Still Gotta Come Through Chicago
Thursday Night Football
Happy GAME DAY, Chicago!
SUBSCRIBE TO THE NEWSLETTER NOW:
There’s nothing like a Thursday Night Football game to mix things up, unless you’re someone who actually plays in the games. But we don’t, so in that case, let’s go!
Yours truly is headed to the game tonight, and I’m not sure whether to be pumped or a little depressed that I’m going to be throwing on my Bears knit cap for it. Either way, you can enjoy the game knowing that if a third down is converted by Washington, it was not for lack of effort or noise.
I’m headed to the game with a friend who will be experiencing his first non-preseason Bears game. It was absolutely adorable when he suggested we leave his place in Old Town for the 7:15 game at “around 6:50.”
It’s always good to bring another fan into the fold. Hopefully he doesn’t leave there pounding his chest talking about how many hotels and restaurants you could fit in Arlington Park and easy Metra access.
The last football game I attended was at Neyland Stadium in Knoxville, Tennessee for the Tennessee-Florida game. For some reason I thought the southern accent would be dying down a little bit at this point, especially in college towns. Let me tell you something, it is positively not.
It was hot in there. People could smell the Northern vibe on us and did not greet us with Southern hospitality. They all looked like the kind of people who inexplicably know who Chicago’s mayor is, and for some reason are dying to ask about her. You won’t find me defending Lori Lightfoot on a day-in, day-out basis, but if someone wanted to bring her up that day after 36 hours in the South, I may have vouched for her like the Irish Catholics did for Kennedy in the ‘60s.
In other words, I need a palate cleanser tonight. Specifically, I’m craving lots of fat guys drinking beer and high-fiving, and little to no scoring. I want Bear Weather, a rowdy 4th phase, and a 60-minute, 61,500-person discussion on whether or not we’ve got our next quarterback.
This will be my first game since I wrote my open letter to Justin Fields about the trials and tribulations that us Bears fans do go through. As I detailed there, things have not been pretty at Soldier Field the last three times I’ve attended. A lot of bad weather (I prefer “bad” weather for Bears games, a sunny warm day feels sacrilegious), and a couple of embarrassing losses. I’m hoping things turn around against another truly awful team. God Bless Bear-For-Life Ron Rivera, though, who said this week, pretty much point blank, that his own quarterback sucks.
In that open letter to Justin, I was being kind of facetious.
I don’t necessarily think that I experience more pain from the Bears losing than any Bears player does. I have to make that clear after society once again produced some awful “If I were to do this at my job…” takes over the last two weeks.
Draymond Green punches Jordan Poole at practice and now Gary The Account Executive wants to tell you about how if he punched John The Other Account Executive at work, he would get fired.
Well guess what, buddy? You’re Gary The Account Executive.
That’s no smear at account executives, or whatever other made-up title you hold that your company pumps up a little bit to make you feel better about wasting your existence. Hell, we’re all in the same boat.
But to compare Draymond Green punching someone in an NBA basketball practice to you physically assaulting your co-worker in the next cubicle over is truly too stupid of a comparison to take umbrage with. But I will anyway.
There’s a reason that you would get fired from your job and Draymond Green will not. The first being that he is good enough that his past idiocy is solely responsible for the downtrodden people of Cleveland getting a basketball championship six years ago. He is one of 450 players in the NBA. He is one of four players in the NBA with four championships (he should be one of three with five).
At no point will your life be comparable to his. At no point. No matter how many altercations you get in with people, how many punches you do or don’t throw, or how many times someone pisses you off at work.
You can have an opinion on the situation, sure. Draymond Green is kind of a piece of shit.
His world is not comparable to yours, though. And guess what? Here’s an olive branch, folks. Your world is not comparable to his, either. That’s why when his dumbass said that it wasn’t bad to have a cellphone on the bench in the NBA — because other people are on their phones during the work day, too — put him right up there with Gary The Account Executive on the stupidity scale.
But! Let me tell you something. If I was Ihmir Smith-Marsette, I would have held onto that ball on Sunday. Hell, I may have even broken a tackle, shimmied Harrison Smith and high-stepped into the end-zone. That just isn’t realistic though, but only because I decided not to play football in college and instead go to a big school so I could party.
The Bears are an exhausting team this year.
That’s because — like their quarterback — we’re not ever sure whether they are a good, decent, or bad one. Obviously, they’re not great. In the first half against the Vikings, they looked like one of the worst teams in the NFL. After the second half, you could argue that the Bears should be in a three-way tie atop the NFC North.
The problem with the NFL is that, outside of the second Trestman year, the Bears — like every other team — will most likely be competitive in the majority of their games. It’s what makes the NFL great. There are never any games where one team truly cannot win, though, again, the Bears have tested that conventional wisdom over the years.
What really makes the Bears exhausting is the referendum around every Justin Fields pass. There’s a game within every game, and because I tend to be on the pro-Fields side, or at least the for-the-love-of-God-can-we-please-wait-and-see side, I feel like I’m fighting two battles at the same time. See, Justin? It isn’t easy being a fan.
Sometimes the statistics — particularly the more in-the-weeds ones — are hard to parse out. But it’s easier when they back up what you see on the field every Sunday.
In my personal opinion, Fields looked much better on Sunday compared to the prior week. And the week before that. That evaluation is still keeping in mind this: that the Bears have bad pass protection and a historically bad set of starting wide receivers.
Here’s further evidence of that:
You can see, then, why some of the quarterbacks I compared Fields to last week — such as Trevor Lawrence and Jalen Hurts — may be succeeding just a bit more this year.
The Bears have the ability to bolster their wide receiving corps mid-season. They should have probably done that for their sophomore quarterback in the offseason. The Panthers, for instance, are in shambles, which has evoked the idea that the Bears could trade for one of their wide receivers — namely D.J. Moore, but also Robbie Anderson.
I don’t want to beat the same drum every week. The Bears did do what they could to improve the offensive line this offseason. And they did. The pass protection is bad, but things are generally better than they have been. That’s most evident in the run game, which frankly didn’t exist under Matt Nagy.
The wide receivers are another story. The Bears had rotational wide receivers and added more rotational wide receivers, if they were even that. Then we all throw our arms up every time Fields struggles.
Nonetheless, he read blitzes better than he had the rest of the season on Sunday. He ran very well when he needed to. Without Smith-Marsette’s mistakes, we could very well be going into tonight’s game even a little more confident than warranted.
The Commanders have allowed the 6th most points in the NFL. They’re not terrible defending the run or the pass compared to the 31 other teams, but not good either. Despite the Bears being at home, the Commanders are actually now favored by a point heading into tomorrow.
For a team that may have figured it had a chance to compete for a Wild Card spot this year, it’s a must win. For a team that had zero expectations and is has all the above-mentioned warts, it’s not.
Still, I think the Bears should win this game. And it starts with the defense, though that won’t be the focus.
Here are a few reasons why the Bears D-Washington O matchup is the place to keep your eyes on.
Carson Wentz sucks. He’s so bad that when he gets sacked and pillaged, no one knows whether to blame him or the offensive line. He’s also dealing with a shoulder injury, but is set to play. Meanwhile, Washington Tight End Logan Thompson, who has 13 receptions this year, is out. Jahan Dotson, the rookie who already has 4 touchdowns this year, is also out.
Meanwhile, the Bears are finally getting Jaylon Johnson back. It was ugly without him over the last few weeks. But I will say this: Kyler Gordon made two great tackles in crunch time this past week. It was an encouraging sign.
At the same time, Justin Jefferson had 12 receptions for 154 yards and a completion for 23 yards to boot.
You could make a reasonable argument that with this Bears team, Johnson is the last player you want to be out of the lineup. The bad thing is, he often is.
The issue with the Bears defense starts up front, though. The Bears are averaging 1.6 sacks per game, which is tied for the third-worst mark in the entire league. You can feel it, too, as QB pressures have been hard to come by. Even the best secondaries cannot hold up under those circumstances.
The Y-Axis represents pass-blitz percentage, while the X-axis represents pressure percentage. As you can see, the Bears’ front is labeled “no threat”… and then some.
(The Bears being in the bottom left of all of these graphs certainly isn’t great.)
Nevertheless, the Bears should be blitzing the shit out of Carson Wentz with Johnson back on Thursday. The guy is like Brett Favre without any of the threatening talent. Make him make mistakes.
I’d also like Roquan Smith to stop looking in the open field like a guy that missed all of training camp and is therefore out of shape.
The Bears will be donning orange uniforms on Thursday with orange helmets. That’s the first time — to my knowledge — that they’ll be wearing orange helmets. The NFL now allows an alternate helmet during the season, and this is the Bears choice:
I’m agnostic on the choice, but I will say this, which holds true in both college and the NFL. Alternate unis are fine, but god dammit, you better win in them. If you don’t, they immediately look stupid.
Let’s bring one home tonight, and lead warmly into a Victory Friday in Chicago. BEAR DOWN!
There are two things that are completely unalike one another.
The first is regular season MLB and postseason MLB.
The second is the playoffs without your favorite team playing and the playoffs without your favorite team playing.
In both cases, the latter is far more enjoyable.
Having said that, the cold air in Chicago doesn’t come with the same juice when the Sox or the Cubs aren’t in the playoffs. This year, the Sox are the ones who didn’t even come close to holding up their end of the bargain.
It’s not all bad news for Sox fans, though. After completely wasting two years of a fleeting contention window, Tony La Russa has decided to retire. The “he’s a hall of fame manager” fans can’t even defend that move now.
His phone was reportedly going off repeatedly during his press conference announcing the retirement, which is good symbolism. The older you get, the less control you have over what sorts of sounds your phone makes. Spend five minutes with your mother and father and you’ll understand. I’m not sure my father knows how to turn off his ringer, which seems to be louder than Steve Jobs would have ever imagined possible.
There’s no need to sit here and go over why the La Russa move was a bad one. It was such a bad one that it’s not even an argument anymore, which is kind of sad. There’s also no reason as a Cubs fan to really even gloat over the Sox’ failures, because their fans are all just sad and it sort of just makes me sad. They’ve lost all their fight, like a dog so close to the end that they won’t even get up for the word TREAT.
I was annoyed — but not shocked — that the first three names I saw connected with the job were Ron Washington (70), Bruce Bochy (67, retired), and Joe Girardi (recently fired). What the hell are we doing here?
The manager shouldn’t matter when you have the right talent. It only matters when it is a bad one, which La Russa was in the last two years of his career. Get someone that has no name recognition among half of baseball fans.
None of it will matter, in the end, if the Sox’ best players can’t stay healthy.
Jed Hoyer’s year-end press conference went on for a while the other day. The only thing anyone heard, though, was “spend intelligently.” Some people think that means the Cubs are once again going to be sissies in free agency, others think those people are looking into it too closely. Either way, it turned Cubs Twitter into White Sox twitter for a day.
All I know is this: The Cubs are currently the hottest team in baseball.
Ayo Dosunmu is your starting Bulls point guard. I love Ayo and am proud of him for earning the opportunity. I am also worried about his playmaking ability filling in for Lonzo Ball.
Patrick Williams dominated in his last preseason game.
Full Bulls season preview … next week! LETS GO BULLS!
The NHL season started? Damn that’s crazy.
Thank you for reading today’s newsletter! I’ll be back next week — I have to be. The Bulls season starts and I’ll be reporting back from Soldier Field. I will talk to you all then. STILL GOTTA COME THROUGH CHICAGO!
Leave a comment:
Oh, I forgot, P Williams simply does not have the aggression necessary to succeed. I am confident that I could purposely and rudely shoulder him in a crowded space and he would apologize.
I understand that our scheme is technically a bend don't break defense. You will mostly see the bears just rush four and keep the rest in coverage. I get that it really helps to not be beat deep, however there are certain Quarterbacks who you must bring pressure to. Like Kirk Cousins and Carson Wentz. If they are under pressure, they make stupid decisions. I just do not know if the scheme is beneficial in games like this, but hey it keeps us in games I guess.