He would be 150 days older than Michael Jordan was when Jordan brought Chicago his first championship in 1991, but Brian Urlacher isn’t counting. A Super Bowl XLI title next month drives the city’s most beloved sports idol since the Jordan Era but hardly obsesses him.
At 28 and having just completed his seventh regular season, the same stage Jordan was at in his career when the ’91 Bulls began the playoffs, Urlacher disputes any premise based on this being a chance that may never come to him again. Nor would the Bears middle linebacker ever agree that, as has been suggested about Peyton Manning in Indianapolis, NFL career legitimacy comes only after leading a team to a Super Bowl.
“Everyone wants to win a ring and that’s how I want to be remembered, a championship football player and stuff like that, but I don’t think if you don’t do it, you failed in your career,” Urlacher said Thursday.
He remains too young to let thoughts of joining Dick Butkus and Gale Sayers in Bears history as great players who never played in a Super Bowl keep him up at night. At this point, Urlacher leaves talk of NFL legacies to radio shows. He concerns himself more with leaving an impression on Seahawks quarterback Matt Hasselbeck’s chest Sunday than on a football city that will adore him long after his last tackle.
In Urlacher’s mind a guy under contract for five more seasons has no reason to consider the void a likely Hall of Fame career would have without a Super Bowl appearance or title. On the other hand, life in the NFL guarantees nothing beyond the next game and what if a Bears off-season full of questions and retooling begins as soon as Monday?
That tenuous reality validates the question whether the time ever will be better than now for Urlacher and the Bears to bring a championship to the franchise the way superstars do and enhance his franchise legend.
“Some of the big names in this organization, the great ones, never won a Super Bowl so it would definitely set Brian apart,” teammate Lance Briggs said.
Sayers understands such a sentiment but cautions anyone holding Urlacher to a Super Bowl standard when deciding where he fits in the pantheon of Bears greats. No matter how much Urlacher accomplishes in the postseason, Sayers believes he will have Hall of Fame credentials if he plays three more years to make 10 in the league — which would give Urlacher one more season than Butkus.
“Dick Butkus is the best, but Urlacher is right behind him, and it wouldn’t affect his legacy if he didn’t go to the Super Bowl,” Sayers said Thursday during an appearance for MasterCard and Sam’s Club.
“There are 32 teams. How many have won Super Bowls (17)? Look how many great players never played in one. It doesn’t mean they’re not great players or it lessens their careers.”
He pointed to his and Butkus’ examples.
“You need a collection of talent to get to the Super Bowl and we just didn’t have that — we had Dick Butkus on defense and Gale Sayers on offense,” Sayers said. “Does it spoil my career that I didn’t win a Super Bowl? No. I accomplished everything else but that. It didn’t happen for me, but it didn’t happen for Jim Brown or O.J. Simpson either. To say I didn’t go to the Super Bowl and Franco Harris did, so was he better than me? No, I don’t think so. And whether [Urlacher] goes to the Super Bowl doesn’t reflect on how great a player he is.”
Man of few words
Sarcasm dripped from Urlacher’s words as he stood at the podium during his weekly news conference, which he typically enjoys as much as getting blocked.
How will the Bears combat versatile tight end Jerramy Stevens?
“What do you want to know? He has played all season, right? He had a good game last week,” Urlacher said, the implication of Stevens’ inconsistency obvious.
Could the Seahawks’ Super Bowl experience 11 months ago give them an edge?
“Last year . . . last year’s over,” Urlacher said.
Surely the prospect of facing 2005 NFL MVP Shaun Alexander concerns Urlacher, right?
“I think they’ll try to run the ball more with him in there,” he said. “He was a good running back last year, but last year’s over.”
A day earlier in a teleconference with Seattle media, Urlacher surprised some with his bluntness when asked to compare the Seahawks’ linebacker corps with the Bears’.
“We think we’re the best,” he said.
An outsider might consider the totality of his comments pre-playoff trash talk, but Urlacher’s dismissive attitude toward the Seahawks’ personnel is his subtle way of trying to remind everybody in the room that the Bears defense is pretty good too.
It has nothing to with Seattle and everything to do with the animosity building all season among Bears who have used perceived disrespect as motivation, and apparently still are using it.
Taking the us-against-the-world tack is as old of a ploy in football as the quarterback sneak but the Bears still use that too–because it still works.
“The media has been consistent all year long, people have been on our backs all year long, so that has been nice,” said Urlacher, tongue firmly in cheek. “At least they’re consistently telling us how bad we are, so that’s good. At least there hasn’t been any in-between area. We’re the worst 13-3 team of all time. We still have a home game in the playoffs somehow.”
The Bears also enjoyed home-field advantage last season but blew it against the Panthers, the biggest source of the last 16 games of skepticism. What made that defeat painful enough to linger for so long was the collapse of a defense the Bears had come to trust, a defense that ultimately failed the team and its fans.
Urlacher was asked if that unexpected flop a year ago made him even more committed to not letting the defense be the reason for an early exit this season.
“Thanks for bringing that up,” he answered.
Teammates’ respect obvious
When Hunter Hillenmeyer led the NCAA in tackles as a senior middle linebacker at Vanderbilt in 2002, Urlacher was one of his favorite NFL players. Four seasons later, he has sat next to him in enough meetings and played alongside him for enough games to consider himself fortunate. When Urlacher makes a play like the one he made against San Francisco in tipping a pass while getting blocked and still intercepting the pass, Hillenmeyer no longer is surprised.
“I think Brian will be the first to admit this: As sharp as he is reading keys and making plays based on lineman splits or whatever, he takes advantage most of the time just by being a great athlete,” Hillenmeyer said. “Some guys get the edge by watching eight hours of film a day. He understands the game very well and then obviously combines his athleticism and size, you don’t find that.”
Guard Ruben Brown hasn’t found it in 12 NFL seasons. Brown had to block Urlacher twice in games as a member of the Bills before becoming his teammate and only having to worry about looking bad during training camp.
“When you have the athletic ability he has, if he gets a jump on you, it’s over,” Brown said. “When players like Olin [Kreutz] and Brian play, they’re just scary. There’s a point in time you say, this guy’s young and you see the upside and like now when he’s hitting his stride you say I saw it all along.”
Urlacher finished the season with 185 tackles, the second-highest total of his career. He believes he’s “smarter now,” and keeps getting better with age and experience.
But not recording a sack and the Bears’ giving up an average of 26 points per game over the final four weeks were the two reasons Urlacher did not defend his NFL Defensive MVP Award and finished fourth.
“The biggest reason was our dropoff,” defensive coordinator Ron Rivera said.
Rivera was asked if Urlacher had a bad game this year.
“I’d say there probably have been average games,” Rivera said. “I wouldn’t say bad games.”
There haven’t been many in a career that includes 1,141 tackles over 105 games in seven NFL seasons. Mike Singletary played 12. Butkus played nine. Doug Buffone played 14, more than any other Bears linebacker–which would mean Urlacher would be halfway done if he were to approach that team record.
Asked about the physical toll at this point of his career, Urlacher answered “my body feels fine.”
“There are some things I can’t do when I was 21 or 22, but I feel pretty good for an old man,” he said.
Light-hearted as the comment was, the fact Urlacher is not getting younger has not been lost on his linebacker buddies. They want to get to the Super Bowl for themselves, their team and their city but maybe most of all for their leader.
The affection for Urlacher was obvious in the voice of Alex Brown on Thursday who, while goofing around, introduced the linebacker in a Halas Hall auditorium in a way that revealed his true feelings.
“He’s the face of the Chicago Bears, for that matter he’s the face of Chicago,” Brown told reporters. “He’s the one guy when you say 54, everybody knows . . . my true friend, Brian Urlacher.”
Friends don’t let friends miss out on NFL opportunities this super.
“I think our drive starts with [coach Lovie Smith], but his window is going to be a lot bigger than Brian’s so there is a sense of urgency for Brian,” outside linebacker Brendon Ayanbadejo said. “This is his third opportunity as a Bear [in the playoffs], and it’s right there at the tip of his finger. You can’t assume that he’ll be back in this situation again.”
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dhaugh@tribune.com
