While driving his truck to Halas Hall each morning, Brian Urlacher usually treats sports-talk stations like potholes and avoids anything resembling Bears chatter.
So imagine his surprise last week when Urlacher heard voices talking Super Bowl XLI on FM and mentioning Cover-2, Good Rex and Lovie in between country, hip-hop and R&B songs.
“I was listening to the radio on the way to work, just the regular music stations, and all they talk about is us now,” Urlacher said. “It’s a little crazy.”
Crazy only begins to describe the local mood since the Bears beat Seattle to earn the right to play in Sunday’s NFC championship game against the New Orleans Saints.
News anchors abandoned professionalism and wore Bears jerseys as they cheered on the set. Sen. Barack Obama guaranteed a Bears victory and threatened his chances of carrying Louisiana in 2008. The Chicago Public Library played the Bears’ fight song each day before the last book was checked out. A newspaper held a sexiest Bear contest.
Restraint took a vacation and left town before the Seahawks did.
Good thing none of the Bears got the memo.
Celebrating on hold
A Super Bowl-or-bust mentality dominated the mind-set of every Bear from Urlacher to the 53rd guy on the roster, Tyler Everett, who imitated Reggie Bush in practice last week. The collective mood late last week mirrored one typically seen after a loss, not a playoff victory.
Ricky Manning Jr. summed it up best when asked to reflect on the Bears playing in the NFC championship game for the first time since the 1988 season after a year that has included enough controversy to script a reality-TV show.
“You don’t know what’s worth anything until the season is over,” Manning said.
They realize that the reaction around Chicago is like popping the cork at 11:30 p.m. on New Year’s Eve. While the rest of the city lost its mind after the Bears’ first playoff victory in 12 years, players and coaches rolled their eyes.
The congratulatory response from outside Halas Hall overlooked that the Bears viewed the first playoff victory as compulsory. Losing was never an option, which is why a loss would have caused an overhaul in the philosophy and psyche of a football organization.
Beating Seattle, no matter how narrowly, merely fulfilled a requirement on the Bears’ 2006-07 checklist. Beating the Saints, though driving the city’s happy meter to levels not seen since 1985, simply would draw a line through another goal on that list.
Driven by determination
The Bears reconvened for their first mini-camp back on April 10, and every ounce of sweat dropped since that day was in the name of getting to the Super Bowl. Meanwhile, on April 10, Drew Brees and Sean Payton probably were still unloading boxes in New Orleans.
New is the operative word in any discussion of the New Orleans Saints. The dangerous team that takes the field Sunday includes 28 players who were not members of the 3-13 team in 2005. While the Bears were developing bonds in training camp forged by that playoff loss to Carolina, the Saints were introducing themselves to each other.
A matchup between teams close in talent could come down to intangibles, and that category heavily favors the Bears. Forget about destiny. Determination wins playoff games.
The way Payton and Brees and a Saints offense with two rookie starters and a rebuilt offensive line dominated defenses in their first season together rates as the NFL story of the year. A loss Sunday wouldn’t change that, and the Saints could march back to New Orleans with their heads held high.
They have positioned themselves to be annual contenders in the NFC South, and one could argue their window of Super Bowl contention is wider than the Bears’. Simply positioning themselves in that spot in the NFC makes 2006 a success regardless of what happens at Soldier Field.
But if the Bears lose, they will wake up Monday morning considering their season a bust. Why? Because the Bears put it in those terms as far back as training camp in Bourbonnais when they boasted about welcoming back 22 starters.
Before camp ended, Urlacher created the context in which the Bears framed every day of the season.
“Teams get split up because of money reasons, [and] this is definitely our best shot,” he told the Tribune in August. “Who knows how long I’ll play? But I know I need that ring.”
I need that ring. That feeling has only intensified over four months.
The ring thing
Urlacher and the Bears believe they need a Super Bowl ring. The Saints want one. The difference? It’s not much–probably about four points–but enough to think the Bears will continue their mission in Miami.
It has been all about getting to Miami all season. If the Bears didn’t believe in the Super Bowl-or-bust ultimatum, maybe they would have taken a tougher stance on Ricky Manning Jr. after he pleaded no contest to a felony assault charge in September. Maybe Tank Johnson would be an ex-Bear.
There were football reasons the Bears kept both in the fold, and they were obvious last Sunday when Manning intercepted a pass and Johnson made a key sack. From a football standpoint, those contributions were worth all the hand-wringing beforehand and the jokes afterward about the victory setting up a title game between Saints and sinners.
The Bears have sacrificed so much to get to the brink of the Super Bowl–time, money, energy, integrity–it seems hard to imagine them being stopped by a team that might just be happy to be here. The Saints have so much less to lose by losing that they probably will.
`Do what we do’
Sure, in seven of the 10 previous meetings in the NFC championship game between the conference’s top offense and defense, the offense prevailed. But no team that played its home games in domes has won an NFC title game outdoors.
It will come down to Bears veteran offensive tackles John Tait and Fred Miller neutralizing aggressive Saints ends Charles Grant and Will Smith.
It will come down to the Bears’ young safeties challenging routes better than they have the last month and the entire defense making sure tackles on the Saints’ short passes. It will come down to Cedric Benson, especially, and Thomas Jones running hard and loosening up a vulnerable New Orleans secondary for Rex Grossman.
It will come down to Lovie Smith not letting Sean Payton outcoach him.
It will come down to the Bears refusing to let a team that needed name tags to identify each other last summer take a spot at the Super Bowl table they have had reserved for a year.
“We know who we are,” Lance Briggs said Friday. “All we need to do is do what we do.”
Do what we do. The Bears say that a lot. It’s their mantra.
They only have one thing left to do now. Play with the urgency of a franchise that doesn’t want to wait another generation to play for a Super Bowl trip, an urgency that was missing for parts of the second half against the Seahawks.
Give the city something really worth celebrating.
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dhaugh@tribune.com
