Shut the hell up, Lovie

Bears prepare to retool, not rebuild heading into offseason.

That's the current headline at chicagobears.com, the website of my discontent. And coach Smith's post-game comments therein are the stuff of self-delusion legend. Let's face it, winning season or not, 2008 was a miniature disaster for this team. Sure, we found our guy at running back, but we took giant steps backward in almost every other aspect of the game. The defense fell apart, the passing game fell apart even by Chicago Bears standards, the return game fell apart, and most of the core of veteran players this team has been based on for the last decade - yup - fell apart.

And yet Lovie Smith thinks we're almost there.

“When you’re 9-7, you’re close,” Smith said following the 31-24 loss to the Texans. “You don’t need an overhaul. You just need to add a few pieces to the puzzle, and that’s what we’ll do.”

A few pieces? A few fucking pieces? You moron, "a few pieces" isn't a description for what's missing; hell, it barely describes what's in place right now. What do we have that we can build on right now? I'll tell you: A running back, a tight end, a kicker, a punter, a long-snapper, and one outside linebacker. That's about it. On defense, Mike Brown, Tommie Harris, Dusty Dvoracek, and Nathan Vasher can't be counted because of injury concerns, Brian Urlacher and Adewale Ogunleye both aged fifteen years in the off season, and Alex Brown and Charles Tillman both just fucking sucked most of the time. And how about the offense, Lovie?

“Did we do enough offensively throughout the year?” Smith said. “No—again, just like the rest of our football team—but I think the arrow is pointed in the right direction. I like the core that we can build on.”

And what core would this be? You got a running back and a tight end that you should be set with for a while. After that, you only need a new quarterback, a new fullback, at least two new wide receivers, and anywhere between two and five new starting offensive linemen. Sounds like the right direction to me~!

From that point on, he drifted off into a litany of delusional double-talk, with this being the real gem:

“Are we going to change schemes, throw out everything that we’ve established here?” Smith said. “No, we’re not. We’re going to do it better. We’ll look and evaluate everything in our program: coaches, players, schemes. Everything that we’re doing, we’ll evaluate it and go from there. We were close—one game away from the playoffs—so we need to just add a little bit more, and that’s what we’ll look to do.”

I'm sorry, skippy, but you threw out everything you had established here when you fired half your real assistants and replaced people like Ron Rivera with people like Bob Babich. And if the scheme is broken and you refuse to fix it (or even alter it slightly, as was the case all season long) doing it better won't matter one bit. A defensive game plan that's essentially optimized for giving up 8-10 yards on every pass play and an offense based on runs up the middle and seemingly designed to exclude wide receivers from the passing game is still going to fall on its ass, even if it's executed goddamn flawlessly. If Lovie ever actually evaluated anything, he'd see that the first two sentences of his quote up there were absolutely bat shit insane and/or full-on retarded.

Summing up: Lovie Smith is too full of his own bullshit to be useful anymore, and this team isn't "close" or anything resembling any form of "close." The airplane has hit the mountain, and this fucknut expects to fix it with some popsicle sticks and rubber cement. I'm pissed at football, and it's gonna be a long time and at least one coaching change before this team gets good enough again for me to be able to find team merchandise somewhere other than the Internet.

And the hurting never stops.