Winter approaches, and the discontent of the Bears will grow. If ever a team needs to practice, it is the Bears. Now, coach Dave Wannstedt is about to discover they can’t even do that efficiently.
Plans for a new Bears practice facility are still no more than “near future” plans. Club President Michael McCaskey, who has delayed action on a new home hoping someone would build him a stadium, said Friday he is “actively looking at sites” for a new training facility to replace inadequate Halas Hall in Lake Forest. The Bears have been talking about it for years, but procrastinating. McCaskey doubts it would be available even for the 1994 season because he has yet to acquire the land.
It obviously won’t help Wannstedt this season. The Bears enter winter practicing on a muddy or frozen field they share with Lake Forest College. When the weather gets too bad, they go inside a primitive air-inflated bubble a 15-minute drive from their locker rooms and offices. It is an untenable situation that makes Mike Ditka’s success over the years all the more impressive.
Compared to the rest of their rivals on this season’s schedule, the Bears are at a distinct disadvantage in practice conditions. How they expect to improve the 28th-ranked offense in the league by slipping, sliding and stumbling on unsuitable fields is a mystery. Football teams like to say they play like they practice. Don’t be surprised.
The Raiders, Chargers, Bucs and Rams are warm-weather opponents remaining on the Bears’ schedule. Here are the practice facilities of the other opponents:
– The Chiefs work in a 2-year-old facility next to Arrowhead Stadium that includes a 90-yard artificial indoor surface.
– The Lions are able to work inside the Silverdome, where their locker room and training rooms are housed. Outside, they have grass fields.
– The Packers have a permanent indoor facility across the parking lot from expanded Lambeau Field locker and training rooms, but they are tearing it down and building an indoor palace so big it could house two 747 jumbo jets.
– The Broncos work in a 3-year-old, 59,000-square-foot facility that includes a 70-yard artificial field under a bubble, a 50-yard workout field and an outdoor grass field kept thawed by underground wiring.
Such training facilities are not only important for practicing, they are helpful for recruiting in the free-agent era. McCaskey said he is “not so sure” about its recruiting value. But a player deciding between the Bears and Packers, for example, would have a no-brainer if the money were close. The working conditions are so disparate the two teams don’t appear to be in the same league.
Line of steel: During the six years from 1985-90, there were only 18 of 101 games when Jim Covert, Mark Bortz, Jay Hilgenberg, Tom Thayer and Keith Van Horne didn’t play as a unit on the offensive line. That’s an amazing record of durability that might be unmatched.
They never missed a playoff game together, starting nine. Only once did more than one starter miss the same game. That was the regular-season finale of 1990, when Covert and Hilgenberg sat out. Both started the next week in the playoffs.
The worst regular season was 1988, when Covert missed eight games with the back injury that eventually would end his career prematurely. Otherwise, the five played 15 of 16 games in 1985, 15 of 16 in 1986, 9 of 12 in the strike year of 1987, 14 of 16 in 1989 and 14 of 16 in 1990.
Their only regret, of course, is they didn’t get to play in more than one Super Bowl together. That would have placed them in elite company. The 1972-73 Dolphins offensive line of Wayne Moore, Bob Kuechenberg, Jim Langer, Larry Little and Norm Evans was the only line to start two winning Super Bowls together. The lines of the great Steelers, 49ers, Redskins, and Cowboys teams were never the same in their Super Bowl appearances. The runner-up Bills line of Will Wolford, Jim Ritcher, Kent Hull, Glenn Parker and Howard Ballard started the last two Super Bowls intact, but it is rare for five players to maintain the kind of stability that Covert, Bortz, Hilgenberg, Thayer and Van Horne afforded the Bears over such a long period of time.
Shula, Shula: Don Shula tied George Halas’ record 324 victories 10 years to the day Halas died, Oct. 31, 1983. Now, Shula has a chance to break the record Sunday against the Jets, the team that dealt him his most painful defeat, beating the heavily favored Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III.
“It would have to be the worst because it destroyed a great relationship between Carroll Rosenbloom and me,” Shula said, referring to the late owner of the Colts. “Just prior, we had beaten Cleveland in Cleveland, and on TV after the game, he put his arm around me and said, `This is the last coach I’ll ever hire.’ A couple of weeks later the Jets beat us, and that next year our relationship came apart, and that led to my leaving to come to Miami.”
Shula has worked under only two ownerships, Rosenbloom and the Robbie family. Such stability helps. Halas worked only for Halas, but Shula is glad he never owned a team.
“When I first came down to Miami, I was part owner of the team for five years. But I just felt there was a contradiction there. I had the feeling players were negotiating with ownership and perceived you as ownership and something they weren’t making was going into your pocket. Next thing you know, you’re in front of the squad asking them to give more than they are capable of giving,” Shula said.
Comparisons to Shula can be embarrassing. The Rams’ Chuck Knox is second with 186 victories. He has coached 20 years and would have to average seven wins for another 20 years to get to 326. By then, Knox would be 81 years old. But no comparison is more awkward than the one with Shula’s own son David, coach of the league’s only winless team, the 0-7 Bengals. Shula is 5-18 since taking over last year.
