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.

WEEK SEVEN: The Perfect Storm.

"juyghfhfjfc fuck" Those are the words (or jumbles of letters and one word) that I typed a day ago on my first attempt at this post, before just walking away from the computer. Because at the time, there were pretty much no other appropriate words to describe what had happened. Because 17-14 only sounds like a near-miss, one of those "well if that one play blah blah we'll get 'em next time" sort of things where you keep your head up high and look forward to the next week. (And in this case, it's a bye week, and god damn, as someone just watching the games, even I need a break at this point.) And at 4-3, the Bears are still technically atop the NFC North, having for now a tie-breaker over the Packers, and even still have the second-best record in the awful, awful, awful, fucking AWFUL, shitty-bad NFC as a whole. But seriously, who the hell are we kidding? As far as the defense and occasionally Devin Hester's legs can carry this team, 2010 is already a lost season, a sixteen-game slap in the face that has to be endured until next year hopefully brings a new regime and the rebuilding years we should have begun in 2008. (and wouldn't have been necessary if players we actually needed who had actually been any good had been drafted between 2003 and 2007) Well, it'll either bring that or a lockout, but I'm trying to not think about that right now. But without an offense, a team can't win, and the one that the Bears have is in complete shambles.


It was only a few weeks ago that I was actually praising Mike Martz, after he actually made halftime adjustments against Dallas, something that I had never seen a head coach or offensive coordinator do in my time watching this team. But I suppose that even with a win over a team that was still supposed to be good at that point, the thought of straying from the plan - his beautiful, perfect plan that had been utterly exposed, exploited, and destroyed by opposing defenses as early as 2004 - and admitting that flexibility was not a vice, but a virtue, was simply too much for ol' Mike to take. Since then, we've gotten to see Martz's true, horrifying form, which is that of a bitter former genius whose death-grip on a dead football philosophy has rendered him something that less resembles a genius than it does a clearly retarded person who hates quarterbacks. And it is this, his rigid insistence on playing "Greatest Show on Turf" football - insisting on long dropbacks to allow long pass routes to unfold with no functioning offensive line to keep the QB vertical through all of this, refusing to hand the ball off even when the game is close and Chicago backs are averaging over four yards a carry, and completely writing the team's best receiver out of the playbook simply because of his position - that was the first part of the Perfect Storm of 2010 Bears football.

This man HATES quarterbacks.

The second part of the Storm is one you probably know of by now if you've been sitting through this gibberish I keep typing, and that's the offensive line - The Doom of 2010, a sad handful of broken men whose names I shall not utter here. Behind them, no running back can gain ground and a quarterback can only look down field at his peril. Seriously, there were points where these ass-dumplings made Albert Haynesworth look like a superbeast, and he's pretty much only known now as the guy who got so fat that his body physically rejected the act of jogging and started to literally destroy itself. They allowed four sacks, and that was actually a vast improvement for them. These guys fucking suck balls.

Ladies and gentlemen, Chris Williams.

And the final piece of the hellish puzzle of the Perfect Storm is the player who was supposed to be the glorious Chosen One to lead us out of fifty-plus years of quarterback hell - Jay Cutler himself. And I've defended this guy a lot over the last year and a half, because hell, there really was a lot worth defending. He spent last year behind an only slightly less shitty line, running Ron Turner's stupid-ass offense, throwing to a bunch of rookie receivers, while his favorite target, Devin Aromashodu, stayed off the field all year, in Lovie Smith's doghouse. (Where he remains this year. I think Lovie hates receivers as much as Mike Martz hates quarterbacks.) This year, he's been damned by The Doom of 2010 and cursed by Martz's hatred of short passes, running plays, and having the quarterback move anywhere but straight back. And despite all of this, for a while, the True Cutler shone through, and god damn, it was beautiful. And I truly believe that the quarterback of those first few games of touchdowns and glory really was the True Cutler. But the key word here is "was." Because god damn, we've been here before, haven't we? A quarterback being the subject of whispers of Pro Bowls and NFL MVP awards, only to completely fold up once opposing teams learned his Kryptonite-like weakness of being slammed in the dirt a bunch of times. And after that, he was never the same, and heard approaching footsteps behind him even when none were there, and god damn, who knows where he'll throw the ball this time. Yeah, we've seen this happen before.

And now, he's watched from the sideline as it happened to someone else.

Jay Cutler now has The Fear, the same creeping terror that took down our last Chosen One, and at the same time, a completely different thing altogether. Because you see, Rex Grossman, for all his gunslinging cockiness, was a coward. When faced with even an attempt at a pass rush, (at a time when the Bears still at least had John Tait, Ruben Brown, and a pre-downfall Olin Kreutz, even) would just hurl the ball skyward, and with all eleven men on the defense standing under the ball's shadow, waiting for it to land safely in their arms, he knew that there'd be no one left to hit him. But the Fear that Cutler has been relentlessly sacked into has turned into a whole new beast, with Cutler being way too cocky and arrogant to even realize what's happening to him. He stands firm in the pocket like a statue, as if to say, "come on, fuckers, I'm taking you all on," just before a pocket that never existed collapses into a four-man gang sack. He says, "yeah, that's right DeAngelo Hall, I'm coming at YOU," and then throws an interception. Then, he strides back onto the field, says "yeah, that's right DeAngelo Hall, I'm coming at YOU," and then throws another interception. Then, he strides back onto the field, says "yeah, that's right DeAngelo Hall, I'm coming at YOU," and then throws another interception. Then, he strides back onto the field, says "yeah, that's right DeAngelo Hall, I'm coming at YOU," and then throws another interception. And then, after the game? Much like the glassy-eyed, semi-coherent boxer who gets knocked out in the first round, and then curses his opponent as a weak-punching pussy at the press conference, he basically says, "yeah, that's right DeAngelo Hall, I'm coming at YOU," and then, presumably, somehow threw another interception. Perhaps it's not so much that Cutler has been pounded into the dirt so often that he now fears each play as though it may be his last, so much as all the hits he's taken have made him really, really, rrrrreeeeally fucking stupid.

"Yeah, that's right, DeAngelo Hall, I'm coming at YOU!"

So we have no offensive line, an offensive coordinator too stubborn to even try to work around that issue, and a quarterback who's been literally knocked stupid. And the hurting never stops.

YAY/BOO: Week Seven Edition.

BOO: The same stupid crap that's always wrong with this team is still wrong, and I'm going to run out of ways to lament this soon.
BOO: Devin Aromashodu actually starts a football game!... And then, is pretty much never seen after the first play.
BOO: Lance Briggs is injured, much like I said would happen before the season started.
YAY: Brian Iwuh has actually done okay filling in.
BOO: When we stumble upon a backup linebacker who might turn into a good player, it's not in the middle, where we're gonna need a young guy soon.
BOO: Seriously, after being completely 2005-level beastly for the first few games, Brian Urlacher has fallen off the face of the Earth.
BOO: In a season where he's already barely showing up on the stat sheet, Julius Peppers has been absolutely handled by rookie offensive tackle two weeks in a row.
YAY: On the other hand, Israel Idonije is starting to turn kind of okay.
YAY: D.J. Moore is starting to have one of those 2004 Nathan Vasher "this dude is going to be awesome next year" kinds of seasons.
BOO: You can't decline a delay-of-game penalty, so D.J. Moore only ran one pick back for a touchdown.

NEXT WEEK: Nothing!

It's a bye week, so they can't possibly lose. Meanwhile, depending on how lazy or motivated I become, I'll have a special not-quite-halfway report and/or a secret look inside the Chicago Brain Trust's bye-week brainstorming session. Early word from the underground says that the latter may or may not involve a killer cyborg and a racist parrot. Stay tuned.

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.