Positives. We’re looking for positives.
I can see that some of you aren’t up for commissioning a search party to look for a needle in a haystack, especially because you first would have to search for a haystack in Chicago. A few of you Bears depressives think that if you actually did find a needle, you would get pricked by it and then realize you hadn’t had a tetanus shot in 20 years. You would think you were deader than the team you follow.
But stick with me here.
Start with this: The Bears weren’t going to beat the Chargers on Sunday. At no point, and this includes the pregame festivities, were the Bears close to winning a football game in the poetically, romantically named Qualcomm Stadium.
That statement doesn’t sound very positive, does it? But it’s the truth, and if you’re able to come to grips with that, you will see that the end of the world is not on the next flight to Chicago.
If you can’t deal with that, you’re going to be a mess the rest of the season. You’re probably already talking about your “last-place Chicago Bears.”
Almost anyone with a passing knowledge of the NFL and with grainy footage of Rex Grossman from 2006 knew the Bears were going to fall to the Chargers on the road to start the season. But it doesn’t mean the rest of the year will end up in a Dumpster.
It means that the bar now has been set, as coach Lovie Smith put it Sunday. I’m sure Lovie and I disagree about where that bar is because I can’t out-positive Lovie. Up With People can’t out-positive Lovie. After Sunday’s 14-3 loss, he probably thinks the bar is set knee-high for his offense. I think single-celled organisms would have trouble crawling under it.
But much of the trouble Sunday occurred because the Bears were playing one of the best defenses in the league, almost certainly on a par with their own. There is no shame in that.
Grossman’s one interception Sunday happened because of a miscommunication with wide receiver Bernard Berrian. Dumb mistake, one we saw too often from Grossman last year. For the Bears to be able to talk about winning a Super Bowl without people laughing, he has to stop doing that. It’s hard to stay positive when there is no indication he will stop anytime soon.
Please do not say the Bears had opportunities to beat the Chargers. They had as many opportunities against the San Diego defense as the Verizon can-you-hear-me-now guy has with Jessica Alba. It’s why there was never a sense the Bears were in this game.
“We shot ourselves in the foot,” Grossman said.
No, you didn’t play well, and you lost to a great defense.
The only question was whether the Chargers ever were going to score against the Bears’ defense, which had shut down LaDainian Tomlinson in the first half. Great players find ways to make plays, even when things are going poorly — especially when things are going poorly. Tomlinson threw a touchdown pass and ran for a touchdown in the second half.
OK, what good can be said about Grossman’s game? This is the positive person’s Mt. Everest. He fumbled once. He finished with a 53.7 passer rating. He looked jumpy at times.
Positives?
Grossman wasn’t god-awful Sunday. There’s room to grow. He dresses nicely.
We’ve seen worse, in last season’s Super Bowl.
Positives? How about this: Cedric Benson, making no one forget Thomas Jones, rushed 19 times for 42 yards Sunday. Hard to get a passing attack going when the defense knows you can’t run. And Grossman didn’t get much in the way of protection from his offensive line.
This very well might have been a preview of the Super Bowl in February. It doesn’t mean it’s how the Bears will play if they get to Glendale, Ariz. It means they have a huge amount of work to do.
Mike Brown is hurt again. So is Dusty Dvoracek. It’s grim, folks, even as new search parties are dispatched to look for silver linings.
What went wrong?
“They scored more points than we did,” linebacker Brian Urlacher said.
It sounded like a flip answer, but it might not have been. The last few years, the defense’s experience has been that if it doesn’t score points, it might not win. That has gotten very, very old.
“It’s not fair to do that to our defense,” center Olin Kreutz said.
But we’re looking for positives, remember? The good news is that there are 15 games left to play. They’re not all going to be this hard. Really.
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rmorrissey@tribune.com
