Charles “Peanut” Tillman, WHAT were you thinking? What possessed you? Why would you let an opponent provoke you that way? How could a smart football player like you pull such a stupid stunt?
Good thing for Tillman he is a valuable and popular member of the Chicago Bears’ family. A penalty like the one he committed in the sudden-death overtime portion of Sunday’s 27-24 loss to Tampa Bay is the kind of thing that can get a fringe player or a rookie cut from a squad on a Monday morning by a hot-tempered NFL coach.
Lucky for him Lovie Smith is no Lombardi/Ditka/Parcells top-of-his-lungs hothead.
Yet even a coach who rarely raises his voice in public couldn’t help but single out one glaring error from a game that took 70 minutes 36 seconds to play — “an elementary mistake” by a veteran cornerback.
“You can’t do that,” Smith said of the way Tillman cost the Bears the ball when they needed it most.
Even players who back a teammate under any circumstances were hard-pressed to give Tillman a free pass for a dumber-than-the-average-bear error. Everybody screws up, sure. But a flag for unnecessary roughness in OT — after you have just stuffed the Bucs on third down at their own 10?
It killed defensive end Alex Brown to say anything unkind of a friend. But as a team leader should, he laid it on the line:
“With Peanut, it’s hard, but you’ve got to keep your cool,” Brown said. “You can’t do that. It doesn’t matter what it was — you can’t do it. Regardless of whatever the explanation was that he has, you cannot do that. Because it gives them the ball back. We would have had the ball on the 40- or 50-yard line.”
A few Bears theorized that Tillman attacked a pile of Bucs from behind after a whistle because he thought they were roughing up Bears defensive end Adewale Ogunleye, who was on the ground.
Fellow cornerback Nathan Vasher, for one:
“We weren’t going to take any mess,” Vasher said. “Peanut’s a physical player. Our defense, nobody’s going to let anybody push another player around, that’s the bottom line.”
Vengeance is fine?
Come on. Not when it costs you a game. Not when a team’s entire week of hard work goes up in smoke because a guy couldn’t restrain himself.
“You have to come off the field,” said Smith, a coach whose temper rarely flares. “It’s pretty simple, doesn’t matter what’s going on, everyone comes off. We’re getting the football. It’s just something you can’t do. It’s an elementary mistake.”
Tampa wide receiver Michael Clayton took credit for provoking Tillman into losing the game. Clayton claimed he deliberately baited Tillman on the play, giving him an extra shot as the play was ending to get the Bear’s dander up.
“That’s all football, man,” Clayton said. “I make a legal block that’s very aggressive. Just trying to clean up the pile. It’s like, ‘OK, here we go, it’s on. I’m going to hit you, hit me back.’ I was baiting him. Make a little fight out of it. Draw a little attention. And draw the flag. It worked out perfectly.”
Tillman’s personal foul gave the Bucs a first down at the 25. Never again did a Bear touch the ball.
The defensive back had no defense for his actions.
“Just a costly mistake, plain and simple,” Tillman said. “Nothing else needs to be said.”
Oh, yes, it does.
Tillman knew that much. And he said as much: “I shouldn’t have put myself in that situation. I was trying to pull guys off my teammate and one thing led to another. I’ve got to be smarter than that.
“It shouldn’t have happened,” Tillman added. “It won’t happen again.”
That’s pretty much what the Bears said a week ago after losing a game in Carolina they had in the bag.
“Unacceptable,” Alex Brown said. “Last week we were up 17-3. This week we were up 24-14. And we lose them both? I mean, something’s wrong.”
You could say Brian Griese beat the Bears by passing for 400-plus yards versus a team he knows so well. But in no mood for that was linebacker Brian Urlacher, who said with a snarl: “He knew it well enough to throw three picks to us.”
You also could accuse the vaunted Bears’ defense of blowing this game, inasmuch as Kyle Orton and the offense did put 24 points on the board.
“The reason why we lost this game was because they scored 10 points on us in the last [few] minutes,” Bears safety Mike Brown said. “The defense had opportunities to win this game for us. We had breakdowns, we could have played better, and the result is we lost. It’s disgusting.”
Disgusting is right.
And that unnecessary roughness was the most disgusting thing of all. You can defend some actions on a football field. Not this one.
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mikedowney@tribune.com
