Bad Ugliness.

The entire game, v 2.0

In 1995, Erik Kramer had the best season a Bear quarterback has ever had. Hell, it might have even been the best year that a Bear QB will ever have. That year, he threw for 3,838 yards and 29 touchdowns, which was closer than any other Bear came did to throwing for 4,000 yards and 30 touchdowns, (really - no Bear has ever done those things) all while only throwing ten interceptions. Was Kramer a superstar? Was he some amazing player who probably would have had a legendary career, had it not been for that neck injury that screwed up the rest of his career? Nope. Overall, he was a pretty average quarterback, really - hell, you might even say mediocre; if it hadn't been for that 29 TD/10 INT season, he would have thrown for more picks than scores over the course of his career.

So what was it that made such a season like that happen? Was he just the beneficiary of a powerful running game keeping defenses from committing to the pass? Did he have a masterful receiver corps that could pull amazing numbers out of a semi-half-decent player? Well, the running game did pretty well, but even then, star rookie Rashaan Salaam had a Benson-esque 3.6 yards per carry, barely went over 1,000 yards, and fumbled nine damn times in the process. (I totally looked stuff up for this, in case you were wondering how I pulled all this shit out of nowhere) As for the receivers, they were pretty good, with both Jeff Graham and Curtis Conway topping 1,000 yards, but let's face it, that's not exactly Jerry freaking Rice and Tim goddamn Brown we're talking about. Those are two good players, but it's not like they were uncoverable megastars - Conway only managed to hit those numbers two more times in a career that lasted until 2004, and Graham never hit 1,000 ever again.

(Conway did manage to marry Muhammad Ali's daughter, though.)

Hmm. So Kramer wasn't a legendary superstar, and he wasn't hiding behind All-Pro receivers or a future Hall-of-Famer at running back. So maybe there's some other little detail I'm leaving out. I know the defense couldn't have helped; it was their fault for being so shitty that the Bears had to throw the ball so much that year. Did he have an offensive coordinator with a game plan so amazing and inscrutable that defenses had no answer for it? No, the coordinator that year was Ron fuck-ass Turner. Hmm. Oh yeah, I remember!

This guy.

In 1995, the Bears only allowed 16 sacks. Seriously. Sixteen sacks. As a team. For an entire season. That's one per game, and that's really, really good. So, how are we doing in 2010? Six games, twenty-seven sacks allowed. fuck, man. Just... Fuuuuuuck. After doing some figuring on Windows Calculator, that's an average of four and a half per game. Or to put it in horrifying full-year totals, the Bears are on pace to let the other team take down their quarterback 72 times this year. Holy balls, that's bad. That's the kind of bad that helped the Houston Texans destroy David Carr's career before it had a chance to start. That's the kind of bad that destroys families, makes dogs growl at things humans can't see, causes the body to break out in sore boils, and causes the Allies to lose the war.

"Today, I was sacked six times. By the Seahawks. FML"

And so it came to pass that once again, Jay Cutler, the guy we traded two drafts for and paid an emperor's ransom to lead us to glory, went down six more times. And this is just two weeks removed from the nine-sack brain-breaking the Giants gave him. And good god damn, this is getting old. It would be one thing if something different went wrong every week. Like maybe one week, the team would have too many penalties, and the next week maybe the defense would give out, but every game has the same problem, win or lose. This team can't block. Say what you will about emerging dumbass Mike Martz insisting on seven-step dropbacks and long pass routes for a team that can't give a quarterback enough time to work with that. Talk all you want about Jay Cutler holding on to the ball and taking every possible sack, because he's too scared about what sort of media backlash he'll get from even the most meaningless interception would get to even attempt making shit happen when it seems like nothing's there, despite that being exactly what the Broncos and Bears drafted and traded for him to do. And yeah, say what you will about Matt Forte neither having the bulldozer power to bust through the defense's first few guys or the moves to make dudes miss behind the line when no hole exists, resulting in a lot of runs for losses. The fact of the matter and underlying cause for all of this - the two losses, the fact that at least a couple of the wins should have been losses, and the Bears being something like 0-for-a-billion on third down - is because there is no blocking. This. Team. Can't. Block.

Seriously, who the FUCK is Edwin Williams?

And the most frustrating part of this is that there's nothing that can be done about it. It's not like this is just a young line going through some transitional growing pains here, and it's going to take is some "coaching up," and things will be just fine. Olin Kreutz is a thousand years old. He's going nowhere but down, that is, if there's much further for him to fall, what with spending more time on the ground than anybody on the team aside from maybe Cutler. Roberto Garza is a ten year veteran and Kevin Shaffer has been around nine, are both on the downside of their careers, and like Kreutz, will not ever get any better - only worse - than they are right now. Likewise for Frank Omiyale, in his sixth season, who unlike Garza, Shaffer, and Kreutz, never actually had a peak or even a point in his career where he was generally considered NFL material.
Meanwhile, Chris Williams's career has been defined by how utterly baffling it has been. Drafted with a career-threatening back injury, with Jeff Otah still on the board and with the Bears in prime position to trade up and snag instant All-Pro Ryan Clady, his arrival was like one of Jerry Angelo's bizarre third round "but if this guy heals, he has first round talent" picks, except in the first, where shit like that is even more dumb than in the third. So he basically missed his rookie year, then sucked for most of his second, before finally blossoming at the end of 2009, and I will not lie that he was pretty much my sole source of hope for the offense this year. And now, he's so fucking bad at left tackle, the position he was drafted to solidify forever and ever, that he's been moved inside to guard in the hopes of salvaging the draft pick, while that goddamn worthless Omiyale is now at LT, and rookie J'Marcus Webb is the other starter on the right.
And Webb... Well, I really liked that they drafted him, what with him being an ungodly behemoth, capable of ripping down mountains like a human Bagger 288, but the problem is that not only is he a rookie, but he's a seventh round pick of a rookie, with the reason for him not being at a real college prior to the NFL was because, well, he's apparently not all that bright. Needless to say, this isn't a dude who should have even seen the field on anything but field goals for at least a year, even if he does turn out to be awesome someday. And the last two guys to be mentioned, Edwin Williams, and Lance Louis... Fuck. Seriously. Williams wasn't good enough to make the Redskins' practice squad this year, and hell, he was only barely good enough to get on the Bears' practice squad before being elevated to the 53-man roster and pretty much immediately being named a starter. Louis is another practice squad refugee who should have stayed there, and all that needs to be said about him is that, much like the wretched Shaffer and Garza, he was bad enough to lose a starting job on a 2010 Bears team that is literally just signing dudes out of nowhere and throwing them on the line. Add in stupid fucking Martz's ten million dollar meat-sack of a hundred year old blocking tight end, Brandon Manumaleuna, and you see why nothing will change until half of these guys are gone.

To cleanse the palette, here is 1980s All-Decade Team member Jimbo Covert, hugging Walter Payton. Awwwww.

So from now on, fuck it, I'm just not mentioning the offensive line any more, until the freak occurrence that they actually play well sometime this year. Because not only am I tired of every game's misfortune owing itself to the guys paid to block not doing so - the Doom of 2010 - but I am getting really fucking tired of typing about it. Because guys who never should have been on an NFL team in the first place and guys who the team should have thought about grooming replacements for in 2007 aren't going to get any better as the year wears on, regardless of whatever coaching wizardry Mike Tice supposedly has or doesn't have. You can't polish a turd, you can't make chicken shit into chicken salad, and you can't teach Frank Omiyale to not just ignore a blitzing outside linebacker. So I'm washing my hands of it. From now on, I'm just going to give it a quick mention and move on, because there's only so much to be said of a situation that's not getting any better and can't possibly get any worse.

Now, moving on, to sum up my thoughts on the rest of the game in a quick and easy manner:

YAAAAYYYYY

YAY: After an early start that showed all the symptoms of Jay Cutler getting the same sort of Fear that ended Rex Grossman's time as a viable starter following that Arizona game, he settled down and had an almost mostly not-bad game, which is more than should be expected after the first few paragraphs.
BOO: No running game (or even an honest attempt at one) once again, and after a week I spent comparing Matt Forte to Neal Anderson, the football champion of my youth.
BOO: In a further effort to turn me against him, not only has Mike Martz destroyed the running game, but he's also apparently finally phased out Greg Olsen from the offense.
YAY: The emergence of Johnny Knox allowing them to take Devin Hester off the field on offense and start getting superhuman maniacal punt returns out of him again.
YAY: Earl Bennett and Kellen Davis absolutely violently blasting the fuck out of some dudes on Hester's TD return. Someone has to block sometime, dammit.
BOO: The defense barely ever touching Matt Hasselbeck, who is totally one of the most sackable dudes there is.
BOO: The Bears failing in their bid to trade for Logan Mankins, a move that would not only have landed an actual NFL lineman, but would have also rid us of Tommie Harris.
YAY: The now-shocking and somewhat refreshing thought of them actually trying to make that move, rather than just lying to themselves about how everything is gonna be okay, man.
BOO: A week after we cut Mark Anderson to sign him, Charles Grant's fat ass has already been cut, effectively ending the career of a guy that no one in the UFL wanted a week ago.

UPON FURTHER REVIEW: Getting rid of Alex Brown: Brilliance, or SHEER brilliance?

NEXT WEEK: The Redskins come to town, and what I would love to do more than anything right now is start some big bloggity smack-talking war, where my team is gonna kick the ass of Raven's team, and his team is gonna kick the ass of mine, and it'll be great for the internet at large, but that sort of thing got beaten out of me sometime during the Dave Wannstedt years. This is a 4-2 team that really should be 2-4 and are just trying to figure out ways to staunch various areas of massive blood-loss, while the Redskins are a potentially upwardly-mobile 3-3 team that will punch you in the goddamn face. This is going to be horrible and nasty, and Lovie Smith won't have any answer for whatever the hell it is that Mike Shanahan will do, because that guy never has had any answer for anything anybody has done. Brian Orakpo (or is it Orapko? Huh.) will probably be jailed for war crimes after his fourth sack, and the Bears will take advantage of the Skins' 24th ranked run defense by handing it off maybe 13 times all game. Devin Hester will have a big return or two, and Cutler will probably have one of those "shitload of yards, but not much else good to speak of" games, and maybe Urlacher and Briggs will bottle up the running game, and none of that will matter. Also, looking at the Redskins page on NFL.com, they apparently drafted a guy with the first name "Selvish" in the seventh round, and WHY WOULD ANYONE EVER GIVE THAT TO ANYONE AS A NAME? Shit.

Redskins 27, Bears 10.