2010 WEEK FIVE: Nostalgia.

Just like old times.

Today, I learned a lesson. I learned that any time I make a prediction on what the outcome of the game will be, the exact opposite will happen, so therefore I am making this official announcement: From now on, no matter who the Bears play or what I think the outcome will be, I'm picking them to lose. Hopefully, this will propel the Bears to a 15-1 record en route to their second Super Bowl title. Also, as an experiment, I predict that I absolutely will not totally find a couple hundred-dollar bills on the ground at work tomorrow.

Anyway, I'm not gonna lie; I didn't actually see the game, (which actually seems to cause Chicago victory more often than not, too) so I can't get too nerdalytical with the drive summaries and punter formulas or whatever. But from the sound of it, this game seemed shockingly like the Chicago Bears football of my youth. Not like Super Bowl XX legendary Bears football or anything, because hell, I was a tiny little kid at the time, and if you told me that Wilber Marshall played quarterback or that Keith Van Horne was an actual grizzly bear in a man-suit, I'd have had no argument against it, other than wide-eyed astonishment and an intense desire to become Keith Van Horne when I grew up. But no, what I'm talking about is Bears football from when I started to figure things out, like around 1990-92 or so. Like when they would just throw everything on the back of Neal Anderson, let the defense handle the rest, and if whoever the quarterback was at the time (usually either painfully average Jim Harbaugh or vile murderer/Green Bay sympathizer Mike Tomczak) was going to spend the day bouncing the ball at Wendell Davis's feet or trying to nail whoever the other team's free safety was in the chest with it all game, so be it. Because for whatever the passing game may or may not have been doing, we had our man Neal, and whatever we needed him to do, he would handle that shit.

Which brings us to today. Matt Forte has been catching the ball like the pro he is all year, but as for actually running it, he's struggled. He struggled behind the Bears' best impression of an offensive line in the first three games and in week four, and struggled last week behind Mike Martz not stopping to think that if you're only down by three and you've seen your franchise QB hit every single time he drops back to pass, that maybe you might want to run it a couple times. But today, god damn, today. (Well, yesterday. I typed that last sentence yesterday. Shit, this is like time travel here. By the time you're reading this, I wonder if I'm dead...) With the Panthers having a shitty enough defense to not completely overpower the Bears now rookie-laden front five, Forte went off for a career-high 166 yards, and man, it really feels like the latter days of the Ditka era this week. Because we have a dude back there in the backfield who was the dude today, (once again, yesterday - and there were no hundreds on the ground at work, so all is probably lost) leading the team in receiving too (for what that was worth) and probably lining up wide like good ol' Neal used to do. At least now, it's just because Forte is good at catching the ball and not like the old days, where Neal Anderson HAD to line up as a wide receiver sometimes, because Davis would be double covered, Tom Waddle was slower than agonizing death, and Ron Morris physically existed and didn't do much else. Hopefully, the Bears keep actually attempting to run the ball, because as shitty as the line is and always will be, they're way less bad at run-blocking than pass-blocking, and hopefully, somewhere along the line, Martz will realize that #22 is an actual special player, rather than just an obstacle to his dreamed-of World Without Running Plays.

But yeah, between good defense, huge running, and apocalyptic QB play, I feel a little nostalgic right now. And since I'm pretty sure VH1 hasn't made early 90s nostalgia a terrible thing yet, (Or have they? Shit, I haven't had cable for years, even in this, the world of the future.) I will now take you back to my world at the time. First, here is a YouTube clip of some nerd showing the internets the Dungeons and Dragons style pencil-and-dice game Gamma World, which my older brother forced me and several other kids from around the neighborhood to play with him at such a tender young age:



And to make all this much more tolerable now, much as it made it more tolerable in 1992, here's some FUKKIN METAL, which was typically the background noise for all these shenanigans.







Good times, good times.

NEXT WEEK: The Seattle Seahawks come to town, with their fancy new coach Pete Carroll, who used his time at USC to strike from the record how lousy he was as an NFL coach before that, and then threw it all away by never asking the question, "Um, Reggie, how can you afford that silver-plated Escalade?" Being in a huge college football town, where the local team was usually right up there with USC around that time, (And got chainsaw-dismembered by them in the BCS title game one year) I'm around a lot of people who absolutely despise that dude, but honestly, I never had the same sort of hatred for him. I mean, sure that whole "yay team, let's go guys!" enthusiasm gets old pretty fast, but given how many successful coaches are joyless assholes, it was at least something different. On the other hand, though, now that he's going to play a team I actually do have some sort of twisted sense of loyalty to, fuck him; he can die. It's a harsh way of looking at things, but I didn't get where I am today (actually two days now from the start of typing. No flying cars yet, but I remain hopeful.) by showing mercy. Anyway, the Seahawks aren't awful, but they're not all that great either. And on one hand, "not awful" on defense might be good enough to sack the Bears into oblivion, but on the other hand, the Bears having a running game might not be a "one week only" deal, and there is again a chance at Jay Cutler's brains coming unscrambled enough to start, or at very least for Caleb Hanie to get the start and not spend all the game shitting into his diaper and throwing the ball to whoever he thinks has a nice face, the way Todd Collins was doing. So really, I think this is a pretty winnable game for the Bears. That being said, a superstition is a superstition, so,

Seahawks 73, Bears -5.

Now, let's see if this works...