That Same Ol’ Doom

I don’t want to talk about the offensive line anymore. I don’t want to talk about the offensive line anymore. I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT THE STUPID OFFENSIVE LINE ANYMORE. But really, what else can you do? Ignoring it won’t make it go away; if that worked, there’d be no problem, Aldon Smith would have five less sacks, and Jay Cutler and Jason Campbell would both have a lot more fully-functioning brain cells. And after Monday night, things might have finally hit some sort of horrible, psychotic tipping point.Hands are wringing, teeth are gnashing, one guy’s already lost his job, and another just sort of… left. Shit’s getting weird, and just a week removed from NBC’s big “Super Bowl preview, question mark, question mark, question mark” game against the Texans, everyone is finally having to acknowledge what should have been obvious three years ago; that this offensive line is broken way beyond a one-year rebuilding job, and when you spend zero years improving it, it only gets worse. The bus has no breaks, the abyss has no bottom, and the cobras you’re ankle-deep in are incapable of remorse. The good times, they have gone.

Well. Bye.

Of course, the weirdest news of all involves apparently ex-guard Chilo Rachal. Precious little info has been trickling out about what happened, but apparently, when they told him that he wasn’t going to be a starter anymore, the dude just took off. Quit the team, hopped in the car, took his happy ass home, and ended up on that “reserve/left squad” list that Harvey Unga spent ten years on. He rejoined the team today, but really, he might as well have stayed back at the house, because if that really was the reason he took off, he has about as much of a chance of playing another game for the Chicago Bears as I do. As of right now, his season is over, moved over to the “reserve/non-football injury” list, which I think is upper management's way of making fun of him for being terminally butthurt.  Still, though, as bitch-made a thing as leaving because you got benched is, it probably gives this a much happier ending than anything anybody might have been speculating on yesterday would have been. I mean for real, as a lapsed pro wrestling nerd, I hear “so-and-so has left the team for personal reasons,” and my mind immediately jumps to “ohhhhh snap, dude’s gonna text his physical address to Chavo Guerrero Jr. and strangle his family.”
Like when Brian Urlacher took off to go have secret knee surgery in Europe from the Human Centipede guy or whatever, I was like, “Nooooo, don’t murder Jenny McCarthy, Brian! Sure, she’s nuts, but she was kind of funny in BASEketball, I guess! It’s not worth it!” But instead of killing her, all he did was dump her, which would seem baffling to a time-traveling fourteen year-old version of me, but made all the sense in the world to the grown-ass version of me. And Urlacher probably has enough experience with crazies, after his baby-momma pulled that crap she did a few years back, where she publically accused him of trying to turn their son gay, because she needed to shake him down for money, because she owed over ten million dollars to Michael Flatley – the goddamn Lord of the Dance -  from that time she accused him of rape. Wow, holy shit, no matter how many times I read, think about, or type that situation, it never gets any less insane. Like for real, I could not in a million years have made up a situation like that. No one could have. So yeah, Brian Urlacher knows a thing or two about crazy maniacs with Crazy Maniac’s Disease and knows better than to risk having one slip past the goalie and end up with a lifelong, child-based connection to another crazy maniac. I mean yeah, Jenny McCarthy is more of a “misguided” crazy than Tyna Robertson’s “something’s about to get set on fire” brand of crazy, but it’s best not to risk things on a woman who might slap the vaccination needle out of a doctor’s hand that would have prevented the kid from getting parvo three years later. Wait, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, Chilo Rachal.
Anyway, dude got benched, then immediately threw away any prospects he might have had for a “rest of his career” ever really happening. Of course, who he got benched in favor of is a scary prospect, with Chris Spencer as the frontrunner. Chris Spencer being a guy who got benched earlier in the year in favor of Chilo freaking Rachal. So there’s one problem that’s not getting any better.

Meanwhile, he wasn’t the only starting lineman who isn’t one anymore. Gabe Carimi lost his starting job, although he’s admittedly taking it a lot better than Rachal did. A year ago, he was a first round pick, the sure-fire, can’t-miss savior who was going to come in, play right tackle, and then everything would be alright for the next decade. Nope. Much like Chris Williams – the previous first-round tackle savior from 2008 -  he lost his rookie season to a pre-existing condition, then collapsed into a big pile of holding penalties and time spent laying on his back like a great big baby-man while the other team’s defensive end runs a victory lap around the stadium with a clump of Jason Campbell’s internal organs raised victoriously in his mighty hand. So now, Jonathan Scott takes over at right tackle, so you give up on the first-rounder in favor of a career backup that no one wanted, and somewhere, Frank Omiyale laughs at my anguish.  It’s a curious thing that of the team’s two starting tackles to get slapped down, Carimi’s the one on the bench now, though. Because in a perfect world, you’d be able to find two serviceable tackles somewhere and bench both guys, but man, J’Marcus Webb has been over on the left side of the line – the blind side that Sandra Bullock told us about – being just as bad or way, way worse than Carimi, and he’s been doing that for three years now.

And man, J’Marcus Webb. I just don’t know, man. How he continues to even reside on the active roster week in and week out, to say nothing of his set-in-stone starting job, is completely mind-boggling. He was apocalyptically bad as rookie, and he’s never gotten any better, so you’d think there would be some back up plan in place. But nope, here’s to another six games of endless Twitter updates about food and the stupid JWEBB NATION, while he continues to seemingly not give a flying squirrel shit about professional football. And it sucks, because somehow, you really want to like the guy, because he just seems like such a positive dude who’s just happy as hell to be here, and he’s got that same big goofy, kinda droopy gigantism face that The Big Show has, and I dunno, man, he’s just so goddamn loveable, in a weird sort of way. But you see, here’s this thing. I got this dog, Cocoa. Now, for the record, I hate that name, but she already answered to it by the time we accidentally adopted her, so there was nothing we could do. Anyway, she’s dumb as a sack of hammers, but is otherwise a pretty loveable dog; just this awkwardly floppy, lumbering galumphus, running into shit and just being happy as hell to see anyone or anything that comes within 50 feet of her, and she’s got this big smooshy face, and OOOHHHH GODDDD. But for argument’s sake, let’s say I went out back, fixed all the holes in the fence, and started up a goat farm. Like a serious, big-money goat farm, and my whole operation hinged upon the success of one particular goat. A goat that I had purchased for fifty million dollars. Let’s call him Goatler. And let’s say that once a week, usually on Sunday, but sometimes on Thursday or Monday, my whole neighborhood gets filled up with ravening wolves, and those wolves want nothing more than to see the what the flesh of a fifty-million dollar goat tastes like. And for some reason, I have to choose one dog to watch over my Powerball-priced flock, with three years of time to bring in a series of new dogs and trial-and-error that shit until I can find one that’s the best at keeping the wolves away from Goatler. And you know, I love the hell out of that dog, but for the love of all that is fucking holy, the first time I caught Cocoa sitting in a mud puddle, barking at squirrels on the old Dish Network dish that may or may not still work, but we don’t have Dish Network, so who knows, while a shifty-ass wolf is taking bolt-cutters to the chain-link fence; man, I would snatch her ass up, throw her in the house, and have another dog out there immediately. This would not be a decision that took me four years to arrive at. Yet here we are, 2012, and J’Marcus Webb is still sitting in that damn mud puddle, chewing on an empty Mr. Pibb can at one of the church kids from next door tossed over the fence, while Jared Allen calmly roasts Goatler on a spit. Jesus Christ, there has to be a better way.

Beethoven seems the obvious answer, but he has bad footwork and trouble recognizing complex blitz packages.

I just don’t know. I’m sure that there are mean things I could say about the other two guys, but I just don’t have the energy for it anymore. But I can say that when Lance Louis is probably your team’s best offensive lineman, something has gone terribly, horribly, obscenely wrong somehow. Anyway, this week, the Bears play the Vikings, and they’re probably going to lose. In addition to the usual Jared Allen horrors, I’m honestly not so sure about the defense anymore. Not to say that they were never as good as people were saying they were while the team was winning, because no, they really can be that good. But this is that point of the season where it becomes more than apparent that the offense will never hold up their end of the bargain and that there’s really not much hope of even a one-game playoff run, and the combination of hopelessness exhaustion makes the defense just sort of peter out over time. So the big story this week will be how the Bears handle the Vikings offense, in particular the resurrected Purple Jesus, Adrian Peterson. Regardless of the actual final score, this more than anything else will reveal what the rest of the season will be like. If the Bears can remain respectable, maybe they split the series with the Vikings, stomp the Cardinals, then steal a close one from someone like Seattle, and hell, ten wins gets you in the playoffs, where everyone's 0-0, etc. If there’s another San Francisco game, the Bears get blown out, and Peterson runs for 190 yards? You can just forget it and hope for the best in 2013, because going from a 7-1 start to a 7-9 finish could seriously happen. The hurting never stops, horror, doom, pain, fear, cobras, etc. Awful, just awful.

PREDICTION: VIKINGS 24, BEARS 10

2010 Bears Post-Season Awards, Part 1: R.O.Y.

Awards presented by your hosts, Pedobear and Knife Bear.

So, football is over now. I know, there's the small issue of a superlative Bowl to be settled, but for me, no more football. None last week, none this week, and perhaps none at all in the year to come. Now, there's nothing left but to think about what was, bitch abut what might have been, and pretend that what little news slips through the cracks in the months to come actually means that football is still going on for real. So for now, Richard Dent stands on the cusp of being denied Hall of Fame entrance once again, and Jerry Angelo hiring Tim Ruskell last year as an assistant/emergency scapegoat means that not only are the Bears still trying to build a winning team off of the Buccaneers' and Rams' glory years of nearly a decade ago, but now, they're apparently going to start adding bits and pieces of the late-2000s downhill slide of the Seahawks to the mix. Fun. But with things as they are, there will probably be lots of time to speak of such things in the future. For now, it is time to take a look back at the year that was. It's time for some dang awards.

PICTURED: The third result for a Google Image Search for the term "some dang awards."

First, we stop to remember one of the finest rookie seasons in Chicago History. In 1995, the Bears had one of the most potent offenses the team ever had, led by the passing attack of Erik Kramer, Jeff Graham, and some other guys not normally associated with the words "potent passing attack." Meanwhile, first-round draft pick Rashaan Salaam was rewriting the team's rookie running back record book, running for over 1,000 yards, scoring ten touchdowns, and finishing high in the running for NFL Rookie of the Year. And today, we remember him as one of the finest rookies in Bears history, and as not much beyond that, because 1995 was the only season where he ever really did anything. Today, he blames his failures (and many, many fumbles) on a crippling addiction to the Devil Weed, despite the fact that he was still pretty much doing his best Doug Benson impression for that season as well as his entire legendary college career. Perhaps the secret of this brief success lied in his bong. The world's most perfect bong, hand-crafted of the finest imported glass, and standing well over two feet tall, it was a bong worthy of Chong himself, and it served him well for many years, until it was tragically knocked off the coffee table by former Colorado teammate Michael Westbrook, following an argument over a heated game of Super Mario Kart. It was all downhill from there, as Salaam lost the effects of his legendary and perhaps magical bong, even after repeated Super-Gluings. And as his career failed, we soon remembered him only as the superstar rookie that he once was.

R.I.P.

And now, the time has come to honor and remember the former World's Greatest Bong in the form of an internet blog award. So without further ado, the 2010 recipient of the Rashaan Salaam's Bong Memorial Rookie of the Year Award is none other than offensive tackle J'Marcus Webb.

"For real?"

As an unheralded seventh-round draft pick out of West Texas A&M, not much was expected out of Webb. And well, uhh, I gotta be honest, not much was delivered by him, either. Seriously, the offensive line - The Doom of 2010 - was the weakest link of the Bears, and while Webb wasn't the weakest link of that weakest link, he probably would have been if Frank Omiyale or the thirteen guys not named Garza that they tried at guard had never been born. But really, what was I to do? The Bears only had three rookies on the roster this year. Their highest-profile draft pick was Dan LeFevour, a quarterback who never should have been drafted and ended up being a Cincinnati Bengal anyway. Meanwhile of the other two guys to actually make the 53-man roster, Major Wright was hurt for most of the year and not good for much other than late-hit penalties for the rest of it, and even though he did cast down the Dark Lord once and for all, Corey Wootton saw the field even less than he did. If nothing else, J'Marcus Webb was out there for most of the year, starting week in and week out, trying to make up for the manifold failures of former first round pick Chris Williams that put him in that place.

Maybe he should have stuck with hockey.

And really, let's not forget the fact that he really was a guy who shouldn't have been out there. He's a raw-ass physical talent without the polish that a rookie from a major college program would have, and probably the only reasons he was even on the game day roster in the first place were because they figured they couldn't sneak him on to the practice squad and because GM Angelo had already used up his one phantom injury rookie red shirt Injured Reserve spot on running back Harvey Unga. So really, we never should have even seen Webb until 2011. But when the Williams experiment failed and something about having Kevin Shaffer in the starting lineup apparently scared the coaching staff shitless, he was thrown to the wolves. And yeah, he was awful. J'Marcus Webb's 2010 rookie campaign was one marked by countless sacks-allowed and holding penalties, (or maybe they've been counted but I don't feel like looking it up) but you can't forget that he got better with every week. Sure, he was still way below average even by the playoffs, but considering how much of a hole he started off in, it was still shockingly encouraging in the end.

And these seriously exist.

As it stands right now, with a full year of starting experience and the knowledge that it really can't get any worse under his belt. Webb is a favorite to take over at the all-important left tackle position in 2011. And we could do worse. Hell, for the last few years, between Omiyale, John St. Clair, and the withered-up husks of Fred Miller and Orlando Pace, we really have done worse. But St. Clair was an out-of-position career backup, Omiyale was an inexplicably-employed career backup, Miller and Pace had both been playing since the Coolidge administration, and with 20/20 hindsight, Chris Williams was pretty much doomed from the start. So we've still got a potentially bad prospective LT starter, but for once, at least it's one with the arrow hopefully pointing up. So congratulations, J'Marcus Webb. You... Well, you sure were a rookie playing in 2010.


Theoretical past winners, had I bothered to do this in the past: RB Matt Forte (2008) and WR/KR Johnny Knox (2009)

Next Time: The 2010 Brian Piccolo Memorial Award for Excellence as a Gritty, Hard-Working Fan Favorite, as well as the 2010 Zombie Brian Piccolo Memorial Comeback Player of the Year Award.