Still Gotta Come Through Chicago

Turning the Page

Happy Friday Chicago!

It’s 9 p.m. on a Saturday night.

My friends don’t know it, but my Uber home is four minutes away. Once it gets here, I’ll let them know that I have a long work week — I can’t be out late.

Now I’m in the Uber, and time is of the essence. It’s a 16-minute ride home, which means if I fire up the McDonald’s order now, it should be arriving by the time I take off this costume I present myself to society with, and then I’ll transform into the cozy degenerate that God always intended me to be.

I’ve gotten back to my apartment building. There’s footsteps up the hallway from me as I near my door. There’s butterflies in my gut.

Yes, the DoorDash driver is walking my way, having just dropped off a $46.72 order at the door that would have cost $12.50 in the store. Did I need the three cookies? There’s no time to consider such trivial things right now.

I conceal my smile as the delivery man and I pass each other by, and I refrain from slapping him on his ass and yelling LETS GO! in his ear.

I left the air on in my apartment, not purposely, but I’m thankful. I’ve been unintentionally sweating on and off for the past eight hours and I even felt some of the beads of sweat race off my armpit, down the latissimus dorsi, into my waist. The fall chill can’t come soon enough.

There’s not much left on to watch, if you’re a layman that is. I got eyes on every West Coast game, including and especially the one that has 2,000 fans in the stands and two quarterbacks I don’t know.

For the next five minutes I’m rifling down McDonald’s. The following 120 minutes will require my undivided attention. A no-name QB needs my support, as he tries to win a road game as a 10-point dog. Like Avril Lavigne, I say to him, I don’t know who you are, but I… I’m with you.

Avril Lavigne is one of my 21st century heroes. She wrote her first album “Let Go” when she was 17. I shake my head in disbelief, remembering again that Let Go was written by a teenager. I was once a teenager…

Snap out of it.

I need to refocus. My chosen quarterback just dropped back, tripped, and threw the ball in the air to avoid a loss of yards. Interception.

I made fun of everyone talking obnoxiously about their sports bets all day at the bar, ruthlessly so. But now, it’s just the man in the mirror and I, and truth be told, I need this one. I’m 3-4 on the day and the Iowa Hawkeyes scored 12 points in a win. I assured everyone that they were “clearly headed in the right direction offensively,” however.

Touchdown. Not only are the 10-point dogs — the San Diego State Aztecs — covering, but they are actually winning. Suddenly, nothing in life matters more than this QB pulling out his second career start.

I text the group chat: Is anyone watching this?

No one responds. Are they with their “girlfriends” and “wives”? Ugh, maybe. Embarrassing.

That’s okay. I prefer the alone time anyway.

I tuck my phone under the pillow. Now is one of the arbitrary times where I’ve decided that phones are killing the next generation, so I’ll live on my high horse while it sits underneath the pillow. These kids and these phones. They don’t even know how to talk to each other anymore! (I’ll be lucky if I only pick mine up three times in the next hour, solely out of habit.)

San Diego State is running out the clock. Father Time is coming to get me now. My eyes are getting heavier, as McDonald’s sits on the ottoman in front of me, looking as if two raccoons had their way with it.

It’s time to get horizontal. If I were a rich man, it would be easy to convince myself that the couch is a better option for sleep tonight. But I’m not, and therefore I can see my bed from where I’m sitting.

But every man is due a couch night here and there, and it’s in the cards tonight.

There’s an unexplainable joy to sleeping on the couch by choice, conceding to lay your head right where you sat down hours ago. It feels like your parents are out of town and you’re breaking all the rules, but instead you’re on a couch you paid for under a roof you rent.

My socks are now placed directly next to the ottoman, which is begging to not be painted red by the smeared ketchup from my fourth meal of the day.

I whisper into the remote: Turn on Michigan-Ohio State, The Rivalry. It’s been 12 straight hours of college football, but I just can’t believe it’s back. A documentary I’ve seen 46 times is only right to close things out.

I’ll shower and clean up the raccoon remnants in the morning.

My toes wiggle, my lips smirk. The Bears play tomorrow at noon. We’re getting Italian subs ordered at 11:30.

Who has it better than us? I whisper. My remote picks it up, and that’s my cue to turn off the TV. I need some sleep so I can watch 12 more hours of football tomorrow.

Nobodddy. I whisper again.

Today was amazing. And I get to do it all again next week.

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Football is only one week away. And yes, we celebrate Week 0 in this house. But first, we got a lot to get to — Let’s go.

Hard Knocks picked up in a major way this week. I’m not sure if I could have gone five episodes pretending as if I enjoyed getting to know Matt Eberflus personally.

And, on that note, it certainly seems like he is more comfortable speaking on a football field than anywhere else.

Only in America can a man’s safe haven, where he begins to operate like a normal human being, be on a football field. What a wonderful thing that is for him, and hopefully somewhere down the line — perhaps when he turns 60 — he’ll learn how to transmit thoughts properly from his brain to his mouth.

More on him later.

Hard Knocks did its job this past week. I fell further in love with D.J. Moore and Rome Odunze; Caleb Williams continued growing on me; Keenan Allen seems like a good guy, as does Jaylon Johnson; I’m a sucker for Austin Reed’s parents, and don’t want to see their hearts break; and every shot of Ryan Poles or Ian Cunningham makes me wish I picked a different career and was sitting with a lump of tobacco in my mouth, next to them.

I’m also going to be devastated when the Bears inevitably cut the rooking running back, Ian Wheeler. They got me, dammit.

The episode had that very Hard Knocks flow to it, where if it was another team, I still would have been rooting hard for them in the preseason game by the end of the episode.

In this case, it was the Bears, so I must admit I got the chills a few times — yeah, I know — during the footage of a game I had already watched twice.

Moore yelling “I love football!” as he ran through defensive backs was the icing on the cake, and I wanted to put the pads on as I wrapped up watching at 10 p.m.

As for the actual game, the Bears could probably have not asked for a better performance all around. I’m still mad they didn’t go for it on 4th and short during Williams’ first drive, but hey, beggars can’t be choosers.

I really appreciated being able to watch the game, and then get a few answers to my questions during the Hard Knocks episode. For instance, Williams communicating with Odunze after the throw out of the back of the end zone was such a delight. For one, it cleared up my questions on the play, and secondly, it again showed a really positive side of Williams.

His performance was also about as positive as it could have been. A dart to D.J. Moore in a tense third down situation. A beautiful throw on the run to Cole Kmet. An improvised shuffle pass to D'Andre Swift in a collapsed pocket. A good decision to run for a first down, followed by a well executed slide.

He just looked comfortable.

None of that suggests, to me, that Williams is going to be a star throughout the season. There will be ups and downs. What it does show is that the training camp reports calling him helpless in practice probably shouldn’t have weighed on anyone’s minds too much.

And maybe the defense is just that good.

That leads us back to Matty Eberflus. His defense was flying around on Sunday, from start to finish. The third stringers looked about as sharp as the first stringers. A football game is a football game, and the Bears shit pumped the Bills for essentially 60 minutes straight on Saturday.

The way I see it, a week-to-week improvement in the preseason is worth taking stock of. One single game is not a good indication of what the Bears will do in weeks 1-18, but an upward trajectory through these games is appreciated.

It’s something the Bears have lacked in recent years. Obviously under Matt Nagy, no one played in the preseason, and thus no one was ready for Week 1. But last year, too, the Bears looked like they hadn’t practiced all offseason.

I’m hoping that the approach in this preseason will lead to zero significant injuries, and simply a more calloused football team in Week 1 against the Titans.

Austin Booker continues to impress, man! He’s 21 and probably is 25 pounds too light right now, but how can you not get wrapped up in the hoopla? He had 2.5 sacks, which added to the lore that he’s already been building a bit through training camp.

Booker redshirted his first year at Minnesota, hardly logged any numbers of significance in his redshirt freshman year, and then transferred to Kansas. In his one and only year at Kansas — last year — he had 56 total tackles, 12 tackles for loss, and eight sacks.

He strikes me as a raw talent that has the chance to rapidly improve. I’d be remiss to not mention that it looked like he was getting significant push on the Bills’ offensive line on Saturday.

There’s the weight, the inexperience, and the fact that he has mostly been playing against back-ups. But, man, if he turns into a contributor this year, and into a bonafide pass rushing threat in the future, that Poles 5th-round pick will be chalked up as one of his best and most important decisions ever. Remember that he traded into the first round to get Booker in the first place.

I don’t think Booker’s emergence is a reason to leave the defensive front alone. But I do think, in general, that the Bears should err on the side of caution when looking to add there.

I think both the offensive and defensive lines have relatively high ceilings, and very low floors.

That scares me. But what scares me more than that is giving up draft capital for a Hasson Reddick or Matthew Judon, and then giving them tens of millions in guaranteed money into their early- to mid-30s.

Both Judon — who was already traded to the Falcons, and may or may not get a new deal — and Reddick are awesome pass rushers.

I just don’t want the Bears to blow their load on 2024, get to the playoffs and fall short two times in a row, and realize by 2026 they’re back into an inflexible position that the front office was so close to avoiding.

A lot of the success of the defensive line will hinge on Montez Sweat’s health (he’s historically been very durable) and Gervon Dexter’s progress. Dexter was night and day from Week 1 to Week 18 last year, but he needs to be a legitimate stalwart for the defensive front for this to all work.

(His draft class peer, Zacch Pickens, actually looked good on Saturday as well.)

At some point, the Bears will need to make significant decisions on both sides of the line. And I understand wanting to strike while the iron is hot.

I’d rather wait, though, even if it’s until midseason.

The last declaration I’ll make, as people boo me and throw food at my face, is that I think we have something in Velus Jones Jr. I know he fumbles, I know he hasn’t been reliable through two years.

But man is he talented. Is five touchdowns a crazy expectation for the kid this year? Not if you believe. I do, and the Bears evidently do too. I think he makes the team, and is used much more frequently than most people think.

Apparently Williams, and the Bears in general, played well in a scrimmage against the Bengals on Wednesday. The starters are going on Saturday, too.

#BEARDOWN

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The intro to this newsletter was brought on, in part, due to the Cubs woes this week. I was all the way back in at 1 p.m. on Monday. Now, I don’t want to be out, but I have to turn the page.

Every MLB team’s season has ups and downs, but the constant yo-yoing of the last two years has just exhausted me.

It’s time to put the kids to bed. The Cubs are a better team than their record shows, but that doesn’t matter. And they certainly weren’t good enough to make a dent in the playoffs anyhow.

Those three losses against the Guardians this week were just soul-crushing. You go from a PCA homer to get to 3-0 in Game 1, and you end up on the other side of a sweep.

I did enjoy the fact that the Cubs beat the Sox all four times, and they did so in the most agonizing ways possible. In every game, it was right there for the taking for the Sox. The “Cubs couldn’t even beat the worst team ever” talking points were loaded up.

At least that did not come to fruition.

Now, I’m going to Saturday’s game. In the confines of those three hours (no pun intended!), I will be screeching for Justin Steele like a 12-year-old Swiftie. But only because it’s part of my nature.

After that, I’m officially turning the page to football season.

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I’ve got a work trip coming up next week, dear readers. No newsletter from me. I’ll be back the following week, however. Thank you so much for reading, and please do share the newsletter if you enjoy it.