Still Gotta Come Through Chicago
White Flags
Happy Friday Chicago!
I’m a practical thinker.
My biggest fears are car accidents and early onset heart disease, not spiders or paranormal activity in a dark basement.
And still, I predicted that the Bears would win 11 games this year. And still, I sometimes believe the next move my teams make will be the one that pushes them past the mud they’re currently stuck in.
Without evidence — and with plenty of evidence to the contrary — the cycle goes on and on. My judgement is rock solid until I hear the FOX music playing on NFL Sunday, and until I see a + sign in front of those Bears on the moneyline. My practicality suspends itself outside of working hours.
Just kill the spider, it’s not going to hurt you, obviously.// Could the Bears win this week with a little extra juice from Matt Eberflus being fired?
There’s no ghosts in the basement. You’re just afraid of the dark. Turn the lights on.// Does anyone want to go to Green Bay for the Bears game next year? That would be a blast.
At times, I even think that if I was the King of Everything for seven days, I could fix a lot of the external factors that make our lives worse — like daylight savings time and my favorite sports teams.
In one week, we’d be on the right track, and then I’d resign from my post like George Washington, because I know that although I am a great king, there should be no King of Everything after all.
If that one week was this week, though, there would also be two dead women — shot dead with bow and arrow — on an American Airlines flight. Their crime? Coughing next to me like slobs.
They’d be free of their sickness, but also free of the physical world, their bodies disposed of in the nearest body of water with no proper burial from their families.
The Bears may have Mike Vrabel, the Cubs a bigger spending budget. You’d enjoy an extra hour of sunlight. You’d be able to watch the Bulls and Sox on basic television.
But two women would be floating in Lake Michigan, the arrows still sticking out of their necks. So maybe my reign would be a net negative.
I also know that many of my fellow Chicagoans would turn a blind eye.
The trains ran on time. The sports teams were good. We had sunlight! All the guy asked was for people not to sit next to him on a crowded plane and cough mucus all over him.
Is that too much? Those two women were a small price to pay. That man is a hero, they’d say about me.
Yeah, that’s what they’d say about me.
Let’s get into it.
Grand opening, grand closing to the Thomas Brown for Head Coach chatter. That’s one positive from this last week.
No one should have thought the Bears would be much better off the rest of the season without Matt Eberflus. He’s a bad coach, but also a coach with some semblance of head coaching experience. He’s also a competent defensive play caller, which Eric Washington is not.
But what we all likely did think is that, at least for one week, the Bears would show some heart. The playoff hopes are gone, but the season is not over. If the players were that disgruntled by their former head coach, then surely they would lay it all on the line after a change.
Instead, we got proof of what has been becoming evident over the last few months. The Bears are largely heartless losers.
Jaylon Johnson went off on Matt Eberflus in the locker room after the Lions game. He got his coach fired (deservedly) and then rewarded Kevin Warren and the Bears brass by giving a Pro Bowl effort. And not an effort worthy of a Pro Bowl vote, but an effort that looked like he was in Hawaii playing in that now defunct All-Star game.
The Bears veterans were happy to make veiled remarks to the media — and on their own “shows” — all year.
To me, it got annoying. Even for those of us that wanted Eberflus out ASAP, and badly, the comments were too much. That is going to get figured out eventually, whether you throw dirt on your head coach midseason or not. But they thought it would win them favor and attention in the media, which it did.
They never thought that they may be playing a part in this disastrous season too.
Eberflus was a major problem for the Bears. That much is clear. What wasn’t clear at first was that certain players may be as much to blame. A bad coach and whiny, entitled players are not mutually exclusive.
If the Bears wanted to show all their worth as players post-Eberflus, they lost their chance on Sunday. What an embarrassing showing.
A 4-2 team let a hail mary kill their season, and that’s just about all you need to know about this current group.
Sure, two guys that weren’t playing calls at the beginning of the season were thrust into playcalling roles in the middle of it. Kyle Shanahan versus the Pass Game Coordinator is not a good matchup.
But that doesn’t explain the business decisions that were being made on Sunday. The lack of effort tackling, the unwillingness to make a stand during a blowout being broadcast to tens of millions of people.
The Bears had the pieces, allegedly, coming into this season. The question was: was the diva quarterback going to be able to step up to the plate his rookie year? He played in California, he paints his nails, he dresses a little bit differently.
Yet, down three scores on Sunday, there were only a couple guys that seemed like they wanted to be out there. Caleb Williams was one of them. Williams and Rome Odunze were responsible for the only few displays of emotion — positive or negative — against the 49ers. Maybe we can throw T.J. Edwards in there too.
But when it’s visible who is trying, you’ve got a much larger problem. You have multi-million dollar athletes who got their way unwilling to put their bodies on the line with a month left to go in the season.
And that is a much larger problem. I don’t care if I sound like an old man with a newspaper column.
It’s hard to decipher sometimes between a lack of effort and a lack of ability, but it wasn’t last week. Jaylon Johnson. Kevin Byard. (Oh captain, my captains). Tyrique Stevenson. D.J. Moore.
All talented players, all with piss poor attitudes.
I tend to think that, with a better coach, the Bears are far better this year. And I tend to think that a display like the one we saw in Santa Clara doesn’t happen at all.
But that’s all a guess. If the Bears don’t have an owner with a spine, or a president with a brain, or veteran “captains” who care, I find it hard to believe that prospective coaches will think this is the best open job on the market.
I’m grateful for the Williams to Odunze connection for two touchdowns. That’s about it. Would I have rather Odunze not celebrate his second touchdown down by 100 points? Sure.
But at least he cares.
The Bears clinched a last-place finish in the NFC North for a third straight year. In the last 11 seasons, the Bears have landed in last place seven times.
The White Sox dealt Garrett Crochet this past week. And, whether or not the return ultimately ends up being worth it (I think it will be), no one is talking about the larger story behind the move.
The Sox, fresh off a 41-win season, are likely to be as bad next year, or maybe even worse. While the Mets and Yankees are dueling over $760 million contracts, the Sox are making trades with the “long term” in mind.
Frankly, they’re lucky that Crochet put together the season that he did. It wasn’t a given after Tommy John and an injury-plagued 2023 season. His performance last year was just about the only thing fans could hang their hats on, both for the present and the future.
The return was a top catching prospect in baseball in Kyle Teel, the Red Sox 2024 first rounder Braden Montgomery, and then Wikelman Gonzalez and Chase Meidroth.
Meidroth — who is apparently more of a utility man — will probably play some for the Sox this year. Him and Mike Tauchman are likely to be fan favorites on a team that gives Steve Stone existential dread.
The Sox did not get the Red Sox best prospect in the deal, it should be noted. But it does seem like they made out relatively well, particularly for a player like Crochet, who has a lot of risk attached to him.
Teel is 22 years old, and had an .818 OPS last year with the Red Sox AA and AAA affiliates.
Another rebuild is commencing, and this one is likely to look a lot like the one that transpired less than a decade ago. Trade anything worth of value for prospects and hope — against a lot of odds — that they end up making up a team worth a damn.
The Sox should prioritize a long-term view, in a vacuum. But it does say something that they have no shame. You would think a team that won 41 games last year may make a splash. Let’s give the fans something to look forward to. I guess not.
Plus, the Sox are relying on prospects to return them to glory, prospects that will have to go through a system that does them no favors.
The Bulls and the Sox are not playing by the same rules as their peers, and therefore will not be competing at the same level as those peers during the season (forget the postseason). Or at least the peers that matter, that is.
Basically, both organizations are banking on luck. And luck is not a strategy.
As the baseball offseason goes on, it’s tough to call Jed Hoyer and Chris Getz failures. Who knows what they can and cannot do. But, to call them failures, you’d also be suggesting they tried at something.
Hoyer doesn’t deserve that tag, because he has not tried.
We’ll see if Getz has better luck.
Thanks for reading another newsletter! See you next week for a special year-end edition of Still Gotta Come Through Chicago. Comment below.
AD i would love to get rid of Daylight Savings time, oh and every owner of a Chicago team maybe switch the peps in you story from the 2 ladies to those clowns.