Still Gotta Come Through Chicago
Yes, Aaron Rodgers Owns Us
Part two of this week’s newsletter will be out tomorrow, so be on the lookout, Chicago.
When I was 19 years old, I frequented a bar with a few of my friends, one of the only ones that would look at our blatantly fake IDs and serve us anyway. Every once in a while, a cop would roll by, and you’d get that tickle down under that made the next beer after the squad car passed that much better.
Holy shit, I was the man. I probably had on some khaki pants so large they covered my shoe laces and a fraternity shirt on. Maybe even had my hair in a pony tail. Trust me, you would have LOVED me.
There was a guy that we’d see in there all of the time, and boy did he have some trash NBA takes. I would make my way over to him, and we’d argue over whether Jimmy Butler was going to re-sign with the Bulls or go to his favorite team, the Lakers. After I got done talking way too loud, likely unintentionally spitting all over as I called this stranger an idiot to his face, I’d return to the group I came with.
‘What were you guys talking about?’
‘Jimmy Butler.’
Their faces always had a look as if they wanted to ask more questions, but decided against it, considering that it would probably mean me spitting in their faces for the next five minutes as well.
The day finally came. Jimmy Butler singed a max extension with the Bulls, and boy I was ready to see this motherfucker and give him a piece of my mind after my 6th 24 oz. Bud Light.
But I never did see that guy again. There’s a small chance he saw me walk in and darted for the other exit. He may have even been snuck through the kitchen by the workers, saying ‘the Jimmy Butler Guy just got here!’
Time has passed, lots of it. I now have clothes that properly fit me, zero fraternity shirts, and a lot less hair. For the last five years, for some reason, I’ve had less and less hair, now that I think of it. I think that’s probably because I’ve just been a bit stressed out. Should be back in no time. At least that’s what my mom says, as she looks upon my head with tears streaming from her face for some reason.
See, the Chicago Bulls to me are basically like what Bitcoin is to some nerd who invested in it a decade ago. And no, it’s not just because last year’s Bulls OVER season win total bet created generational wealth for me and my family.
It’s more so that it’s this thing that everyone has been disregarding for the better part of the last five years. No one in Chicago seemed like they were a Bulls fan anymore, and it made me sad — yes, like a little child, I was sad that people didn’t like my wwwwittle sports team. I held on, though. And though no one wanted to listen to me talk about the Bulls all these years, I’d try to talk their ears off anyway.
Instead of mansplaining bitcoin to a girl in the corner of a party, I’d pray to God that my younger brother — who has gotten too cool for me as the years have gone on — would talk to me about where the franchise was headed. It was a cold, dark, lonely place.
Now, like Bitcoin, everyone seems to be on the Bulls. Blah blah blah protected against inflation blah blah blah blockchain blah blah blah; Blah blah blah I like the Lonzo Ball signing blah blah blah Alex CARUSO HAHA! Blah blah Lavine’s a baller! blah blah.
Now that I’ve resisted my urge to tell all of those people to shut the fuck up, I’ve learned to enjoy the ride. I look around now, and there are folks like you nearby to enjoy this journey with me. And unlike the Bitcoin mouth-breathers, when someone talks to me about the Bulls, I’ve learned to simply listen. I resist the urge to tell them, ‘Man, you have absolutely no clue what the hell you are talking about.’ Instead, I head for the bathroom and eek out two specks of piss to get away from the poison that is ill-informed sports opinions.
Because it turns out, I not only just want you in my corner, I need you in my corner. I need you to be donning your Still Gotta Come Through Chicago shirts out at the bar, waiting for anyone to talk shit about the Bulls. Give me a call, and I’ll be on speaker phone in a second, ready to back you up in this argument. Hell, I may even show up.
One time in another under-age friendly bar, two of my dearest friends got into it. The topic at hand: R.A. Dickey, the knuckle ball pitcher, and how much money he made. I looked down at my phone for about 15 seconds, and when I looked back up one of them was challenging the other to a fight. I kid you not, one friend said to the other ‘Let’s go outside.’ He wanted to pummel a man who had a different opinion than him on R.A. Dickey.
Some may say that’s absolutely fucking insane, but it’s absolutely the energy I need from you this season. If you see a negative Bulls comment on Twitter, you challenge that person to a fight. Someone is talking about the Bulls defense being bad at the bar? You know what to do. Let’s go outside and see who’s defense is bad when I introduce you to my fists — one is named fuck around, and the other is named find out.
When they ultimately either kick the shit out of you or tell you they won’t fight you over the Bulls, you let me know, and the t-shirt will be in mail.
The Bulls weren’t worth being prideful over for a long time, but they’ve returned.
Their over/under is 43.5, and I am laughing right now in my Mercedes Benz — that I bought with last years winnings — on my way to the sports book to put another behemoth bet on that OVER.
This is the last thing I’ll say, for the annual over hype video is being published in tomorrow’s newsletter and I’ll talk more about Chicago basketball — including our champions, the Chicago Sky — then.
The Bulls will win more than 43.5 games, perhaps three or four more games than that. They will make a big pick-up midseason, most likely a big man. They will be a top-5 team in the East, there will be playoff basketball in the UC this year. And the Bulls will have a top-15 defense in the league.
And then you I’ll see you all at the OVER party celebrating at the end of the year.
Thank you all for reading this newsletter again, God Bless, and LETS GO BULLS.
The reason Chicago sports fans are great is also why the McCaskeys and the rest of the Bears’ braintrust is able to remain atrocious.
Twice per year, the rallying cries of “Packers suck!” and “Fuck the Packers!” fill spaces online and on the ground in the city. It does not matter that the the former war cry is both demonstrably false and that those screaming it know it to be not the case — the intensity with which its hollered out of both sober and drunk mouths never fades.
So when Aaron Rodgers sealed the game with a rushing touchdown Sunday and screamed “I own you” to the fans at Soldier Field, over and over again, it hurt. But it hardly ruffled feathers — as the rest of the nation gasped at the taunt, Chicago — though hurt — just shrugged its broad shoulders.
No matter how many stickers are placed on the back of pick-up trucks that have a young boy pissing on the Packers symbol, and no matter how often we remind Rodgers of his most intimate familial and relationship struggles, nothing changes.
George W. Bush was still at the helm when Rodgers first beat the Bears. He’s been beating our asses for four presidencies. He outlasted the war in Afghanistan. He’s lasted long enough that his head coach is now a handsome, in shape, smart young man, a far cry from the Diet Mountain Dew-guzzling, fat, red-faced NFL coaches that have been the staple of the NFL for the last fifty years.
Things have changed all around us, but one thing remains the same: the Packers and Aaron Rodgers own us.
The Bears did what they usually do, teased us a bit to think there was a chance they could pull this one off — despite all the evidence to the contrary — and then Murphy’s Law took over.
Murphy’s Law is the idea that if anything can go wrong, it will. It exists in all places, but specifically, it resides on the Bears side of the football anytime they play Green Bay.
The analogy I’ve been thinking of is Kyrie Irving. He’s currently away from his team because he refuses to get vaccinated, right? Whether you think he is a moron for his vax decision or have put a poster in your room commemorating him for his bravery, he is nonetheless a headache for the Brooklyn Nets.
But the fact of the matter is that if it wasn’t this — his vaccination status — it would undoubtedly be something else. In other words, signing Kyrie will mean headaches for your team. His health could be stellar, social justice could be achieved, he could have his ideal contract, and still, he would find a reason to be bothered with the world around him. And he would miss time because of it.
The Bears, similarly, could have most everything going right for them. But when they’re playing the packers, if anything can go wrong, it will. A good defensive stop. A couple nice throws from Justin Fields. And here come the refs. But if the refs were just fine, we wouldn’t have gotten those defensive stops. And if we got the defensive stops, Fields would have been incapable of making a good throw.
The feeling of impending doom is endlessly present when the Bears play the Packers. I’ll never forget when the Bears beat the Packers on Thanksgiving years back. When the Bears had stopped the Packers, my eyes darted to the people around me and back to the TV over and over again. Was there a flag, can we just kneel this out? Is the game really over?
Similarly, when the Bears were kicking the shit out of the Packers in Week 1 of 2018 at halftime, no true Bears fan thought the game was even close to over.
The question is how do we stop that feeling, and how do we get Murphy’s Law off of our backs? It could be getting Rodgers out of town, but one could fairly point to Brett Favre’s 22-10 record against the Bears.
The reality is likely that it’s in the Bears DNA. .
There are no such thing as curses, and of course Murphy’s Law is not really a law at all. But when bad management is running a sports team, it manifests in a way that makes you believe in all of that.
Bad management means bad coaches, bad decision makers. The wrong players in the wrong spots.
Were the Cubs cursed by a Billy Goat for decades and decades? Was Bartman a part of the curse?
It’s more likely that everything bad that could happen, did happen, because of the situation Chicago sports fans had been put in by the morons at the top — the owners before the Ricketts family, the McCaskeys, Gar Forman and John Paxson, and Bill Wirtz.
Every once in a while, you’ll hear that the McCaskeys care desperately about one thing: beating the Packers. For their sake, I hope that’s just a lie, and they’re not just incompetent morons.
But in the end, when December 12th comes back around, we’ll be yelling “Fuck the Packers” and “Packers suck” again. And that bodes well for the people who run the Chicago Bears. But what are we going to do? Stop being fans? That just, unfortunately, is not an option.
Back to the Murphy’s Law talk. That was probably the worst officiated game I can remember.
Bad calls are bad, but what made this worse than others is that the referee errors materially affected the game, multiple times over.
First, Fields throws an interception on a play he clearly thought was a “free play” because the Packers defensive lineman jumped in the neutral zone. Is there any doubt in any of your minds’ whether Rodgers would have gotten that call had the roles been reversed?
That took the Bears from a position where they were leading, and driving, to a tie game in three minutes. From that point on, the Bears never led again.
The Packer drive immediately following that was accelerated by an unsportsmanlike conduct on Mario Edwards Jr., a play in which Aaron Rodgers grabbed his face mask and then he proceeded to not touch him, but wag a finger at him. 2nd and 10 at their own 20 with zero momentum turned into 1st and 10 at the 35.
Immediately after that, two blatant holds in three plays were missed. I’m not a huge holding guy. In general, I side with the offensive line — I think the standard to a hold should be much higher than it is. But these ones were not only clear, again, they materially affected the plays they occurred on.
Later, Sam Mustipher was called for a completely phantom hold on a touchdown. Fields also signaled for a timeout around 2-3 seconds before the play clock ran out, and for whatever reason, that was not honored, resulting in a delay of game.
The Packers also were gifted a first down late in the game, a crucial one, where they didn’t look like they were within two yards of the first down marker. No huddle, no booth review, no measurement. And of course, no challenge from Nagy on this spot.
In general, the refs seemed out of the game. They couldn’t announce basic things over the mic without messing up, saying things like “the penalty is declined” and “those penalties offset” in the same breath.
Here’s a play where they lined up the ball two yards outside the hash:
In a game where you’re 6-point dogs, this kind of treatment from the refs — who are seemingly becoming more and more a part of the game across the NFL, which makes the product so much worse — cannot be overcome.
Matt Nagy is no longer calling the plays. Since, the offensive line looks better, as does the entire offense. But it’s still far from good. When Bill Lazor called the plays against the Lions, Nagy’s ego was too large to give him full credit. Instead, he said that, in the end, everything still went through him.
Virtually everything he says ends up working against him down the line. OK, well if he’s still ultimately responsible, that means he’s the reason that the Bears average just 16.3 points per game, only better than the two worst teams in football — the Jets and the Texans.
You simply cannot win games like that.
To boot, Nagy is still actively hurting the Bears chances of winning while doing next to nothing on the sidelines. He called a timeout right before he challenged a spot! It didn’t in the end, but it could have resulted in two blown timeouts in a row. His thought processes simply do not make sense.
The Bears also punted it on 4th and 7, at the Packers 40 yard line, down 10, with less than 18 minutes to go in the game. Against Aaron Rodgers, that is inexcusable. You may as well waive the white flag at that point. Thank god for the 27 yards they got in the field position BATTLE in return.
He’s not good at anything, and even if he’s stripped of every last duty, he’s still a net negative for this team — especially when it comes to the development of Justin Fields, which is all that matters now.
What else:
—Our defensive backs cannot tackle, and they don’t even pursue the ball with any sort of fervor, something you learn to do when you’re getting paid zero dollars in youth football. Tashaun Gipson was god awful from start to finish on Sunday. Eddie Jackson, whether he’s good in coverage or not, makes business decisions regularly despite already getting his big deal — surely his last. Jaylon Johnson looked lost in pursuit on at least two plays as well.
—Bears Defensive Coordinator Sean Desai continues to impress, and while I don’t know the exact reasons why Robert Quinn is 10x the player he was last year, Desai has to have something to do with it. His creativity on stunts and blitz calls has reinvigorated a defense that I thought was well on its way down.
—Akiem Hicks was having a great game until he left again with a groin that was clearly not ready. Good on him for trying to push through it, but I doubt we see him for more than a handful of games the rest of the season. Even at this point in his career, he’s a major difference maker when he’s out there.
—The Bears, as mentioned above, have the 30th best offense based on PPG this year. They were 23rd last year, and 29th the year before that. That’s three years in a row where Matt Nagy has led one of the worst offenses in football, with four different different quarterbacks at this point.
—Justin Fields is playing exactly how I expected him to play this year. He shows flashes of greatness, and makes some bad mistakes. He took a couple inexcusable sacks Sunday. But for a guy that’s playing on a pretty bad team, that’s expected. We’ve also grown accustom, for some reason, to judging rookie QBs as if they’re the final versions of themselves. Fields — although Nagy may have something to say about this — should be fine. Be patient.
—In the first quarter, I, admittedly, let myself think ‘What if the Bears are just good?’ They’re now 3-3, and over the next six games, they play the Bucs, 49ers, Steelers, Ravens, and Cardinals. With the Lions wedged in there on Thanksgiving — are we sure that’s a win? — the Bears could have one of the five or six worst records in football by the time December comes around.
Thank you for reading, my beautiful community members! See you all tomorrow, first thing. STILL GOTTA COME THROUGH CHICAGO!
Is there a bigger group of suckers in the world than Chicago Bears fans? I saw a graphic last week that before Favre was the starter for the packers in 1992, the Bears had the edge in the series by nearly 20 games. Our entire life we have been watching the bears get their heads beat in by the Packers, but we still hold the line. I dont care if it will cost the bears 12 million to cut Eddie Jackson after this season, it needs to be done. If his play wasn't bad enough for you, him going after an all time Bear, Lance Briggs, should be the final straw. I know that Rodgers has said that this will be his final year with the packers, and most likely Adams too, but how fitting would it be if the two parties worked out a deal remained with the packers for another 4 years just to torment us. We're on to Tampa Bay.
I have been getting into an uncomfortable amount of arguments with out of state friends about the bulls having 3 seed potential if Simmons doesn’t play.