No Cowboy-ing Up for Bears

By: Dustin Beutin

My grandfather thought he was a pretty funny guy. Truth be told, he was hilarious - at times. And one of his favorite jokes revolved around a simple question: “Why do you keep hitting yourself in the head with a hammer?”"Because it feels good when you stop.”

Lovie Smith and company had a different running gag on Sunday night when talking to reporters after the game. Tell me if you’ve heard this one:

“We have to go back and watch the film.”

What did football teams do in the days before film? Did they have something interesting to say to interviewers, or did they bemuse questioners by saying, “we’ll have to go back and read the paper to see what happened.” Or maybe they had what would today seem like a novel approach - trusting their own eyes.

Since that doesn’t seem likely to happen anytime soon, we’ll have to wait for the Bears to go back and see what all of us saw on Sunday night. A team with a real shot at being something special coming unglued on national television.

For a team with this much potential, looking back on games should be a somewhat exciting and fun process. Instead, it has become a weekly autopsy, complete with gory injuries. It would be easy to spend this time talking about just the most obvious, glaring problem with the Bears right now (hint, he takes the snap.). Why beat a dead horse, though, when Grossman was clearly not responsible for all of the trouble by the lakefront Sunday night?

It isn’t Grossman’s fault that Bernard Berrian turned into a human turkey, incapable of catching the ball while wide open. No way is it Grossman’s fault that Benson joined in on the gift-wrapping for the Cowboys by adding a fumble to the party.

Nor is it Grossman’s fault that defensive players Lance Briggs and Nathan Vasher went down with what could be serious injuries, reducing the quality of a dominant defense to the level of simply human. If they are gone permanently, it will be a blow that no team could easily recover from.

Moreover, it isn’t Grossman’s fault that Devin Hester seemed to have his first bad game of the season, dropping punts and kickoffs as if he were taking notes from Bobby Wade.

Which of the Bears’ three quarterbacks would you like to see starting?
  Rex Grossman
  Brian Griese
  Kyle Orton
 
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Every Bear deserves a share of the blame. There is a difference, though, between Rex and the rest of his teammates. His teammates had one bad game. Rex has been sub-par for weeks. Devin Hester has earned enough respect for fans to know his rash of fumbleitis isn’t going to be permanent. The defense deserves the benefit of the doubt that they played well despite being left on the field too long without support and suffering brutal injuries. Berrian and Benson - well, the fumbles and drops are worrisome, but not yet epidemic.

Let’s not go jump on Rex’s bloating, stinking carcass. The number of vultures hawking for a piece of him Monday will fill the sky over Chicago with a cloud of black venom.

A better way of analyzing everything we saw tonight is to look at Tony Romo. On the other sideline Sunday night was a 27-year-old quarterback in his second year as a starter who not only suffered his own playoff meltdown, but has had to overcome quite a few knocks on his abilities after going undrafted in the same year Rex was picked in the first round of the NFL draft.

Romo worked all night at Soldier Field with the NFL’s best defense in his face. He had one of the NFL’s premier linebackers spying on him and on at least two occasions was knocked to the ground harder than a drunken cowhand in a saloon fight. He had Bear linemen grabbing him, snagging him and tagging him. He had a running game that was stuck in the mud, unable to move the ball against the Bears front seven, daring him to beat the Bears in the air.

Despite all of that, he completed passes in the face of all this pressure. He danced around in the pocket. He avoided the steady stream of Bear defenders in his backfield (when he could) and immediately found open receivers downfield. He stepped into his throws and didn’t lose his mechanics. Let’s be honest about it, if we can bear to handle the implications: Tony Romo put on a demonstration of how a premier quarterback should handle an elite defense.

In the spotlight, it was hard to avoid the comparison between what Dallas had behind center and what Chicago was rolling out. Romo and Grossman looked nothing alike.

Is Grossman affecting the morale of this team and, thus, somewhat to blame for the overall sloppiness? That might be a stretch, but it can be clearly seen in the eyes of his teammates, his coaches and his fans that everyone is wondering what will happen with the offense if Rex is replaced. And in most of those thoughts, there is a vision of at least a marginal improvement. Surely for most the idea of putting in Griese or Orton now seems like it couldn’t be worse and most likely will be an improvement.

In truth, when the move is made, it could expose that an equally troubling part of the problem is the offensive line. The benefit of having Rex on the field is that the frustration with his performance detracts from observing whether the O-line is simply choking under the pressure to give Rex every opportunity to succeed or if it has weaknesses all its own that are now being exploited by opponents.

And there is no blaming Rex for the disappointment in the running game. Benson is about one or two fumbles away from convincing the faithful to start labeling him as undependable. Adrian Peterson is either not getting enough time on offense to get into a groove or is proving that his qualities are limited to being a professional backup. And why is it that the coaches have to pull Benson off the field in passing situations to protect Grossman? Isn’t Benson a third year running back in the NFL? This is unacceptable and if it cannot be remedied, then Benson is at step one of officially being a bust.

At the end of the day, it’s hard to imagine Grossman surviving another game without genuinely leading the Bears to a win. Should Lovie Smith replace Grossman or give him one more game with Griese officially getting half the snaps in practice? Alas, we’re not going to spend anymore time talking about this tonight. The reason is best explained by my grandfather.

“Why do you keep hitting yourself in the head with a hammer?”

“Because it feels good when you stop.”

Though other sportswriters in Chicago might still be unpacking their carpetbags, Dustin Beutin is a born and bred Chi-town sportswriter. Heading into the heart of the Big Ten (Purdue) broadened his sports views, and it was during the Jauron era that he lost the innocence of blind love for Chicago sports and began looking for an outlet to vent his frustration. A trip out west to USC for a Master’s in writing was only tolerable with high doses of ESPN and Dodgers games, though it gave him a respect for the national perspective. Now in the early stages of a sports-writing career, Dustin hopes to give back to the city of Chicago everything it gave him: opinions and heartburn.

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