MVN - Most Valuable Network

Slim pickings get slimmer: Bears in for long off-season.

Hey did you see the Bears game yesterday? They played 50 good/passable minutes of football. How come they lost?

The old adage goes there are 60 minutes in a game, not [number of minutes your team played well]. The Bears proved this point very well, allowing the otherwise inept Eli Manning to storm back in the fourth quarter like a young (albeit dopey looking) Tom Brady. You ever see those Echo Citizen sports watch commercials? The ones that say the watches are unstoppable, like Eli Manning? I spent the entire game laughing at those commercials until the last ten minutes of the fourth quarter. Then I went out and bought six of them.

Plain and simple, the defense fell apart. It was as if they were playing bend, don’t break football all throughout the fourth quarter instead of continuing to blitz and apply pressure to the obviously rattled Manning. Well, they broke. Yeah, the Peanut Tillman interception in the end zone was great and for 50 minutes the defense looked like the defense we all know and love: forcing turnovers, applying pressure and playing smash mouth football. Very fun to watch. But again, 60 minutes in a game. The Bears’ defense seems to have forgotten this.

On a side note, was anyone else as excited as I was to see Adam Archuleta on the bench? The guy is a menace. He manages to make every defense for which he plays an epic disappointment. But this is a rant for another time. My point here: keep Archuleta on the bench. Release him and take the cap penalties next year. He’s a bum.

And then there was the constant sideshow that is the Bears’ offense. Rex Grossman, whose play execution is more in ‘n’ out than a Double-Double with fries and a coke, led the schizophrenic offense this week. I hardly recognized him behind center. He was completing passes. He was checking down when nothing was open down field. He was putting the ball right on his receivers (Hester dropped that deep ball, plain and simple). He was running a no huddle offense and running it well. For much of the first quarter, Rex Grossman was, to quote Jerry Stiller as Frank Costanza, “Like a phoenix, RISING from the ashes.” He looked like an NFL quarterback, which is refreshing after watching this poseur play in his previous six games.

Then he started dropping back. And back. And back. On two occasions, Grossman managed to be sacked for losses of 11 and 13 yards, disrespectfully. The Giants are a very good defensive team and they get a lot of sacks (six in this game). But there is absolutely NO excuse for losing double digits yards on a sack unless the snap goes over your head. Step up Rex.

Speaking of step up Rex, it was an exercise in futility to hope that Grossman could lead the Bears into the end zone in a two-minute drill. Even after Devin Hester managed to get the ball to the Bears’ 42, the offense still managed to fall apart as they crawled closer to the end zone. It was classic Grossman: make desperation throws and hope beyond all hope that someone in a dark jersey comes up with it. In his defense, Berrian did drop yet another catchable ball at a key moment in the game. How frustrating is to be watch Berrian make one-handed circus catches and then drop passes thrown right at him? Take that frustration and multiply it by a power of ten: that’s how frustrated Grossman is, judging by his expressions.

Overall though, Grossman played all right. He should have had two TD passes as opposed to one. Bears MVP Devin Hester, running a go route, was wide open down field and Grossman, doing what he does best, bombed it as far as he could. With no one within five yards of him and a ball put directly on the money, all Hester had to do was turn around and catch the ball. Turn around he did. Catch the ball, he did not. Instead of catching it with his hands, he tried to pull it in with his body, allowing the ball to bounce off his back shoulder. The ball was not under thrown: Hester ran before he caught it.

This was probably the turning point of the game. You get the perfect pass on the perfect route to the perfect guy and he drops the ball. With this you wave bye-bye to four things: Grossman’s confidence, Grossman’s trust in Hester, Hester’s confidence and all momentum. That pass could have been the nail in the coffin. There’s nothing like a big play to take the confidence from an opponent. Instead, the pass was dropped, there a collective groan from the Bears and their fans and the “here we go again” attitude flooded the front of everyone’s head, most obviously the offense’s. The numbers don’t lie: 214 yards in the first half, 98 in the second. Hester dropped the ball towards the end of the first half. No coincidence there.

The Bears now need a lot of things to happen if there’s any hope that they’ll make the playoffs. I don’t think they can even take care of themselves and win out, let alone rely on other teams to lose. It’s getting to be that time where the Bears pack it in and get ready to make some huge changes over the off-season.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 3rd, 2007 at 2:19 pm and is filed under Bears Offense, Bears Defense, Devin Hester, Adam Archuleta, Rex Grossman, Eli Manning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.