Do not make a Bear angry if you can help it.
Rashied Davis said, “No one gave us a chance! Well, we don’t care what anybody thinks of us from now on.”
Do not underestimate how dangerous a Bear can be.
Alex Brown said, “I guess 13 wins doesn’t count for much any more. Or 14 wins. Or 15 wins.”
Do not assume a Bear is asleep.
Danieal Manning said, “We like it when people turn their backs on us.”
On this edition of the Cold Bear Report, let’s hear a little more about how a football team got fired up Sunday in 28-degree temperatures and a falling snow to beat the gumbo out of those poor New Orleans Saints 39-14, shall we?
Bears coach Lovie Smith said, “Not many people gave us a chance to win the football game. But our guys didn’t buy into that.”
Hunter Hillenmeyer said, “That gives you extra motivation when everybody thinks you’re going to lose.”
Fred Miller said, “We believed in ourselves and so did our fans, but I wasn’t too sure anymore if anybody else did.”
It wasn’t the whole truth, but it wasn’t too far from it.
If you turned on a TV, picked up a newspaper, listened to a radio, you could hear opinion after opinion–a great many of them from former NFL stars who do understand how this game is played–as to how the Bears were about to be sent back to their caves for the winter.
Bernard Berrian said, “They were talking about our defense slacking off and our offense not being that good.”
Manning said, “Guys will have to go back now and reconsider what they were thinking.”
Ricky Manning Jr. said, “And how about Rex Grossman now? He’s a Super Bowl quarterback. What do people have to say about that?”
Davis said, “Rex has been doing real good for us all year, but people kept beating him down. They beat him and beat him and beat him and beat him and beat him and beat him and beat him. Well, he has the last laugh, don’t he?”
That he does. And so do the Bears.
Onward they go to Super Bowl XLI, to the sun and fun capital of the world, Miami Beach.
Where they will be expected and predicted to . . . uh, lose?
Berrian said, “Go on, pick against us again. I dare you all. Pick against us in the Super Bowl, we don’t care.”
If it sounds as if the NFC champions were crowing a little, as well as inviting the so-called experts to eat crow, you can’t blame them. It was put-up-or-shut-up time, and boy, did the Chicago Bears ever shut everybody up.
No one in the locker room said much of anything before the game.
“No one had to,” defensive tackle Ian Scott said. “It was kind of our calm before the storm.”
The teams came to midfield at 2 p.m. for a coin toss to get the game under way. The visitors called “heads” and that’s the way it came up, heads.
That is the extent of what the Bears lost.
They led from beginning to end, exactly the way they did in the NFC North.
Robbie Gould kicked off their day with a hat trick, three field goals for a 9-0 lead. Snow or no snow, Gould continued to be all but automatic.
Thomas Jones made it 16-0 with a 2-yard touchdown run. He was on his way to a 123-yard day, more than doubling the duo of Deuce McAllister and Reggie Bush combined.
Then after the Saints squeezed the score to 16-14, the Bears didn’t get nervous. They got angry.
Particularly at that naughty rookie Bush, who had the poor taste to taunt Brian Urlacher and other Bears after an 88-yard touchdown play.
No way Adewale Ogunleye would stand for that.
“I told Reggie that was unprofessional of him to do that,” Ogunleye said. “I think he’s a rookie and he’s going to be a hell of a player in this league. But for him to point back and taunt, that was no class . . . he had no class.”
This he said right to Bush’s face, after which, according to Ogunleye, “He just pointed to the ref like, `Get this guy out of my face.’ I swear, I was a second away from punching him.”
Do not provoke a Bear.
Urlacher, Ogunleye and others happily made a safety signal with their hands after a Drew Brees throwaway pass from the end zone backfired, drawing a penalty for intentional grounding. That gave the Bears an 18-14 advantage.
Then came the biggest play of all, the one where Berrian got the best of New Orleans defensive back Fred Thomas for a 33-yard touchdown pass.
Yes, in a snowstorm, a Saint was no match for a Bernard.
“That play by Bernard broke their backs,” Davis said.
Ogunleye couldn’t agree more.
“I loved that catch by Bernard,” he said. “Everybody said the Saints were a team of destiny. But all year long we’ve been having plays like that.”
It was 4:30 p.m. on the dot when Berrian made that play.
At 4:31, Grossman jumped into guard Ruben Brown’s arms.
At 4:37, Ogunleye sacked the Saints quarterback, forced a fumble and fell on it.
At 4:45, Cedric Benson’s touchdown made it 32-14.
At 4:50, Nathan Vasher picked off a pass.
At 5 p.m., Jones’s touchdown made it 39-14.
At 5:05, this game wasn’t over, but it might as well have been. Tank Johnson even gave Reggie Bush a big hug.
At 5:13, Urlacher put on a cap that read “NFC Champions.”
At 5:14, the players poured a pail of cold water onto their head coach.
At 5:15, Grossman fired the game ball into the Soldier Field seats.
“Where are all of those people who told us that we were going to get our you-know-what beat?” Davis demanded to know a while later.
Packing a suitcase for Miami, most of them.
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mikedowney@tribune.com
