Still Gotta Come Through Chicago
Your Undefeated Bears
Good morning Chicago!
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The Queen of England is dead.
Because I am of Irish descent, I am supposed to rejoice in her death. But that is not my style.
I am actually rejoicing in her death because of an entirely different reason. When I was in Munich, Germany, some dumbfuck Brit would not leave the girls I was with alone. As he was yammering on and on, trying to get us to give a shit about his country, he started talking about the Queen. “AnD wE aRe GoIng tO GeT a DaY oFF WhEn ShE TuRnS 100.”
I had been surveying the scene for a while waiting to make my move, but he couldn’t have served my entrance up to me on more of a platter if he tried.
“No fucking SHOT she’s got another eight years in her buddy, you ain’t getting that day off.”
He made a few more dumb British comments as his voice grew less confident, and eventually took his yammering elsewhere. That was the nail in his coffin for that day, and his little Queen received hers five years later.
I’m not glad the Queen died because of the British Empire’s tyranny. Frankly, I’m not sure how much she had to do with suppressing other countries’ people across the world. Maybe she was an evil bitch and she relished in the fact that Ireland was part hers or that her country got like half of the world addicted to Opium. Or perhaps she was just a little proper woman who was all for public service.
I don’t know, nor do I really care. I’m just happy that idiot didn’t get a day off from work. That’s what made me smile on the day millions frowned over losing the Queen.
I bring this up for two reasons:
— to again remind all of you country-locked peasants of my wonderful escapades abroad in college
— to open up the thought process that I believe added a cherry on top to the Bears win on Sunday
A day after torrential downpour took over all of our Sundays, we were gifted with about 36 hours of the most beautiful weather you could ask for. A breezy, high 50s day is probably the only type of weather that could make you miss your middle school girlfriend or want to call the ex-wife you don’t have and try to reconcile things.
The Bears hats and sweatshirts around the city on Monday is yet another great reminder that nothing — nothing — gets Chicago going like the Bears succeeding.
Unfortunately, there aren’t always enough reminders of this. The best example I can remember of late is the day of the Bears last true playoff game — against the Eagles in 2018. On a grocery run the morning of that game, Chicago felt like a Big Ten college campus on game day. If you ran into anyone you knew, that’s all the conversation consisted of: Where are you watching the game and what do you think is going to happen?
Monday felt like that, regardless of the fact that one team was three wins from being Super Bowl champs and the other is projected to win six more games this entire regular season.
But when you’re 1-0, the difference between those two teams feels irrelevant.
After one of the most soul-sucking baseball summers in Chicago I can remember, this felt like God tucking us into bed and giving us a little smooch on the head.
He turned down the temperature, let us have our flowers on Week 1, and said “there you go, you little rascals” as he turned out the light post-tuck in.
It’s not much, but he (OR SHE!) gives his (or HERS!) toughest battles to his (or HERS!) strongest soldiers. We are the strongest soldiers in the sports universe, or at least it feels like it sometimes, so it’s nice to get a kiss on the head and a tuck in every once in a while.
There were undoubtedly thousands of weather-high Chicagoans who shook off the nostalgia that had them watching their high school Hudl highlights, only to end up thinking “would if the Bears fucked around and beat the Packers next week?”
Slow down, soldier. Take it a day at a time, for these days are fleeting.
But why was this victory so special? What did add that cherry on top?
I don’t think many of us were singing HOO-RAH before the Bears first game. Other than a few Papa Bear Halas Stans, there were very tempered expectations heading into this year. As there should have been. I still have those expectations.
But nothing gets Bears fans together like a national media bunch that just won’t shut up about how bad the Bears are going to be. If they talk about it enough, it becomes enough to convince you the opposite of what they’re trying to convince everyone else: that the Bears may not be so bad after all.
It’s not an easy job to cover any sport nationally. But in a day and age where everyone is trying to rile up fanbases with surface-level information, trying to go viral through a 3-minute monologue, the nationals can get quite annoying.
And that’s particularly the case if they feel the need to talk about how bad the Bears are going to be everyday, or if they do it without the right evidence backing it up.
As a friend said the other day about a national media type: “This guy said, ‘Who even are the Bears receivers?’ Isn’t that his job?”
Amen, brother. So once the Bears were boxed in by the the national press as the worst team in the league — or at the very least, one of them — Bears fans had a new reason to scream and shout for a victory.
They didn’t just want the Queen dead — they wanted that douche bag to still have to go to work on her non-existent 100th birthday.
They were right to, too. Because immediately after, we heard from all of those same media types again.
It was the bad weather. What a dumb game. No George Kittle. What a strange, fluky result for a good team against the worst team in football.
The weather no doubt had an effect on the game. The Bears’ lights-out field goal kicker missed two kicks. It no doubt had an effect on young quarterback play: Justin Fields could not get anything going in the first half. The lack of elite tight end play was glaring: former second-round pick Cole Kmet had zero catches for zero yards.
The desire for your team to win can only be superseded by one thing — and that’s to prove others wrong. That could be a friend, a guy you met at the bar and talked shop with, a person on ESPN you’ll never meet, or even your father.
We all got that heading into Sunday’s game. And even though the job is far from finished, and we could all still be proven wrong on something we never truly believed in the first place, it’s worth at least a couple of “Bear Down, Chicago Bears” plays on the loud speaker.
And what’s better than that?
So, Go Bears! Fuck the National Media! Fuck that Brit! God Bless the Queen, but I don’t think he had time this week, as he was taking care of us. Thanks for that.
Onward.
What a Bears win!
Despite a million caveats you can offer, this team being 1-0 after playing a team that lost in the NFC championship this year is a major victory.
Especially after that first half. Before God blessed us, he wanted to remind us one more time what it felt like to cheer for a team that was completely inept on the offensive side of the ball.
If the Bears defense is as good as it showed on Sunday, Luke Getsy has to be just creative enough to put the Bears over the edge. No matter how the rest of the season goes, it seems like it’s going to be a fun one: a young, well-coached team that’s in every game is not too hard to watch. And that sounds a lot better than what we saw last year, or even the year before that, or even the year before that.
The biggest doubt coming into this game had to be the offensive line. You had, from left to right: a 5th-round rookie from Southern Utah in Braxton Jones; Cody Whitehair, of past bad Bears lines; Sam Mustipher, of past bad Bears lines; an unexpected mix between second-year Teven Jenkins and Lucas Patrick, who just got cleared to play two weeks ago; and another second-year, late-round draft pick in Larry Borom.
And the result was… fantastic!
At the surface, they allowed two sacks and six tackles for loss. Some of their success could be contributed, I guess, to the weather. But some of their failures can also be attributed to that, as no one — including Fields — ever had good footing.
Specifically, Cody Whitehair posted a 100% pass-block win rate, as did Sam Mustipher.
On running plays, Lucas Patrick ranked 6th among all guards in the NFL with an 83% run-block win rate, according to ESPN Stats and Info.
Jones had the easy task of taking on Nick Bosa in his first ever NFL start. After a shaky first quarter, he held up honorably.
"A couple of those plays, I tried to do a little bit too much and that's just not me,” he told NBC Sports Chicago. “I stay to what I do. I don't need to go crazy out to Bosa or anything like that. It's going to get you beat. If you stay nice and controlled and do what you do and just trust your teaching and your technique, that's what I did in the second half."
That performance is by far the most surprising of Week 1, and also flips a narrative on top of its head — for now. If this continues, it’s a massive mark in the win column for General Manager Ryan Poles. I also think Getsy will generally put the offensive line in better positions than Matt Nagy did.
Justin Fields probably will too. One of the biggest knocks on him was that he holds onto the ball too long. But what’s too long when your offensive line gave you two seconds to throw? Moving forward, his escapability should bode well for the offensive line. On the first touchdown, he not only showed that ability, but had the wherewithal to still look down field after escaping the pocket instead of just tucking it and running it. Instead, he found Dante Pettis for the first touchdown of the season.
The biggest thing about Field’s performance is that he didn’t let the first half get to him like we all probably did. It would have been easy for him to think, ‘Here we go again,’ and yet, his second half was far better than his first. In the end, he made the crucial plays he needed to for the Bears to win the game.
He was wearing two gloves for — I think — the first time ever in a game, and said after he had to change them because of how wet they were getting. So I won’t dissect his traditional box score on this one — 8/17, 121 years, 2 TDs, and 1 Int.
The offense, bear in mind, was also up against what will be one of the better defensive teams in the league this season. Last year, the 49ers were a top-5 team by most metrics defensively.
On the defensive end, the Bears never gave Trey Lance a chance to feel like he could take over the game. For 60 minutes, the defense was stellar. Jaylon Johnson wasn’t targeted once, Eddie Jackson had his first interception since 2019(!), Jaquon Brisker and Kyler Gordon were making plays, Roquan looked like Roquan (though I’d like him to stop jumping on people’s backs as a tackling strategy), and Dominque Robinson — a 5th rounder out of THE Miami (Ohio) UNIVERSITY — had 1.5 sacks in his debut and noticed a tendency of one of the greatest tackles in the game beforehand.
I’m sure the coaches told him afterward to keep it to himself next time, but that being his rookie mistake on the day is A-OKAY with me.
Overall, as we noticed during the preseason, the Bears just looked better. Besides our kickers trying to wipe down the fucking ground with a towel prior to kicking a field goal, there were little to no dumb mistakes.
The Bears only had three penalties for 24 yards, while the 49ers had 12 penalties for 99 yards.
That may have been the difference in the game, or it could have been the Bears’ one turnover versus the 49ers’ two. Or it could have been the 49ers not starting Jimmy Garoppolo. Or it could have been the weather.
Or it could have been all of the above-mentioned facts from the game. Even if that’s not the case, those facts still hold true.
Welcome to the Terrordome.
For Week 2, the schedule sets up about as poorly as it could have. Off the high of a Week 1 win, we’ll now need to head up north for a visit with the Packers.
But it’s not just that. The Packers are also coming off of a disgusting loss to the Vikings.
You’d have to suspend reason to believe that the Packers are losing to two division foes in the first two weeks of the season. I plan to do exactly that on Sunday from the time I wake up until kickoff at 7:20 p.m.
The Packers are banged up. Their offensive line is discombobulated, as is their receiver group. If the Bears are going to get them once this year, this is probably the time.
Nevertheless, the Bears are 10-point underdogs in Week 2, tied for the largest line of the week only behind the Falcons, who are 10.5-point underdogs against the Rams.
Whoever said there are no moral victories lives in Tampa Bay or Boston. If the Bears make this one competitive, I’ll be happy as a clam. If the Bears win this game, I’m taking off the week from work.
After a weekend chock-full of wonderful, sweet football, I crashed down back to earth tonight as I settled in to watch the Tony La Russa-less White Sox. Despite their resurgence, baseball is about as appeasing right now as vodka was the morning after you finished your freshman year in college.
But they are back in the hunt. Here come the White Sox, minus their manager (for what reason, we still still do not know).
This note seemed important, however:
“If he will return.”
Obviously, I hope all is well with La Russa. He probably shouldn’t be managing a struggling team at his age anyway. I hope some rest and time away has improved his health.
Do I feel like shitting on one dead person and one old, sick person in the same newsletter? Believe it or not, folks, I do not.
It’s hard to extrapolate out the White Sox 9-3 record in September. Is it because La Russa is no longer managing? Maybe. Maybe not. Did playing the A’s three times probably help? Yes.
Either way, the Sox biggest problem has changed. Their biggest problem all year has been themselves, and now it’s finally a team in their division. After basically begging the Sox to take the division over a matter of a few weeks, the Guardians have now won seven of eight games.
The Sox are three games back with 20 games to play. Neither the Guardians or the Sox have tough remaining schedules. Each play a bad team — the Royals and the Tigers, respectively — six more times.
The White Sox have averaged a tick over six runs per game in September. The hitting has turned around. Eloy Jimenez’s average is well above .300 at this point, and he has five of his 12 home runs in the month of September. Jose Abreu homered last night for the first time in a month and a half.
The issue will be the White Sox pitching. Despite having the Cy Young favorite in Dylan Cease — who has a 2.08 ERA — and Johnny Cueto, with a 3.09 ERA, the Sox starting pitching has been middle-of-the-road all year because of Lucas Giolito’s bad season, Michael Kopech’s inconsistency (he pitched well last night), and Lance Lynn’s slow return to form after his early-season injury.
The latter three need to step up for the sox to 1. make the playoffs and 2. make any sort of noise in the postseason.
Seiya Suzuki is my guy. If I were to buy a Cubs jersey moving forward (I won’t), I’d buy his. And if I were to buy stock on different Cubs players, he’d certainly be one of my choices.
On August 20th, he had a .241/.315./.402 slash line. Today, he has a .263/.333/.436 slash line. He just keeps getting better, and although this is just his first season in the MLB, he’s already a well above average player for the Cubs.
As it pertains to the offseason, David Ross was recently asked by The Athletic the question that has Cubs fans unnecessarily stressing out. With Nico Hoerner turning into one of the better shortstops in all of baseball, and the best coming free agents being shortstops, what ever are the Cubs to do?
These are good problems to have, and aren’t really problems at all. If the Cubs get one of the best shortstops in free agency, too, I’m sure the Cubs will be able to find a place for Hoerner.
Here’s Ross:
“It’s like when you want to buy a new car but you don’t have to, you can be picky, right?” he said. “We’ve got a really good shortstop here. If something works out where they identify a middle infielder that is of value that they feel like fits really well, I think everybody’s on board with that, including myself and Nico. Those are good problems to have. We’ll let the front office kind of pick and choose on that.”
Meanwhile, since we last spoke, the Cubs return in the Scott Effross deal to the Yankees has already showed us why the Cubs were willing to deal a good bullpen arm with plenty of years of team control.
Hayden Wesneski threw five innings in his big-league debut against the Reds, allowing just two hits and no runs. He also struck out eight! batters. It was a really, really impressive debut.
There is no good news to report on the Bulls front: they still have not made the one more move I all but promised, and Lonzo Ball’s return to basketball keeps getting pushed back.
We now know that Ball will not only miss training camp, but also the beginning of the season.
Jamal Collier of ESPN wrote about the timeline on what has been a very strange injury for Ball here.
Thank you all so much for reading. I appreciate it. I will chat with you next week!
Until then… STILL GOTTA COME THROUGH CHICAGO… and comment here:
Matt Eberflus is looking like Mikey Palmice would in 2022, if he had been a faster runner.
I am ecstatic with the Bears SIMPLY because they appear to be well coached. I was soooo sick of the sloppy shit with Nagy and his ego causing him not to adjust as every good coach does.
Unfortunately, I think the Packers Moneyline is going to be a lot of peoples top bets going into this weekend. I am alright with that after seeing Rodgers being a complete Bitch in their loss to the Vikings.
No Cubs coverage. I think David Ross is a great Manager. They better not lose him. He has that team playing hard with nothing to play for. Sweep of the Pennant Chasing Mets tonight?