. I’m going to continue to do that.”

It probably won’t hurt for Jackson to put extra time in.  At the end of the day, if you fail at something, you want to be able to look in the mirror and say you did everything you could to succeed.  But I have serious doubts about whether doing it in this case will be of any help.  Jackson’s problems are of execution not of preparation.  On some level even Jackson seems to know that as he says that he “guesses” that he needs to work harder and at the same time that he’s already working hard.

I’m reminded of John Shoop when he was the offensive coordinator for the Bears.  We read and heard stories constantly about how hard he worked.  About all of the nights he stay up viewing tape.  And I remember reading them and always having this vision of a bleary-eyed Shoop desperately watching hours of film while failing to see the same things over and over again.

I don’t think putting in a lot more time is going to do Jackson any more good than it did Shoop sitting there in the dark.

Former Bear Matt Bowen highlighted the trend in the NFL toward the 3-4 defense in a blog post today for The National Football Post.  His comments reflected my own thoughts as I watched the 2009 NFL Draft exactly, especially this one:

“However, as one NFC general manager said to me this past week, there’s an issue now when it comes to finding the personnel to fit the 3-4. In the past, teams were able to wait until the second day of the draft to find linebackers who could rush off the edge in the 3-4 front because the scheme wasn’t in style, not enough teams ran it and clubs could find the proper talent late — sometimes very late in the draft.”

The Pittsburgh Steelers have had such success with the 3-4 in part for exactly this reason.  Few teams were looking to draft the same player profiles that they were.  But with so many teams switching to the 3-4, that is no longer the case.  The first round of the draft had exactly one quality nose guard appropriate for the 3-4.  B.J. Raji cashed in when he was taken by the Green Bay Packers at a spot higher than might have otherwise been the case without the 3-4 trend.

On the other hand, Bowen doesn’t say it but he implies that the 3-4’s loss is the 4-3’s gain.  As more teams move to the 3-4 it leaves more talent left for 4-3 teams than they otherwise might have seen in previous years.  This is particularly true for teams that run a version of the cover-2, which is definitely falling out of favor.

I heard at least two fans at the Bear Expo ask Bear coaches if they were thinking of playing the 3-4.  They were flatly and tonelessly told “No.” by both head coach Lovie Smith and defensive coordinator Bob Babich.  And rightfully so.  Smith, GM Jerry Angle and many of the front office and coaching staff all have a great deal of experience acquiring and prepping personnel for a version of the cover-2.  And they’re in those positions because they’re good at it.

I say settle down Bear fans.  Let the other teams follow the copy cat trends.  Heck, you should go to bed at night praying that they do.  If the Bears as an organization stay the course and stick to what they do best, they’ll be better and more talented for it and in the best way possible - at the expense of many other teams around the league.

The Miami Herald is reporting that Dolphins defensive end Randy Starks has been arrested for basically trying to run over a cop with a slow moving vehicle (sound familiar to any of you fans in Minnesota?).

The officer tried to pull Starks over in bumper-to-bumper traffic after noticing that he had 13 people in the four person wide black freight-liner including one woman who was sitting on his lap.  He tapped on the window and Starks kept driving.  Then he tapped on the door at which point Starks brilliantly decided that the best way to handle the situtation was to suddenly accelerate the vehicle to the left, hitting the officer in the chest and pinning him against a vehicle in the next lane.

It turns out that the plates weren’t registered to the vehicle he was driving.

Needles to say if there’s any decency in Miami this thug won’t have a job tomorrow.  And that will be the least of his worries.

Vinnie Iyer made some good points about the minuses of expandeing the regular season for The Sporting News yesterday, including at least one that I hadn’t thought of:

“With two more games, the league’s best teams will keep winning and distancing themselves from the pack. So instead of one or two meaningless games at the end of the season, there could easily be three or four.”

He might be right.  One of the great things about a 16 game season is that there are so many teams that are capable of making the playoffs based upon the results of that last game or two.  The teams that perfrom best under that pressure are the ones who make it and are probably the ones that deserve it the most.  You could legitimately argue that with two more games to separate teams, that will be less likely to happen.

On the other hand, his last point fell flat with me:

“The point is, the NFL has proved it can command the attention of sports fans all the time. Now the danger is oversaturation.”

To a fan who is sitting in May wishing that there was an NFL game on, this argument isn’t likely to hold water.  I don’t think I’m alone when I say that, for now, more is better for the average NFL fan.  And that’s probably the bottom line argument when it comes to making a decision on this issue.

Judge Paul Magnuson finally ruled in favor of the NFL in a case which the NFLPA made on behalf of Kevin and Pat Williams, Saints defensive ends Charles Grant and Will Smith, and free-agent running back Deuce McAllister.  For those who don’t remember, the NFL has been trying to suspend these players for talking an over the counter supplement called “Star Caps” which contained a diuretic which could serve as a masking agent for steroids.

Mike Florio at profootballtalk.com believes that the players still have a case in state court based upon two Minnesota laws. The first prohibits employers from imposing discipline based upon a single positive test.  The law also gives the employees the right to explain a positive test.

Florio is a lawyer and ordinarily I wouldn’t venture to contradict him on something like this.  But I have to say that these probably aren’t going to hold water.  The players aren’t arguing that the test was a false positive and the explanation is inadequate.  The supplement wasn’t on the NFL approved list.  You can twist and turn and say they didn’t give you all of the required information all you want but the bottom line is that the drug wasn’t there.  End of story.

What really angers me about this case is the attitude of the players themselves.  In particular here’s what Pat Williams had to say:

“Basically now I got to hold trust issues with the NFL,” Williams said.  “I don’t know if I can trust them now.”

“If I did something wrong, I’m going to take it.  But they knew about it and didn’t tell the players.”

Why is it that when it comes to so many NFL players, heck with so many people everywhere, it’s always someone else’s fault?  Pat, you did do something wrong.  The supplement wasn’t approved and you took it.  They aren’t obligated to tell you anything.  It’s perfectly clear - what you put in your body is your responsibility and you and only you are responsible for the predicament that you are in.  Time to man up and pay the piper like the rest of us.

One of the more amusing things that I observed at the Bears Expo on Sunday was the effort which those fielding questions put forth to keep expectations for new quarterback Jay Cutler down.  This was particularity true of general manager Jerry Angelo and head coach Lovie Smith.  The comments continued later and showed up in articles like this one by Carol Slezak at the Chicago Sun-Times.  For instance:

I’ll tell you right now that no matter what Angelo or anyone else says, media-fueled expectations are going to be high for the Bears and Cutler this year.  But that’s not what I thought was funny.  What amused me was the thought that Cutler needs protecting.

One of the more interesting questions of the day was asked by a young man who introduced himself as a marine who had done duty in three combat zones.  The question was “How do you handle the pressure that comes with walking out on to a field in front of 60,000 people, carrying the hopes and dreams of an entire city on your shoulders?”  Cutler and tight end Greg Olsen looked at each other in what I thought was kind of a puzzled way.  It was sort of like a “How are we going to answer that?” look.  Then Olsen fielded the question.

Olsen handled the first thing that needed to be said deftly by stating up front that playing football is nothing like what the marine had been through.  It was well done.  But when it came to actually explaining how football players handle pressure, he floundered.  I honestly don’t remember much of the explanation because little of it made sense to me.  Olsen just talked off the top of his head about playing football without really answering the question.

After thinking about it for some time, I think I know why Olsen had such a tough time.  It’s because he’s never thought a minute about it.  He wants the ball.  He wants to catch it and he wants to run with it.  He knows he can do it and he knows he can do it well.  That’s all there is to it.

People only feel pressure when they think they might fail.  That possibility probably rarely occurs to Olsen and when it does, it’s probably a fleeting thought of it as something that generally happens to other people.  Cutler didn’t speak in answer to the question but given what I saw of him Sunday, you can bet that he’s no different.  It’s a good bet that many if not most great athletes are no different.

Bottom line, in contrast to what Angelo or anyone else thinks, I figure that you might as well let your expectations soar, Bear fans.  Because they certainly won’t be any lower than Cutler’s.