Lance Briggs strolled into a hotel salon filled with relatively intelligent people.
“How you doin’?” the Bears linebacker asked cheerfully. “All right, all right.”
Everything was upbeat, even though Sunday’s game for a trip to Miami–and then maybe to Disney World!–could also turn out to be Briggs’ last as a Bear, his contract being up.
A minute or two later, a reporter piped up to ask him, “Lance, do you feel like you guys are the underdogs or the favorites for this game?”
“Do I feel like we should be [one or the other]?” Briggs asked back.
“If you are,” the guy said.
Briggs patiently pointed out that (a) the Bears will play this NFC title game on their own field, that (b) they have the best record in the NFC . . . oh, you know, pertinent little football facts like these.
He could have tossed in for good measure that Las Vegas has booked the Bears as a two-point pick.
Instead, he said, “If we’re an underdog, it’s nothing new to us.”
“The reason I ask,” the persistent questioner continued, “is because nationally most people have picked the Saints to win this game.”
I squirmed in my seat, guilty with the knowledge that I have had a brain cramp myself and publicly have picked the Saints to win this game.
But then something struck me as odd as a crawfish on a deep-dish pizza.
Most people have picked the Saints to win this game?
They have? This is a fact?
Most people are down on a Bears team with a record of 14-3 and are going with a New Orleans team that has lost six times? Most people are more impressed with a Saints team that lost two of its last four?
Most people don’t believe in a Bears team that won games 26-0, 34-7, 37-6, 40-7, 41-10, 38-20 and 42-27?
Most people prefer a Saints team that gave up 31 points at home to Carolina, 31 at home to Cincinnati, 38 to Pittsburgh, even 35 to no-offense Baltimore?
Well, if somebody in the news biz says so, it must be true. (Cough.)
Briggs was then asked point-blank if he believes the Bears should be the favorites for this game.
“You know what?” the NFC’s fourth-leading tackler and two-time Pro Bowler replied without a moment’s hesitation, or maybe two. “Absolutely, absolutely.”
He stuck to his guns, if you’ll pardon an allusion more applicable to Tank Johnson.
“We know who we are,” Briggs said. “The fact that we are underdogs in most people’s books is nothing new to us.”
The fact.
I don’t buy it. This “no respect” dog won’t hunt. From the beginning of this season, the Bears have been ranked by experts (another cough) coast to coast as one of the NFL’s strongest, very best teams.
Five weeks in, they were giving up 7.2 points a game. In Week 7, the Bears rolled by 31 over a 49ers team that ended up nearly making the playoffs. They went to New Jersey and whacked the Giants and Jets by a combined score of 48-20.
They went to New England and came within four points of a Patriots team that could end up in the Super Bowl.
They won four in a row after that.
Ah, but then on New Year’s Eve they had the audacity to more or less phone in a game against Green Bay that was of fundamental importance to three basic food groups: (a) Brett Favre and his family; (b) a few other Packers and their families; (c) people with large wedges of cheddar on their heads.
Because of that and a few other trivial details, “most” people are disqualifying the Bears faster than a beauty queen in a Donald Trump pageant?
Me included?
Well, shame on us. This is an awfully fine football squad, you know. That guy Rex Grossman you poke sticks at, his passing numbers are huge. That running back Deuce McAllister of the Saints you keep raving about? He ran for 1,057 yards. A certain Mr. Thomas Jones ran for 1,210.
Grossman must be right. We are glass-half-full guys.
About that big, bad–as in good–defense the Bears have. OK, so over the first five weeks it gave up 7.2 points a game, but over the last five it gave up 25.8 points a game. That is not a good thing. That is a graph with a line zigzagging crazily down the chart.
Come back, Tommie Harris, wherever you are. Suit up. Play on one leg. Go to a faith healer. Inspire us, the way you did at Super Bowl XL a year ago when you came up to Detroit and sang along with that fine gospel choir.
The coach, Lovie Smith, says he sees a bright side.
“My glass is half full,” he actually put it.
Harris can’t play, safety Mike Brown can’t and the Bears do seem to be missing some brawn and brains. But their teammates have done without them for quite a while, Smith contends, yet here they are, still doing all right. Way down yonder in New Orleans, folks know what real panic is. They know what it’s like to lose something vital to your well-being and be forced to make do with what you’ve got.
“My father was a calm man,” Smith pointed out. “When storms come, I think [players] want to see a look on your face like it will be OK.”
And so the Bears press on, shy a couple of able bodies, short a little of the previous respect they were given.
Will they lose this game? Would it feel as if they have lost everything?
Briggs knows, as most everybody knows, down deep, that this is simply a game of football, nothing more.
“If I have any nightmares,” the linebacker says, figuratively speaking, “it’s seeing all those different Saints players in the end zone, doing a dance. A dance that I probably worked on because I want to get into the end zone.”
In the past, Briggs has spent time attempting to instruct teammates in something he calls a freestyle walk. It is a way of celebrating a big day or a big play, a strut, a dance.
“Most people” supposedly believe the Bears won’t have anything at all to celebrate when this game comes to an end, including trips to Miami and later to Disney World.
You know what?
Most people could be mistaken.
———-
mikedowney@tribune.com
