Ever since I reached an age when I had any concept whatsoever of team ownership or the "front office" in general, somehow, I've always known that what the Chicago Bears had there was no good. They refused to pay players their fair market value and did nothing as the 1985 Super Bowl team crumbled into dust before the 1990s had even started. They gave Dave Wannstedt (The Enemy) free reign to cut loose any and every player from the Ditka era, regardless of whether or not they needed to go or whether or not they had anyone to replace them with. There was the fiasco with the Dave McGinnis non-hiring, which led directly to turning their football team over to the unsteady hands of glorified accountant Ted Phillips. With the sort of talent already in place that should have provided the basis of a dynasty, they kept rewarding Lovie Smith and Jerry Angelo for crushing failure after crushing failure with lucrative new contracts. The list goes on and on.
The Bears are one of the original NFL teams in the league's second-largest market. They should be the New York Yankees of pro football, the team everyone despises because they just won't stop winning every damn thing. But instead, this is a team who, outside a quick blip in the mid-1980s, hasn't really won shit since they stopped calling wide receivers "ends" and whose star quarterback and star defensive back weren't the same guy. It always seemed like Virginia McCaskey barely even knew she owned a football team and that her boy Mike had some sort of bizarre narcissism/mental retardation combo going on. So it really didn't give me any warm feelings when little brother George was named Chairman of the Board last summer. But god damn, in one fell swoop, he has gone a long way toward winning me over.
Asshole.
In summation: Fuck you, Jerry Angelo. You came to this team with Brian Urlacher, Mike Brown, and Olin Kreutz right fucking there, three players who could have been the foundation of something special, and you never managed to put together an entire team around them in ten years. You purposefully tanked the 2001 offseason - setting the team back a year talent-wise - to try and get Dick Jauron fired, when you knew damn well he'd just do the job himself. You lucked out when you drafted Lance Briggs and Charles Tillman and just couldn't help yourself after that, thinking you could build a real football team out of players drafted after the second round. You traded Thomas Jones for a pile of shit, just so you could try and convince yourself that Cedric Benson deserved a starting job in the NFL, and your insurance policy was to draft a high school-sized guy in the third round that you might have been able to sign as a free agent in Garrett Wolfe. You also drafted Dan Bazuin, Mike Okwo, Michael Haynes, Jarron Gilbert, Juaquin Iglesias, and Mark Bradley, when the team needed actual NFL players. You gave new contracts to Edwin Williams and Earl Bennett, while feeding Matt Forte some line of bullshit about not negotiating deals during the season. You gave Terrence Metcalf a thousand second chances and made him a millionaire to keep the bench warm. You caved when coaches wanted their old shitty players from their old shitty teams, a policy that got chained Roy Williams, Adam Archuleta, John St. Clair, Brandon Manumaleuna, and the withered corpse of Orlando Pace around the team's neck, to name a few. You let Lovie Smith fire all the real assistant coaches after Super Bowl XLI and replace them with random buddies he had who happened to be college coaches. You could have had Kurt Warner, but told him that if he was a Bear, he would only ever back up Rex Grossman. You gave an eleven million dollar deal to Frank Omiyale, history's greatest monster, based on about three quarters of football you saw him play after he was a backup for like five years. You have been a piece of human cholesterol, thwarting and destroying this team from the inside out, the whole time patting yourself on the back as a genius, no matter how often you fail, like Wile E. fucking Coyote, and I'm glad you're gone. But no, I hope the door does hit you in the ass on the way out, and I hope it knocks you straight to Hell.
Double asshole.
But especially fuck you, Mike Martz. You worm. You sack of shit. I'm gonna come to your house, Mike Martz; I'm gonna find you. And I'm gonna take you out with a fuckin' gut punch. You think you're so fuckin' clever, with your offensive scheme that hasn't worked at the pro level since there were still two World Trade Center towers. You're too taken with the aroma of your own shit to see when everything's on fire around you. Too smugly certain of the perfection of your game plan to notice that a quarterback can't drop back seven steps when both defensive ends only need four to get there. This team has Roy Williams because of you, you fuck. Roy fucking Williams, Mike. And the Bears had to keep putting him in there for the first play of every game, even though he was really the team's Number Five receiver at best - behind Knox, Bennett, Hester, and Dane punk-ass Sanzenbacher - just so he would still be listed as the starter, just to keep your dumb ass happy. Is his ankle 100 percent yet, Mike? And is his ankle why he can't catch a fucking thrown ball, despite allegedly having done it professionally for the last eight years, Mike? We have Roy Williams, and we don't have Greg Olsen. This was the year of the tight end, when everywhere you looked, there was a Rob Gronkowski or a Jimmy Graham or a Vernon Davis or a Jason Witten or whoever else there was who was the key to everything for his team, and the Bears traded theirs away, traded the team's only real receiving threat - in an offense where all you ever wanted to do was pass - smooth the fuck away for next to nothing. Why? Because you couldn't stand to crack open your dusty-ass playbook and switch a few things around to properly use the talent you had around you. You didn't resign. You ran like a little bitch from what you knew was going to happen to you. I hate you, Mike Martz. Gut punch, Mike Martz. Gut punch. It's coming.
A hard rain's gonna fall, Lovie Smith. Watch your back.
