After all that waiting, the Bears finally get . . . another week to wait.
Seems like half the regular season was spent wondering whom the Bears’ first playoff opponent would be. It’s Seattle. So now you know, and now you sit tight (when you’re not pacing).
Patience, children, patience. Look at it this way: You get another week to put some distance between yourselves and that horrible loss to Green Bay in the regular-season finale.
But the excitement of finally identifying the enemy can’t erase the suspicion that the Bears might be their own worst enemy. Yes, they certainly did embarrass the Seahawks 37-6 on Oct. 1, but go ahead and try to tell me that wasn’t a lifetime ago. Rex Grossman was living the life back then, going 17 of 31 for 232 yards and two touchdowns. Rumor has it that he’s still living but that he’s somebody else now.
It’s pretty simple, at least in theory. The Bears need the talented, damaged Grossman to play decently Sunday, though if they’re honest with themselves, they’ll admit they have no flippin’ idea if he will. If that seems like a strange, painful position for a 13-3 team, that’s because it is.
The only thing the Bears are going on right now is faith, because it can’t be recent performance. If I believe one thing about these Bears, it’s that they believe. That and some shoulder pads might be enough in the NFC.
If you’re desperate for more good news, it’s that all the Bears have to do is figure out a way to resurrect the past–the first five games of the season, when Grossman and the fellas were so good at times, it took your breath away.
No problem.
All right, it is a problem. Grossman certainly isn’t the same, and neither is the defense, weakened by injury and susceptible to breakdowns because of it. The Bears have not shown they’re the type of team that can turn it on whenever they feel like it. If they were, they wouldn’t have struggled so much.
Here’s another problem, and it’s something the Bears are going to have to navigate. Their last memory of real, live football was awful–that 26-7 loss to the Packers at Soldier Field. The Seahawks’ last memory is a good one–Saturday’s playoff victory over Dallas.
Who has the momentum?
Well, when Grossman said he wasn’t focused for the Packers game, all sorts of red flags started flapping in the wind. It was the most shocking, incriminating thing he could have said.
Here’s hoping this game gets his attention.
The beautiful, maddening, scary thing is that it’s all there for the Bears. They’re a rested team. They have home-field advantage. And everyone in the NFC–everyone–seems so beatable you wonder if you’ve somehow stumbled on NFL Europe and nobody told you. The prize is tantalizingly close, yet at times out of reach.
Coach Lovie Smith spent most every week defending his team’s play by chanting its accomplishments (“We’re 12-2, we’re the North champions,” etc.). But most people weren’t fooled. They knew good football when they saw it, and too many times, the Bears didn’t play it.
But now the Little Team That Should has a chance to make everything right again. The Bears need a Super Bowl to make this season whole, and Sunday will be the first step. Anything short of an appearance in Miami will be a failure. As hard as that might be for them to handle, lots of other teams wish they could be in that position.
What the Bears and Grossman need is a little amnesia. They need to forget why they were bad and remember why they were good. They do have Brian Urlacher and Lance Briggs. They do have a running game. Grossman might be shot mentally, but he is capable of playing mistake-free as long as the game plan is risk-lite. At the first sign he isn’t, Smith needs to yank him and insert Brian Griese.
You don’t mess with an opportunity like this one.
Why did the Bears have trouble this year? Maybe disinterest set in. Maybe they got bored when it became apparent they were going to cruise through a weak NFC. Maybe their quarterback wasn’t ready. Nobody seems to want to hear that maybe the Bears weren’t as good as their record indicated.
Whatever the reason, they have to forget it.
They not only have to remind themselves that they tied for the second-best record in the NFL, they have to play like it. Why does that seem so hard now?
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rmorrissey@tribune.com
