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There is perhaps nothing dumber in my life, to this day, than what I experienced in warm-ups as a football player.
Ah, yes, to knock “the cobwebs” out and get ready for the game, a coach would have us get on both knees, in full pads and helmet, across from one another. We’d hit one shoulder against each other, then the other, and then — literally — just bang our heads together to wrap up that drill. Yes, the word “warm-up” was doing a lot of work there.
If you were lucky, you were lined up from some pre-pubescent kid who was contact-averse, only out there because he came from a family of athletes that was so convinced he would be, too, that they’d ruin his after-school time for years just to see that never come to fruition.
If you weren’t so lucky, you’d get some asshole who had hairy balls in 5th grade slobbering in front of you, hellbent on knocking your brain into one side of your skull, all the way into the other, sometimes before the clock had even struck 9 a.m.
Somehow, I was always across from the second kid.
There are two sides to the discussion on why we were doing that in high school. Was it because: the coach was misinformed, given that he had done the same drill as a kid? Or was it because he was a moron? Or, perhaps, a third option: he had his brain knocked around enough as a child that he was too stupid to even realize what he was doing?
That’s not up for me to decide, and there’s a good chance that many youth- to high school-level coaches were in it for the wrong reasons, getting high off of their own. version of Schadenfreude, where kids in oversized pads were the victims.
Some of those drills you were subject to as a kid seemed normal at the time. There were others, too, where you’d just go from one side of a coach to the other, hitting another kid as hard as you could like six times in a row — before you were actually about to play a game where this particular “skill” would not be utilized once.
And some of the drills, well, even a group of 16-year-olds could band together and classify them asinine before a 46-year-old — who had no child in the school system and didn’t teach there — could.
The silver lining to that is — that’s how you discovered great friends. It’s also why a whole generation of former child athletes have a gag reaction to the smell of sun beating down on rubber, black turf pellets.
But, in the end, whether you agreed with them or not — hell, even two-a-days were outlawed in Illinois after I had gone through them — they were experiences you had. And every experience you have as a child does, inevitably, in some small or big way, create the person you are as an adult.
It’s sort of the like the student-loan conversation. Those who have paid theirs off have mixed feelings about those coming after them not having to do the same to get to the other end. Even if they recognize one system to be cruel — or one that they loathed during their time going through it — they have a hard time letting the kids go along in this world without getting past the same trials and tribulations they once did.
Undoubtedly, that’s at least in part because of nostalgia, which can be a wonderful feeling that sends a shiver down your spine when an old song comes on in your headphones, or a dangerous vehicle that wraps up your old memories and experiences, and spits them out the other side almost completely detached from what was once reality.
But whether you subscribe to the “I did it, so why can’t they?” theory or not, those shitty workouts and warmups stick with you.
And every once in a while, they start making their way from the inner linings of your stomach toward your mouth, just as vomit does when you walk past a turf field radiating heat so intensely that it looks blurry above the ground.
Once it does meet your mouth, though, it comes out uncontrollably, like vomit, but manifests itself in words. Words to your friends, to your kids, or anyone else in shouting distance that wants to hear you calling Yoan Moncada a pussy for straining his hamstring too many times running to first base.
My father doesn’t drink coffee, but you wouldn’t know it. The guy cannot stop tapping and making noises. I absolutely despised it when I was a kid and still despise it now. But every once in a while, I’ll catch yours truly tap-tap-a-rooing around his apartment.
The ghosts of our pasts — whether friendly or not — are never truly gone.
We’ve got a term for this now in sports, right? The meatball. Generally, the meatball-per-100,000 increases the older the generation. It’s the guy who thinks Derrick Rose is soft for not playing on a recovering torn ACL because “he hurt his knee once, too” and played pick-up six months later.
We, meaning my generation, try to stray away from that ideology. But because of that, the pendulum swings so far one way, and then our ghosts start coming back up, telling us to push it back the other way.
I thought all of this through after a particular thought I had today reading this piece from K.C. Johnson on Lonzo Ball’s knee injury rehab, which has been ongoing since late January.
“He’s progressing. That’s as much as I can say. He’s getting better. Probably not at the speed that we would like. But he’s getting better,” Arturas Karnišovas said during a Summer League broadcast the other day. “Hopefully, he’s going to be ready for training camp. That’s just our hope.”
If an executive is saying anything other than “he’s doing great, he looks better than ever,” that’s cause for concern. But then we got down to the nitty gritty in the piece:
Multiple sources told NBC Sports Chicago that Ball’s current workout regimen has featured similar starts and stops. In other words, Ball still occasionally experiences discomfort when he increases his workload.
That’s when it came up for me. The urge to know more than a doctor, the urge to scream from your three-bedroom apartment about the rehab work of a $20 million-per-year athlete.
I was doing it. I was the sports radio caller.
Hell, I had shoulder surgery a few years back, and as I ramped up my workouts after that, there was plenty of discomfort to work through. Does that mean one should slow everything back down again — or, I said to myself, my face turning red during my lunch break — should he fucking fight through it and see what the hell happens?
There’s a give and take. Am I an idiot? There’s a 95% chance the answer to that is a definitive yes. But is there room for nuance, a little room for the meatball to squeeze into the foray? I think so.
And yeah, maybe the White Sox are just pain-intolerant sissies at times. After all, the days spend on the MLB IL have increased by over 10,000 per year since the late 90s. Is that all precautionary? Is that all because we’re smarter now about handling injuries? Maybe it is.
Or maybe it’s not, and there’s a little room for the meatball, which is formed in most all of us thanks to ramming our heads together as kids, against our will.
And if not, and I go too far and say something ridiculous while in this hulk-like temporary meatball state, I can blame it on the Phase 2 CTE I may have from those warm-ups, and get a pass posthumously.
Now let’s get to another outlook.
For the Bulls and Sox near-term outlooks, click here.
The Bears traded for N'Keal Harry this past week.
There’s been a rush to diagnose the trade — high risk, high reward? A bad deal? A good deal? An underwhelming one?
In reality, it’s probably nothing more than getting a warm, NFL body in the building that can feasibly catch a pass in an NFL football game.
The Bears roster is seriously depleted, and its skill position group is even more depleted than the rest. Does Ryan Poles think he and his coaching staff can rehabilitate a disgraced former 1st rounder in Harry? Maybe. But it’s more likely that he looked around and realized a fact most of us did six months ago: the Bears have no wide receivers.
In the second year of a quarterback that we think can be the future, we’ve given him an entire new coaching staff, one of the worst and most volatile offensive line situations, and almost no one to throw the ball to.
The Bears have such a lack of talent that you’ve got guys on Twitter making Darnell Mooney out to be the next Randy Moss.
The good side of it is that the worst is over, in that the last regime is gone. The bad side of it is that preparing to take a different road to set the team up for future success does not mean wins in Year 1.
It says a lot about a team when the best thing delusional supporters can say about the upcoming season is, ‘Well, their schedule looks easy.’ Sure, the schedule doesn’t look too tough, but then again, the NFL is a crapshoot year in and year out. The Bears beat the Bengals in Week 2 last year. The Bengals made the Super Bowl and the Bears fired their coach.
In there lies the point that, who’s “good” and who’s not in the NFL varies from year to year, and even from the beginning of the year to the end. Schedule forecasting is one of the most useless exercises a fanbase can put themselves through.
There are not many players on the Bears that could start on the top four or five teams in the NFL. If the goal is to tank — an embarrassing goal for any Chicago team and generally not a good idea in the NFL — their roster sure has put them on the correct path.
I’m certainly not going to begin criticizing Poles before he has a year or two under his belt, but this is how I generally judge NFL GMs: they deserve no criticism or praise from the start. The idea that because it’s the new guy, we automatically have to treat him like the savior, is a dumb one.
Poles saw a bad, old roster, and he turned it into a younger, worse one.
It’s what most of the wiz GMs do in sports these days, they get a degree from Harvard and think they’re God’s gift to the earth because they can trade away good players while making their team bad and acquiring draft picks.
Poles is looking to do the same, but hopefully, on the way, he’s upending the culture and the past practices and turning Halas Hall into a better place to work.
The problem with that strategy in football is this: a budding quarterback doesn’t have all the time in the world for you to figure out the mess. Fields can only have only so many Cleveland Browns games before he’s damaged forever.
He had one year under Matt Nagy and now his reward is a team that is seemingly planning to lose, whether the guys in the building know that or not. I have faith in Fields and the new OC Luke Getsy, but there’s only so much they can do.
Behind the scenes, we have an ownership group more invested in getting the hell out of the city they claim to represent, all so they can monetize their own, shitty product just a bit more.
Did I want Poles to trade for Tyreek Hill and sign other marquee free agents? I’m not saying that. But just a little help from the outside would have been appreciated, both by myself and Justin Fields.
The Bears are rebuilding. It’s funny, I thought that term was for teams that had made a run at the Super Bowl for a five-year stretch and ultimately fell short and changed course. The Bears have been pretty bad since 2018. That was four years ago, and we still hear about it like it was yesterday. (By the way, they didn’t even win a playoff game.) (And by the way, they were rebuilding before that, too.)
In the end, I do think the Bears will be competitive this year. And I mean competitive in a John Fox-years sort of way. There will be some okay coaching, which is nice for a change. The defense will compete. The offense will be lackluster because we have no talent. We won’t win a lot of games, but we will be in a lot of them.
The sole goal of the Bears moving forward should be to turn Justin Fields into the first real franchise quarterback this team has had since before the last World War.
But guess what? This regime didn’t draft him, and therefore, they get another go at it, too, if they want to throw Fields to the wolves after one or two more disappointing years.
I do think the Bears are on the right track, but it’s a narrow one, one they could get knocked off of by just about anything. And that’s a risky place to be.
18-month outlook grade: C-
Thanks for reading, as always. See you next week for the Cubs and Blackhawks outlooks. Drop a comment below:
"Despised" is a strong word to apply to anything your father did! You should also have emphasized that you had five Division 1 players and two eventual NFL Players on that team to crack heads against!