2010 WEEK ZERO: Problems, Predicitons, and Preemptive Despair

I should just throw this picture up here about a hundred times to go ahead and get the 2010 Year-in-Review post out of the way.

Well, this is it. After all the months of waiting, after all the practices and games that meant nothing, the season is here. The stage is set, the roster is down to fifty-three guys, and the games shall soon begin. And here the Chicago Bears stand at a crossroads, with a a renewed resolve, the coaching staff of 2009 mostly replaced, the bank broken on a new franchise defensive end, and a regime knowing full well that after three years of failure, it's time to put up or shut up, and another post-season spent outside the playoffs quite possibly means the end. All the acquisitions, all the plans, schemes, policies, and press conferences have lead to this moment, a moment in which I will now say this:

I hope next year's coach and GM don't fuck up next year's top-ten draft pick as bad as these guys would have.

Because as much as I want to believe, and as much as I even fooled myself into believing for a while, even as recently as a few months ago, this is a team that has problems. Serious problems. Problems that more than likely could not be fixed in time to save this season by even the finest of coaches. And problems that could never be fixed within a sixteen-game season by Lovie Smith, a man whose idea of a halftime adjustment is quietly telling the players that they need to execute better and then just sort of walking off.

And right there, you have the first and possibly biggest problem, being the head coach. Because even though the leash has been shortened, and he pretty much has no input whatsoever in the team's offensive makeup, on some level, the Bears are still his team. Because as much as Dick Cheney might have been the real dark power behind the scenes, he couldn't do shit without George Bush signing off on it first, and even when mostly reduced to an impotent figurehead, Lovie is still the executive officer. So in the event of the possibile failure of Mike Martz's offensive game plan or the utterly inevitable failure of Rod Marinelli's attempts to pass off Lovie's defensive game plans as his own, it's still going to be ten weeks or more of "there's still a lot of football left to play," "we get off the bus running the football," "you don't get beaten by slants," "Rex is still my quarterback," and all the other mental inactivity we've become so used to. And so on it goes, as Coach Smith plays his fiddle while Chicago burns, knowing that somewhere out there, there's another team who got suckered into hiring a Tony Dungy protege that'll gladly hire him as an assistant next year.

"I know it was you, Fredo. You broke my heart"

Anyway, moving on to the problems of the dudes who don't get penalized when they step onto the field itself...

PROBLEM #2: Jay Cutler's mental health - Ask any TV, radio, or (paid) internet hack out there what the biggest thing to sink the Bears this year is going to be, and they'll pretty much uniformly tell you that it'll be Jay Cutler. They'll all point to last year's interceptions, ignore the fact that he was running Ron Turner's retarded-ass offense with rookies and might-as-well-be-rookies at wide receiver, and gloss over that even with 26 picks, he still had probably one of the top three seasons a Bear QB has ever had. (Which is more of a scathing indictment of the post-Sid Luckman era than anything else, but still) And you know, while I'm still pretty faithful in Blood Sugar Sex Magic, and the words coming from any given AM radio sports guy typically might as well have been squeezed out of a cow's ass, the dude does have issues right now. Of course, a "gunslinger" style QB in a system like this is going o throw a lot of picks, and yeah, Cutler has had some 2005 Favre-like lapses in judgment over the last few seasons, but this year, you've got added protection issues. I'll get to the problems there in a minute, but after a preseason of running for his life behind the jackasses the Bears call an O-line, he's already starting to crack under the pressure, showing the jittery feet, back-foot passing, and general overwhelming terror reminiscent of early 2000s Houston Texans quarterbacks. Simply put, Jay Cutler now has The Fear, and as we saw for most of the starting tenure of he-who-shall-not-be-named-but-wore-number-eight-and-wasn't-named-Cade, a shell-shocked QB who specializes in the long bomb is a terrible and horrifying thing. So unless Jay can pull himself together, this is going to get ugly.

Apropos of nothing, here's a picture of a jaguar that reminds me of Jay Cutler. I know a bear would be more appropriate, but hey, strange times and all.

PROBLEM #3: The offensive line is aptly named. - In 2010, the Bears are trying to become the first NFL team in history to win a championship without an actual offensive line taking the field. I know, we've been over this before, but shit, man. Shit. Sheeeeeeeiiiiiiiiit. Roberto Garza has never been more than average, and will never be more than average. Lance Louis, despite line coach Mike Tice's eternal throbbing hard-on for him, never should have been more than depth or even practice squad fodder. Chris Williams looked goddamn brilliant in the last few games last year, but is lately looking more like the dude with a broken back we never should have drafted in 2008 than the dude who might be okay after all. And Olin Kreutz? LOL ill pretend u said OLDin kreutz. The perennial Pro Bowler of days of yore is long gone, now replaced by some dude who spends at least fifty percent of the time during a running play kicking around on his back, much like a tiny little turtle, except around three-hundred pounds and possibly on steroids. So just to roll this ball of shit into a huge giant turd, things can best be summed up thusly: Last year, Frank Omiyale was almost certainly the worst offensive lineman in the entire league. This year, if anything about training camps and fake preseason games is to be believed, Frank Omiyale might be the best fucking offensive lineman on this team. You know when you look at the news and there's some horrific crime, like where a dude just gets on a city bus, crashes it into a crowd of nuns and special needs children, and then starts taking out the survivors with something fucked up, like a corkscrew or a ball-peen hammer? Things like that are caused when a dude learns some information along the lines of Frank Omiyale being a team's best lineman, decides that God was never real, that all the world is built of layers of lies upon layers of damnable lies, that there can be only one, and that since those crippled kids and the people on that bus add up to way more than one, they simply must be dealt with.

"Little Timmy, we meet at last... And it shall be the last time we meet."

PROBLEM #4: You have to have FOUR defensive linemen. If I was one of the previously-mentioned standard professional sports dudes who are barely even paying attention to anything not involving Tom Brady or a baseball, I'd put something about the wide receivers here. But you know, aside from the continuing doomed Devin Hester experiment, things are more perfectly fine here than most will admit, so I'm gonna head to the other side of the ball. And you know, the Julius Peppers signing seems to be one of the least hare-brained moves this regime has made, the team has their first real pass-rushing threat since The Enemy purged Richard Dent from the team in '94, and the opposition now has to wonder what they're gonna do when Uberklawamania runs wild on them. But the problem is that there are three more dudes lining up on the defensive line, and they can't stick Peppers on all three at once. I mean, Anthony Adams is a solid enough dude, but he's one of those "well, he'll do till we can get somebody good in there" types; essentially the Roberto Garza of the defensive line. Past that, I get no positive waves coming to me from the two-headed monster of Mark Anderson and Israel Idonije at the other defensive end, and at the three technique tackle, Tommie Harris has pretty much become Albert Haynesworth, except with a smaller contract and without the excuses of being fantastically fat or being too out-of-shape to jog. So you've got one superstar, one passably average dude, a piece of shit and a special teams dude trying to smoosh together to equal one player, and a thin, healthy, in-shape former All-Pro who hasn't given a fuck since 2007, and shows no signs of giving one in the future. This spells a disaster, and will be one, unless something miraculous happens, like Corey Wootton actually panning out as one of the team's wild-ass "hey, he would have been a first-rounder if not for his horrific knee injuries" draft choices, or someone in a seat of power finally realizing that Matt Toeaina might very well have been the best defensive tackle on the team over the last two years they've spent deactivating him right before game time. But this IS the Bears we're talking about, you know?

I've been saying that Matt Toeaina was going to be good ever since they signed him in 2007, but the Bears' coaching staff just wouldn't LISSSTEEEEEENNNNNNNNNNNNNN

PROBLEM #5: Oh dear sweet lord what are we gonna do in the defensive backfield. - At cornerback, both starters remain, and if you were to just look at the regular-ass statistics - just like the ones on the back of a trading card or whatever and not Aspergin' beyond-in-depth shit that baseball people are all up in to - it really looks like we have the squad there. Charles Tillman is a pretty well thought-of player, and his forced fumble stats are always crazy, but his obsession with stripping the ball means that he misses easy tackles constantly, and his performances when lined up against a star wide receiver have been godawful. I mean godawful to the point where a rift in space-time has opened up, allowing Steve Smith to still be scoring touchdowns in the 2005 playoffs. The other dude, Zackary Bowman, looks like a goddamn hero at first, what with his six interceptions, but it at least felt like every pass in his direction that wasn't one of those six picks went for forty yards or more. It's like some sort of fucked-up sci-fi toaster that burns the toast from the inside out, so that the surface looks delicious, but the real substance of the toast tastes like shit. Or something. Hell, I dunno. At safety, things are better than last year and actually almost not shit-fucking putrid, but until Major Wright is back at full speed, things should be pretty ass for a while. Chris Harris is a perfectly fine strong safety, but until Wright gets healthy and gets going well enough to come into the starting lineup, Harris is lining up at free safety, where he is about as pleasant to watch as baby-murder. Whether that means someone murdering babies or a bunch of babies killing a dude is up to you, but either way, it means that Harris sucks balls when slightly out of position like that. And the current strong safety is Danieal Manning, one of Jerry Angelo's tiny-school "I AM CLEVAR, HURRRRR" draft picks out of tiny North Southwestern McMaynerbury Country Dental Seminary and Air Conditioning School, who I must say is a damn fine kickoff return man, but when counted on to anything that requires thought beyond "catch ball, don't get tackled," his play is on the ugliness level of babies killing other babies. So yeah. Help us, Major Wright. You're our only hope.

And now, the truly awful part that will (in this case, hopefully) make me look really stupid soon:

Predictions:

Jay Cutler gets off to a shaky start, then misses at least four games due to sack-related injuries. Todd Collins has a decent first game, prompting the Bears' water-headed fans to cry out for him to be the starter, only to have him throw five picks a week later. From there, horror ensues.

PICTURED: Todd Collins, back when I was still a freshman in high school. Shit, man.

As for the rest of the offense, Matt Forte almost has himself a fine bounce-back year from a shitty 2009, but splitting time with Chester Taylor behind one of the league's worst lines keeps him below a thousand yards. His quiet season deprives me of precious opportunities to post more of those YouTube videos where he talks about "Maurice Jones-Poo."

On the receiving end, everyone gets the Martz offense stat-boost, with Johnny Knox being the first Bear over a thousand yards since Marty Booker back in whatever year that was, and even making it to the Pro Bowl after the ten dudes who received more votes dropped out, because seriously, fuck playing the Pro Bowl anywhere other than Hawaii.

However, tight end production plummets, because Mike "Vernon Davis is possibly the most gifted athlete ever at the tight end position? Well, I hope that asshole can block" Martz believes in Chicago Bears football, where physical ability can be ignored, as long as there's a precious system to be slavishly devoted to. Next year, Greg Olsen leaves town and becomes a star somewhere else. Fuck.

Tommie Harris will have a two-sack, five-tackle game pretty early in the year, causing Chicago Bears fans and local radio personalities to rave about how he's "back." He then finishes the season with 2.5 sacks and about 17 tackles, give or take.

Speaking of sacks, Herr Überklaw, Dark Lord Julius Peppers will have a pretty fantastic year, all things considered. He'll finish with somewhere around 11-13 sacks, despite fighting constant double and triple-teaming. In the end, he'll easily be the team leader, outpacing second place on the team's sack list: Tommie Harris.

Since we can never have nice things, one of the team's starting linebackers will end up on injured reserve at some point. I'm guessing Lance Briggs, because it's his turn, and fair is fair.

He'll take it all in stride, though.

2010 Final record: 6-10, fourth place NFC North. Sweet god damn, I wanted so bad to be optimistic coming into this year, but there's just been so much ugliness to behold lately. On the other hand, to get all half-full on that ass, I think I had the Bears going 11-5 or something like that last year, so maybe fortune will favor the Bears in order to make me look bad again this year. Positivity~

Week one prediction: Might as well get this out of the way now. Despite Tweedle-Tillman and Tweedle-Bowman geting burned for a probably fairly long TD by Calvin Johnson Jr. (By the way, when did he start throwing the Junior on the end? I see that everywhere now.) the Bears manage to use the Lions' shitty offensive line to their advantage and keep the Lions' offense in check. On the other end, the Bears' shitty offensive line pretty much serves the same purpose for the Lions, meaning that this will be one of those long, boring defensive struggles, made less boring by how many sacks and interceptions there will probably be. In the end, though, I have to serve notice to the blisteringly painfully obvious unpreparedness of this team and the way Cutler probably won't be given enough time to torch Detroit's shitty secondary. So yeah, in the opener, as fucked up as it may sound, I have to predict that the House that Halas Built will become a House of Spears.

Detroit 17, Chicago 10.

And the hurting never stops.