Tuesdays with Rosy. That may be what Bryan Knight misses the most.
Former Bears outside linebacker Rosevelt Colvin would pull into Halas Hall last season nearly every Tuesday, the players’ off day, with the rookie Knight not far behind. Once inside the meeting room, Knight regularly sat next to Colvin, working overtime and watching game film, studying Colvin’s tendencies as closely as he studied the opponent’s.
Knight faces the challenge of replacing the departed Colvin in the Bears’ lineup. As difficult as that will be, it might be easier than repaying him for the role Colvin played in Knight’s development.
“Rosy taught me how to be a pro,” Knight said Monday. “He helped me out more than he thought or realized. He’d come up to me and say you need to do this or that. Him leaving took a lot away from this team. Not just stats, but attitude in practice and stuff like that.”
Stuff Bears outside linebacker Warrick Holdman notices is missing every day. The way Colvin worked as hard at having fun as he did at getting better. The way he backed up talking trash by making plays, or the way he could break up the monotony of practice with one-liners as unforgettable as they are unprintable.
The Bears can find ways to keep pressure on quarterbacks, but they still haven’t found out who’s going to keep the defensive players loose. They can come up with players to help offset the loss of Colvin’s team-high 10 1/2 sacks, but who becomes the team leader in levity?
Those intangibles, as hard to find as they are to explain, have been noticeably absent from the Bears’ defense this preseason.
“No. 1, you can hear [because] you can’t hear [Colvin] out here anymore,” Holdman said of life without Colvin. “The togetherness we had, all three linebackers including Brian [Urlacher], was special.”
Holdman and Colvin, especially, spent almost as much time together off the field as they did at football. They developed an instant camaraderie as Bears teammates, enhanced by being chosen five picks apart in the fourth round of the 1999 NFL draft. Holdman went first, the 106th overall selection, with Colvin going at No. 111. They became nearly inseparable as friends and invaluable to the franchise.
“We came in together and had a bond because we had been together so long,” Holdman said. “We could move without talking and we were pretty much thinking the same thing.”
Holdman and Colvin were thinking the same thing the day they realized they couldn’t be Bears teammates forever, no matter how much they liked that idea. Modern-day NFL economics prevents teams from keeping a corps of linebackers as young and effective as Holdman, Colvin and Urlacher together longer than their first contract. Urlacher quickly became as important to the organization as the Soldier Field colonnades; that meant inevitably either Colvin or Holdman had to go.
“We both knew Brian was going to be here and we were like, `Ah, it’s going to be one of us,'” Holdman said. “We still hoped for the best, but it didn’t work out.”
You might say the Bears boxed themselves into a quandary so it couldn’t work out. In a well-documented clerical blunder in the spring of 2002, the Bears didn’t check off the compensation portion of Holdman’s restricted free-agent letter. That allowed teams to pursue Holdman without having to worry about giving up a fourth-round pick in return, which is what the Kansas City Chiefs did.
The Chiefs signed Holdman to a four-year, $12 million offer sheet that included a $2 million signing bonus the Bears matched, in essence picking Holdman over Colvin. Holdman’s deal counts $4.1 million against the salary cap this season, and even though he offered to restructure his contract so the team might accommodate Colvin, the Bears decided against it.
“I could have been gone, and we knew it was going to happen [one day], but we didn’t want it to happen,” Holdman recalled. “That’s the business we play. It’s hard, but we’re doing good, so I’m happy for him.”
Colvin signed a six-year, $19 million contract with the Patriots in March. Wednesday night he will be at Gillette Stadium playing against some old friends and new enemies–if only for a night.
“We talk once a week [and] I know he’s pumped and I’m pumped to see him play,” Holdman said. “I’ve been used to him being there in training camp and whatever. . . . It’s going to be real strange.”
It may look strange for former teammates to see Colvin wearing a blue Patriots No. 51 jersey. But it will sound very familiar.
“He’ll probably be talking [trash] all night, that’s just Rosy,” Bears wide receiver Marty Booker said. “I’m just going to look at him, smile and block him all the way down the field.”
