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