As the Bears prepare for the New York Giants, they have been forced to answer questions about the reasons for and impact of Sunday’s 41-0 loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Beyond queries about the immediate past or future games, however, is one that is beginning to form like a thunderhead over the Bears:
Have they become not just a team that sometimes loses but, in fact, a losing team? Are the Bears a good-team-in-waiting that loses a game now and then, or a bad team like the Los Angeles Clippers that occasionally wins a game?
Winning is a habit. The 1980s Bears had it. So is losing. The late-1990s Bears had that. The 2000 Bears are 0-2 and need a win desperately to prevent a spiral, or even the thought of a spiral, from starting.
“If you lose your first five or six games, it gets pretty bad,” tackle Blake Brockermeyer said. “You can lose a couple of games here and there. But if you start piling it up, then a lot of guys tank it up and don’t want to play.”
Only six current Bears (Jim Flanigan, Sean Harris, Shane Matthews, Barry Minter, Todd Perry, James Williams) have ever known a winning season in Chicago. More than half (31) of the Bears players have never had a winning season in the NFL. The Bears have lost 10 of their last 13 regular-season games and are the only NFL team, other than the 2-year-old Cleveland Browns, that hasn’t had even a .500 season since 1995.
The Bears, under coach Dick Jauron, have made moves specifically to change the underlying character of the team. Virtually every player acquired this year through free agency or trade has come from a team of recent success: Phillip Daniels in Seattle, Thomas Smith in Buffalo, Brad Culpepper in Tampa Bay and Shawn Wooden in Miami. Most of the top draft choices the past few years have been from winning college programs.
“You have so many young guys coming from winning programs, so I don’t think there’s a question of losing becoming a habit,” Williams said. “We didn’t start off the way we wanted to and we still have to pick it up. In our eyes we’re still a good football team.”
Players have talked among themselves about teams that have started poorly and still come back to make the playoffs. But along with the playoffs, another goal for the Bears is to prevent losing from ever being accepted, which players know it can be.
“I’ve got to control what I can control,” receiver Marcus Robinson said. “You’ve got a lot of guys who probably do feel comfortable losing, and a lot of guys that don’t like losing and love to win. In this profession it gets kind of individualized. You have certain people who you want to be leaders and whom people want to follow.”
Winning is the only real antidote for losing. For that to occur at least two things need to happen. Winning teams makes opponents pay for mistakes. The Bears have not. In Minnesota, Jerry Azumah intercepted a Daunte Culpepper pass at the Vikings’ 48-yard line. The Bears were then flagged for a false start and allowed a sack before punting. Minnesota then fumbled twice in three plays, the second rolling out of bounds before Mike Brown could grab it. Two plays later Randy Moss caught a 66-yard pass to set up a go-ahead touchdown.
The Bears had the ball in Tampa Bay’s half of the field on their first two possessions and could not manage even a field-goal try. Tampa Bay turned a first-half fumble and an interception into 14 points.
“You have to take other people’s mistakes and mishaps into something,” said former Bear and radio/TV analyst Tom Waddle.
Waddle was on the 1989 Bears, who coach Mike Ditka declared wouldn’t win another game after one particularly demoralizing loss. The Bears, in fact, did lose their last six games.
But that was the only year in a stretch of eight in which the Bears did not reach the playoffs. They were a good team losing games, not a bad team, and they knew it. The 2000 Bears let a game get away in Minnesota, then were overrun in Tampa. They had no winning experience on which to fall back.
“That [’89 team] was a good team knowing it’s going to the playoffs, shrugging off a loss,” Waddle said. “That’s one of those games where you just say, `We got beat today; we stunk.’ But you still know deep down that you’re going places.
“But this team, with new faces in the second year under a new coach–you get blown out 41-0 and you don’t have that security blanket of knowing that you’re a good team yet. Getting blown out as an established team is one thing; getting blown out as an unestablished team is another.”
Being an established team means having proven veteran leaders who set standards and reach them, which allows other players to follow. The 2000 Bears still have character and leadership questions if only because of time. The natural leader on offense by virtue of position, quarterback Cade McNown, has played only 17 NFL games. On defense, Daniels, Smith and Wooden are veterans but newcomers. Warrick Holdman, Brown, Rosevelt Colvin and Brian Urlacher are simply newcomers.
“Some guys need encouragement and some guys know what they need to do,” Smith said. “You’ve got to be cautious with it.”
Did the Tampa Bay defeat, on the heels of the disappointment in Minnesota, drive the psyche of the Bears to the brink of slipping into a loser’s mindset? For now the answer is no.
“Losses like that can push teams that want to be better to get better in a hurry,” Daniels said, “and this team wants to get better.”
