Orton Gets Balls-Deep in Detroit

So smooth.

Well, what do you know. I know it was against Detroit, and if you've spent even a few minutes reading this blog, you know by no that no achievement against them counts, but this Orton fellow is starting to look pretty good lately. I know, he's only had two good games so far, but that's more than a Bear QB usually has, in a row or otherwise, and it's really encouraging when viewed next to how unspectacular his shitty games typically are. Sure, he might run the run the bus into the curb every so often, but you can trust him to not then stomp on the accelerator and send the bus and its 52 other passengers screaming toward a spectacular death that somehow involves running over six boy scouts and obliterating a puppy farm that was unfortunate enough to be located at the bottom of a cliff. You can't say that about a lot of other recent Bear quarterbacks.

And to me, that was the really infuriating thing regarding Kyle Orton's status over the last few years. The guy comes in and wins ten games as a rookie, and sure, he might have done it with training wheels and arm-floaty things on, throwing short passes and relying mainly on Thomas Jones and the defense to do the heavy lifting. But you have to think about it this way: He came in, managed the games, and never really fucked anything up beyond repair. That sounds like nothing to most people, but this is the Chicago Bears we're talking about here. This is team without a franchise quarterback since roughly 1948, who has featured such wretched shitpieces as Mike Phipps, Bob Avellini, Cade McNown, and the unspeakable Rusty Lisch, a man so incompetent that Mike Ditka opted to just put Walter Payton behind center for a game instead. Adjusted for rookie-year struggling, his 2005 performance probably put him in the team's all-time top ten at the position. And I know that in 2006, Rex Grossman was still more or less unproven, therefore still somewhat deserving of the chance that a first-rounder always gets, but Orton never even got considered for the second string spot. And in 2007, when the Grossman experiment finally died its horrible, thrashing death that had begun during the Arizona game the year before, it took injuries to both Grossman and Brian Griese for Orton to get in, and even then, as a third-year player with relatively extensive starting experience and absolutely nothing on the line for a team that had been eliminated from the playoffs by halftime of the first game, they still treated him like the rookie from 2005. They just sent him out to hand the ball off and throw that dink-and-dunk bullshit, seemingly just hoping that he didn't shit his pants or drool so much that it showed up on the TV cameras. And this was after Griese has turned his navy blue jersey almost black with saliva, and Grossman - not satisfied to simply shit his pants - went out there and metaphorically dropped trou and just sprayed brown chunks over all his teammates, several referees, as many as 80,000 fans in attendance, and several important Chicagoland dignitaries. Yet neither of those two ever played with any limitations, save for the unspoken limitations imposed by playing with Cedric Benson, Fred Miller, and Bernard Berrian in the starting lineup. But how did Orton respond? Taking a swig of Jack Daniels, muttering something unintelligible that might have been "fuck all y'all," and dinking and dunking the Bears to their only two-game winning streak of the year, about 14 games too late.

But that was the best part about these last couple weeks: The Bears actually deviated from the plan. They never do that, and that's been one of the main goddamn things wrong with the offense. The Bears "got off the bus running the football," but when that clearly wasn't working, they decided to actually start throwing the ball, unlike last year, when those poor bastards Benson, Peterson, and Wolfe would get plowed into an uncaring offensive line for a long and arduous series of three-and-outs. And when they decided to let Orton throw the ball, they actually let him play as though they felt he belonged in organized football. He wasn't just throwing three-yard slants to tight ends and little dumpoffs to send Matt Forte to his doom. He threw it down the field, to wide receivers, even. And no, I'm not going to jump to conclusions and immediately think that one good game against a decent team and one badass game against a loosely-organized group of people on a football field automatically makes him a goddamn superstar. I jumped to that conclusion with Grossman in '06, and he ended up being the person on this earth that I'd most like to murder for completely stupid reasons. So no, I'm not gonna sit here and say that Kyle Orton is a gunslinger who's just having fun out there or whatever. But it looks like the coaches have enough faith in him now to open up the passing game, the wide receiver corps I figured would be the worst in the league is starting to come together against all odds, (How the hell can Brandon Lloyd actually seem good? What the fuck?) the coaches aren't being quite so suicidally stubborn when it comes to offense, and for the time being at least, opposing teams using eight man fronts on every down regardless of the situation are probably a thing of the past. These are good things, and it's starting to look like a damn offense around here. I'm not gonna say they're a contender or anything, because there are a lot of games and a lot of injuries to come, but this is definitely not turning out to be the Season of Horror that I figured it would be. Now, if only we could find a way to play Detroit every week, we'd really have something going here.