Somebody asked cornerback Nathan Vasher how, if given the opportunity and a laptop computer, he would write the story of the Bears’ 13-3 victory over the Panthers on Sunday.
“Bears win,” said Vasher, clearly not the kind of writer who gets paid by the word.
Earlier in a postgame scrum with reporters, he had said the Bears were “the real deal,” and so I asked him whether this victory might finally have erased some of the doubts about his much-doubted team.
“I don’t know,” he said. “How do you feel about it?”
That’s the question I’d been asking myself each of the last six Sundays. And mostly what I had felt about the Bears was acute uncertainty.
But Sunday rolled around, and the Bears went out and put a defensive beating on the Panthers, who have been picked as a possible Super Bowl team. And I paused a second before answering Vasher, as if I had to hear the words in my head before I uttered them to him.
“I think you’re pretty good,” I finally told Vasher.
“There you go,” he said. “Here we are. We’re just trying to erase one [doubter] at a time.”
The reformed doubter saw the Bears raise their record to 7-3, saw them turn Panthers quarterback Jake Delhomme into something resembling processed meat and saw them take another step toward the playoffs.
And the doubter looked at the landscape, looked at all the bodies strewn around the NFC and asked this question: Who?
Who out there should make the Bears shake in their cleats? What team is so much better that the Bears shouldn’t start thinking about home-field advantage in the playoffs?
Seattle? Atlanta? Tampa Bay, next week’s opponent?
All I know is that, two weeks ago in Tampa, the Panthers scored 34 points on what had been the second-ranked defense in the league. On Sunday, the Bears held the Panthers to a measly field goal.
“We’ve always had the confidence that we were going to play well,” said defensive end Adewale Ogunleye, who had three sacks. “It was a surprise to the media that we had a five-game win streak. I think everybody brushed that under the rug. Now it’s six games.”
But of those six consecutive victories, this one was different. The Bears made 7-3 Carolina look painfully mediocre, and although it might turn out that’s exactly what the Panthers are, it really doesn’t matter right now. The Bears defensively dominated a team that had been averaging 27.7 points a game.
Vasher followed up last week’s crazy, inspired 108-yard missed-field-goal return with two interceptions Sunday. The Bears’ line put so much pressure on Delhomme that he had no problem finding a wide-open Vasher. The Bears sacked Delhomme eight times. He had been sacked 12 times in the previous nine games.
During the week, Bears defensive coordinator Ron Rivera had told his players that whenever Delhomme was forced to move his feet more than he wanted to, he had the tendency to throw the ball to the wrong team. Prophets and coordinators dream of days like Rivera’s.
What happened Sunday at Soldier Field was the result of what didn’t happen in the first five weeks of the season, when the Bears wanted the world to know they had the best defense in the league without much in the way of evidence.
What happened?
“There’s less talk and there’s more walk,” linebacker Lance Briggs said.
What happened Sunday also allowed the Bears to put aside the soap opera of the previous week, when the talk centered on the fight between offensive linemen Olin Kreutz and Fred Miller and how the team had handled the fallout. A loss would have led to much discussion about the Bears’ inability to handle self-produced distractions.
A victory allowed them to talk about football.
“A win like that will heal all wounds,” said Miller, who played with a broken jaw incurred in the fight.
The offensive line kept Panthers defensive end Julius Peppers off rookie quarterback Kyle Orton, who did his part by not doing much wrong. It’s clear the Bears require only a decent effort from him to have a chance. No mistakes, please. Don’t act like you’re a rookie, but don’t act like you’re a savior either. And whatever you do, don’t act like you’re Jonathan Quinn.
“He’s doing a great job of managing this offense,” Ogunleye said.
Orton probably gets nauseous every time he hears he’s a player-manager, but he threw for 136 yards and a touchdown. He also threw an interception. Those are manager numbers. So is a 7-3 record.
We’re going to proceed now as if the Bears are one of the elite teams in the NFL, as hard as that might be to comprehend. But their record says they are, and Sunday’s victory agrees.
Now they have to live up to it, and life will be a little harder. You beat the 49ers, the Saints and the Lions, and people roll over and go back to sleep. You beat the Panthers, and next week’s opposing offensive coordinator bolts up in bed and notices. So do the doubters.
“We’re good,” Briggs said.
Agreed.
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rmorrissey@tribune.com
