OK, you can give up now.
I don’t mean give up on the Bears. I mean give up trying to figure out what they are.
A bad team? So-so team? Inconsistent team? Injury-riddled team? Underrated team? Unlucky team? A bad team that had a run of good luck? A good team that had a run of bad luck?
Forget it.
Fact is, even the Bears can’t figure out the Bears.
“A lot of guys in here are down right now,” rookie cornerback Nathan Vasher said in the locker room Sunday after a really ugly 22-3 loss to the Jacksonville Jaguars. “But we’ll come back next week and probably play our best game of the year.”
Wouldn’t surprise me a bit.
Over a span of 21 days, the Bears have lost to the Colts by 31 points, to the Cowboys by 14 and to the Jaguars by 19 … but beat the Vikings.
And looked great doing it.
What is their story? What is there to say about them? How can a team look so good one week (vs. the Packers, 49ers, Giants, Titans and Vikings) and so bad the next?
What’s the problem? Lack of experience? Lack of execution? Lack of talent? What beats the Bears?
Apparently, it’s the Bears who beat the Bears.
“For the majority of the year,” running back Thomas Jones said, “we’ve stopped ourselves.”
As to this latest loss, quarterback Chad Hutchinson said, “We were our own worst enemies out there.”
Yes, they were.
Ample proof of this? The 13 penalties the Bears committed.
“Flags were killing us,” left guard Steve Edwards said, “knocking us out of the red zone.”
“Penalties like that,” Jones said, “hurt the confidence of everybody on the field.”
Defensive end Alex Brown called it “crazy out there,” the way gains kept getting called back. Defensive back Charles Tillman called the calls unbalanced.
But penalties don’t cause you to lose by 19 points. Pro athletes have to be pretty hard up for an excuse to say that.
No, they know better.
For the sixth time, these Bears were limited to 10 points or fewer. You can’t win if you can’t score.
And don’t put it all on the quarterback, because a quarterback can’t throw from his back. Hutchinson has been sacked 10 times in two weeks. No NFL team is worse than the Bears in protecting the guy in the pocket.
They couldn’t even give Hutchinson a few seconds to get rid of the ball from his own end zone. He got creamed for a safety when the line of scrimmage was the 4.
“Did you feel as if you were under constant pressure?” Hutchinson was asked.
“Yes,” he said.
And he said no more.
Nothing left to be said. It was what it was. A total breakdown on offense–by the line, by the backs, by the ends. A breakdown by every Bear, everywhere.
Don’t bother singling one out, coach Lovie Smith said, because “we can talk about every position.”
Or not talk about it.
“We’re disappointed,” center Olin Kreutz said. “But we’re not broken.”
Kreutz was asked where the Bears would go from here.
“Home,” he said.
This is all any of us knows about these Bears for sure.
