Not that anyone ever wanted to know, but this must be what a one-man wrestling match looks like. Or a one-army war. Or a nasty, one-actor Hollywood divorce.
The Bears played a virtual NFL team Sunday and did a lot of virtual pillaging, looting and desecrating.
If there are degrees of awful, then the 49ers are very awful, and much of what happened over the course of three hours at Soldier Field flowed from that simple fact.
Yes, Rex Grossman certainly did bounce back from the terrible outing he had two weeks ago in Arizona, going 23-for-29 for 252 yards and three touchdowns. But that’s not the first thing you thought of as you watched the Bears shadowbox their way to a 41-0 halftime lead and a 41-10 victory. The first thing you thought of was that Grossman was playing darts all by his lonesome.
And you know what? Neither he nor the Bears have any apologizing to do. You build a 7-0 record any way you can, even if it means gliding once in a while. That’s the point of being a dominant team–every so often, because you’re you, the opposition rolls over and offers you its exposed belly.
The 49ers, on the other hand, have a lot of apologizing to do, mostly to anyone who has ever played, watched or unavoidably happened across football. On defense, there were missed tackles, ghost tackles, implied tackles. Everything but actual tackles.
On offense and special teams, there were five San Francisco turnovers.
That raises the question of whether the 49ers simply are bad or whether they had badness thrust upon them by the Bears.
Does Brian Urlacher get a vote? After the game, someone mentioned to him that he couldn’t possibly have expected San Francisco, 2-4 coming in, to play the way it did Sunday.
“You mean to play the way we made them play?” the Bears linebacker said. “No one expects us to do what we do. No one wants to give us any credit. Everyone wants to say [the 49ers] didn’t play well.
“There’s a reason they didn’t play well. They played against us.”
This is true. They played against a Bears defense that is talented, exacting and more than a little bit mean. But it’s also true the 49ers offered very little in the way of resistance.
It was 24-0 after the first quarter. It was like watching a forest being cleared.
“You prepare all week for a dogfight,” fellow linebacker Hunter Hillenmeyer said. “You prepare like you’re going to have to make every play the whole game to end up on top.
“Then it goes so right so quickly like that that it’s a totally different mind-set. You have to adjust. You have to find different ways to keep yourself motivated.”
One motivation is to finish the year as the NFL’s top defense. Another is to exit a blowout with no serious injuries. So the two goals were at cross purposes, which is how the 49ers managed to outscore the Bears in the second half. The Bears were so boringly out in front that coach Lovie Smith allowed himself some measure of enjoyment. Normally, it’s 60 minutes of Tums for NFL coaches.
The Bears are a little edgy these days, a little chippy. They don’t believe that everyone believes in them, or at least as much as they believe in themselves.
The Arizona game didn’t help in the universal-love department, but most of what is being said about the Bears is good. Most of the whispers are sweet-nothings. There are very few sour-somethings, but if that’s what the Bears want to believe, bless them.
Urlacher especially seems to be motivated by this sort of thing.
There aren’t many NFL players who can tip a pass and then make a diving interception on the play, as he did in the first quarter. But afterward he seemed less interested in what he took away than in what he believes the Bears aren’t given.
So it was left to his teammates to try to describe a decathlete in a linebacker’s clothing.
“He could literally play every position on the field,” Grossman said.
“The guy’s playing insane,” defensive tackle Tommie Harris said. “To me, if he stopped playing today, he’d be in the Hall of Fame.”
Well, not with 6 1/2 seasons in the league, but you get the gist of Harris’ admiration for his teammate. Urlacher can play a little bit.
So can the Bears. Deep down, they have to know the 49ers laid down like a bad toupee Sunday. But maybe that’s the thing with these Bears. They don’t want to get too deep. If they did, they might just find out they have no natural enemies. And then where will they be?
Alone, as they were Sunday.
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rmorrissey@tribune.com
