Still Gotta Come Through Chicago

Bad quarterbacks, Derrick Rose and I

Happy Friday Chicago!

I spent Saturday with a bunch of older, heavy-set Irish guys. All of them were sweating through their shirts and, I could tell, quietly reconsidering their thoughts on Climate Change.

“It never used ta be dis hot in September when we were kids…” “And that tornado in July damn near ruined the deck I built for the wife.” “I’m not one of those looney toon tree huggers, but I’m just saying guys…”

They’ll be happy this week, as they are met with one of the most beautiful parts of life on earth: when the summer turns to fall.

Life starts all over again when it gets crisp in the fall — F. Scott Fitzgerald

That crisp makes a melancholy man like me wistful. I can’t help it, and I generally like it, unless… unless I read that K-Mart is closing it’s last store, and then I start feeling sad. I have never been in a K-Mart in my life. And that’s when I turn off the fall faucet, and bring myself back up to reality.

But it’s time to turn the faucet back on. Derrick Rose has officially retired after 16 years in the NBA.

A lot of the time, before putting pen to paper on this newsletter, I am filled with procrastination and dread.

Tonight is not one of those nights.

Yes, autumn is just beginning to barge into the night time Chicago air, and now, it just so happens, Derrick Rose is retiring. The confluence of those two things means the melancholy man is The Melancholy Man tonight.

If my little brother and I had 15 minutes left on earth together, we’d spend the first 10 talking about Mom and Dad. We’d spend the last five on Derrick Rose.

If we had a language that only the two of us could understand, it would be the early 2010s Bulls. If we were held hostage, barred from plotting our escape in plain english, we’d find a way to communicate confidentially by only using references to those teams.

There’s Derrick Rose and I, and there’s Derrick Rose and a vanished way of life in Chicago.

This all may sound like hyperbole, but give me a chance.

Firstly, there’s Derrick Rose and I. If Derrick Rose never picked up a basketball, this newsletter likely wouldn’t exist.

Boo-hoo. Not one life has been altered by this small and insignificant platform. That’s true.

If I ran for public office, and my Twitter history was scanned, I wouldn’t get cancelled. But there may be a news story or two.

This guy tweeted about Derrick Rose on his personal account 24 times the night Rose went for 50 in Minnesota.

When I say Derrick Rose and I, “I” is not just me. The “I” in that represents thousands of kids that were lucky enough — and unlucky enough — to be growing up during those years.

Tweeting about Derrick Rose 24 times in one night, for someone who is not actively employed by a sports media company, is insane. It’s embarrassing.

That’s what I used to think, at least, as I had grown older and become a little more jaded. Now I’ve grown even older, and even more jaded, though. And I’ve changed my mind.

I wouldn’t tweet about Derrick Rose 24 times nowadays, but I also wouldn’t tweet anything.

I don’t care about anything that much, and that’s partially why I miss those days so dearly, why I look back so fondly at both Derrick Rose in his prime, and to some extent, me and all my energy in its prime.

You know, it’s actually cool to care that much about something considered so insignificant to everyone but the community you’re totally engulfed in.

I wish that I cared enough to shun my friends for a night because my favorite player got injured. That attitude is juxtaposed with my attitude now, where a bomb could hit the apartment across the street, and I’d still walk to the store to get paper towels and log on for work on time.

Life gives, and takes away. Isn’t that the Derrick Rose story?

It was so unlikely that he even ended up here. A two-time Illinois state champion, from Chicago. Set to go no. 1 overall.

And with a 1.7% chance to land the no. 1 pick in the draft, the Bulls won the lottery. They won a lot more than that, too, as the Reinsdorfs’ incompetence would yet again be masked by a superstar. First Jordan, and then Rose.

He was an immediate star, the Rookie Of The Year. In his first season, he dominated one of the best playoff series of all time, a 7-game loss to the defending champion Celtics.

In his second year, he was an All-Star.

In his third year, he was the youngest MVP in league history.

Our parents had Jordan, and now we had Rose. Nothing was going to stop the resurgence of what was, at a point, the most recognizable basketball brand in the world. Chicago’s own wasn’t going to let anything get in the way of that. It was fate.

But then it wasn’t, and with that came another life lesson.

One day, you’re sitting on the back porch with your friends, feeling like you’ll be young and surrounded by them forever. You can’t even picture life on the other side of that.

When the Bulls lost to the Heat in the Eastern Conference Finals in 2011, it was the first time they’d been there since Jordan. Still, it’s the only time they’ve been there since Jordan.

That seemed inconceivable at the time.

I just knew they’d be back.

And then, after nabbing the no. 1 seed again in 2012, Rose tore his ACL in the first round.

I can remember where I was for every single major injury Rose had. The first one? In the back of the baseball bus.

But I just knew he’d be back. I spent hours that offseason watching Rose’s Return videos made by fans on YouTube. Still, to this day, I’ll pop a retro highlight video on. It hits like the best comfort food you’ve ever had.

It is true, though, that Rose was never back — and the Bulls were never back — like I thought they would be, in all my naïveté.

Just like you kick it carelessly on that back porch with those friends, for the last time, without even knowing it — Derrick Rose’s run with the Bulls ended unceremoniously.

I was at an internship when he was traded. Some dweeb put the news in the team chat, and I said “Oh my god” aloud. He said “The intern has spoken for the first time this summer.”

I wanted to fight him in the parking lot.

Rose’s career did not end unceremoniously, though. There was the aforementioned 50-point outburst in Minnesota. He was the Knicks’ go-to scorer in a playoff series four years ago, half a decade after he had signed a minimum contract to play for the Cavaliers, a contract many thought may be his last.

Some of that lack of recognition can be chalked up to this, though: Derrick Rose and a vanished form of life.

The Bulls have played in two playoff series since Rose left, and they lost both of them. It’s not just his play that left with him.

Chicago no longer feels like a Bulls city, or even close to one. Ownership is mostly responsible, of course, unable or unwilling to fill in the hole that Rose left behind.

It would be hard to convince a 12-year kid now that, when they were born, almost everyone cared about the Bulls.

I thought that Rose would be back, that the Bulls would be back. He never came back, and they never came back. And, in some ways, Chicago basketball has never come back.

Anecdotally, sometimes I find myself having to tell a bartender to put the Bulls game on. You couldn’t imagine having to do that in 2012.

Some of us hold onto those years, others have let go. Some hold on but are completely disassociated from anything Bulls related now. A few of us hold onto those years, and are still associated now, which makes that particular vanished way of life in Chicago that much more apparent, and that much more saddening.

Rose eventually grew into a less reserved, more polished version of himself — both on and off the court.

Begrudgingly, I’ve done some of the same.

Sports stars come and go.

But Rose was from the city, for the city. He was all of the cliches you could think of. He was a part of so many of our identities, whether he knew it or not, whether he wanted be or not.

Too big, too strong, too fast, too good.

The world wouldn’t be much different if Derrick Rose never picked up a basketball. But I would be.

Enjoy retirement, D-Rose.

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I am not an expert in a lot of things, but I am an expert in bad quarterbacks and what they look like. Caleb Williams, I can assure you with all that knowledge, is not one of them. 

I may not know what a good quarterback donning blue and orange looks like. But I can tell you what a bad one looks like, and this ain’t it.

Any chatter about what Justin Fields or Jayden Daniels are doing is sophomoric, so much so that I know I shouldn’t engage in it. But, quickly:

I love Fields, love him. I argued on his behalf repeatedly over the last three years, and regrettably — damn near in tears — wrote a postmortem on him when he was traded, while grimacing through an acknowledgment that Williams was the right route to go.

After all, the Bears can improve their offensive line over the next few years. They can’t fall into another talent like Williams whenever they choose to.

Jayden Daniels looks fantastic in Washington. For one, there’s no rule against — as far as I’m concerned — two good quarterbacks coming out of one draft.

Daniels had more time to throw and more holes to run through in the fourth quarter Monday night than Williams has had all season. I say this deadly serious: Daniels may be dead already if he were drafted by the Bears.

Williams is not only not the problem(s), he’s one of the few antidotes to the problem(s). His performance on Sunday was incredible, even with two interceptions. A Bears quarterback that could throw for nearly 400 yards under those conditions has never existed before him.

Now, to the problems, of which Williams is not one.

Matt Eberflus squints one eye, his upper lip ascends, and he looks like your overserved friend at the bar trying to see if his favorite team is still winning (they blew the lead 25 minutes ago, and the game is over). 

As I wrote last week following the Texans game, us fans can always feel as if we know whether a coach is bad or good. There’s a lot of things we don’t know, though.

But the two things fans can objectively criticize in an NFL coach are his timeouts and challenges.

In Houston, Eberflus had two awful challenges, wasting timeouts.

He followed it up Sunday with an even more masterful performance. First, earlier in the game, Cole Kmet clearly makes a first down. Instead of challenging that, the Bears rush to the line and go for a 4th and short, risking a turnover that should have never been at play in the first place.

Then, later in the game, the Bears score to go down 5 points. Any football fan worth their salt immediately thought, ‘Here comes the two-point conversion.’

The players should have known, yes. But this is what a head coach is for. The players should have known before the damn drive that, after a score, the 2-point try is on.

It’s easy for fans to now blame the players celebrating the touchdown. But an alternate angle of the field shows the coaches celebrating with the players.

Only before it was almost too late, as the field goal unit was trotting on the field to go down four, did Eberflus open up his brain to the other option, an option everyone else but him had thought about 35 seconds — or even five minutes — ago.

And alas, a crucial timeout is burned to get the offense back on the field, and the conversion fails.

The coaching staff should have known the situation prior to the drive. The players should have been alerted to that. Even further, a few plays should have already been circled for the 2-point conversion in the case that the Bears did score.

If there’s a more clear example of coaching incompetence in the NFL this year, I can’t wait to see it.

The Bears didn’t want Jim Harbaugh, or Mike Vrabel, or Ben Johnson, or any coaching candidate this offseason. They had their guy, this guy.

But one takeaway we should have all had from the White Sox article cited on here last week is that those decisions aren’t always up to the GM.

I am nearly positive that Ryan Poles didn’t have the go ahead from ownership to fire Eberflus this offseason. Frankly, none of us even know how involved Poles was in the Eberflus hiring in the first place.

It is more than likely, however, that he had a heavy hand in the hiring of Shane Waldron, who finds creative ways — other than challenges and timeouts — to show us that he is a god awful offensive coordinator.

This was most on display in goal-to-go, when the Bears ran four straight plays out of the shotgun. To stay on theme, one other rare instance in which fans seem to know better than coaches is when the latter employ the shotgun in short yardage. It never ceases to amaze me.

On first down, the Bears ran the wildcat, which stopped confusing defenses 15 years ago. The running back as the sole man in the backfield took the snap and barreled into the line? Who would have thought?

Then there’s fourth down, of course. An option play from the one yard line that ended up in a 12-yard loss.

In a vacuum, I don’t know why any NFL team — particularly with a non-running quarterback — would run the option in 2024.

But let’s hear what some of the players thought about that play, in that situation.

“We wanted to get a certain look. I don’t know if we got the look we wanted on it,” Cole Kmet said immediately after the game. “So that’s something I’ll have to take a look at. I can’t really for sure say what went into all that. But we wanted to get a certain look that they were showing on film at the goal line and you got to give them credit, they played it right.”

"Well, I mean, speed option on, you know, obviously wasn’t the greatest look to run that,” Coleman Shelton said.

The Bears were looking for a 6-1 defensive front, and got a 5-2 front. Now that — in the first half — would be an obvious time to use a timeout, right? Instead, the Bears shrugged their shoulders and ran it anyway.

Williams could have checked out of the play, but no he couldn’t have, actually. The play got in late, and the Bears broke the huddle with 10 seconds left on the play clock.

Shrug the shoulders, lose 12 yards, turn it over, lose the game.

Waldron appears to be a CIA operative who has been ordered to cause widespread flux and panic in one of America’s largest cities. He’s doing a great job.

I don’t know how he would act differently if he were trying to sabotage the Bears season.

Miscommunication on the offensive line, constantly. Miscommunication on the plays, constantly. Miscommunication on routes, constantly. It looks like Waldron was dropped off by a helicopter three weeks ago, only to find a Bears offense that hadn’t practiced while waiting for him.

Despite all of it, Williams made some incredible throws (a few that counted, and another one that didn’t). He threw for a ton of yards, a large chunk of which went to rookie Rome Odunze.

That was a bright spot.

The offensive line was not a bright spot, as I’m not fully confident they improved last week. More so, I just think the Colts current defensive front is that much worse than the Texans’.

Now back to the most head-scratching signing of the offseason: I actually thought D'Andre Swift looked more committed to hitting the hole Sunday. But it’s still not enough. As I wrote last week, he’s not a back that will thrive with a subpar line. His creativity and speed is useless against a bunched front pushing Bears backwards.

Roschon Johnson, as Waldron would have known if he watched any Bears tape from last year, is much more suited for that job. His numbers were still paltry from a league-wide view, but he did much more with what he was given compared to Swift.

And still, in crucial short yardage moments, he was nowhere to be found.

Similarly, Waldron may have found out in the second quarter that he has a solid tight end in Cole Kmet to get the ball to. Still, his manager at the CIA has demanded he keep feeding Gerald Everett, who he has a portrait of on his desk, right in front of the picture of his wife and kids.

I understand D.J. Moore draws a lot of attention, but the Bears make little to no effort to get him involved. When they do get him involved, he’s desperately breaking tackles and getting clotheslined or table topped on a screen pass two yards behind the line of scrimmage.

Per PFF, Waldron has Moore running screens or simple “go” routes.

The Bears sparse usage of slants — instead of screens — baffles me.

Throughout the game, color analyst Tiki Barber did everything in his power to not call Waldron a moron. He did say everything but that.

The Bears have run 59 second-down plays, converting a first down on just five of them.

Even as those bright spots showed up toward the end of the game, the Bears couldn’t help themselves, and jumped on a 4th and 2 to give the Colts a new set of downs.

Anthony Richardson logged a passer rating of 39.0 Sunday. Per Stathead, via The Athletic, the Bears haven’t lost to a quarterback who played that bad — from start to finish — since 1981.

Richardson is bad, but the defense also did their job. Their fatigue was evident by the 4th quarter, and who could blame them?

Jack Sanborn played his ass off again, with a tip that led to an interception and a major tackle for loss on Richardson in two of the eight plays he was on the field.

In a better year, I would have spent half this newsletter discussing how ludicrous it is that: the Bears get a strip sack, but it is deemed forward progress. And then, later, a pile is pushed by 10 colts into the end zone for five seconds with not a single whistle blown.

Who are you protecting, the 6’4, 245-pound mammoth of a man running over defenders once per drive?

But, back to the defense.

There’s not much to say here. The Bears defense is great, and hasn’t grown completely apathetic yet.

I also thought this pass rush win rate chart for defensive tackles was interesting. It shows Andrew Billings as performing extremely well against doubles, and Gervon Dexter Jr. performing better than average.

Unfortunately, as we look forward, it appears Billings and Darrell Taylor could both be out Sunday.

In closing…

I’m back to neutral.

The Colts tried to hand the Bears that game every which way on Sunday, and yes, it stings.

And if the general sentiment toward the Bears right now — nationally and locally — wasn’t so negative, I wouldn’t feel the need to play optimist. But I will.

I think the head coach is in over his head, as is the offensive coordinator. The offensive line is bad.

But some of the early season reaction can be chalked up to insanely high and unrealistic preseason expectations.

The Bears will continue getting better. There is no playoff picture right now. The division looks good, but the Bears also have the tools to be good, even if it doesn’t look like it sometimes.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Bears were 6-3 headed into Packer Week. I expect them to be 5-4. That gives you a shot.

Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater just yet.

The Rams are still banged up. There’s a reason why the Bears are favored. I think Caleb Williams throws 2+ touchdowns again Sunday, and the offense opens up a bit.

Will that be enough to bridge the Pacific Ocean-sized gap between Sean McVay and Matt Eberflus?

We’re only 17% of the way through the season.

#BEARDOWN

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Thank you for reading another edition of Still Gotta Come Through Chicago! If you would like to subscribe, please sign up at the top of the newsletter. If you’d like to comment, do so below. Please share with friends or family, as always, if you enjoyed the read. I appreciate it.