There’s only one more week of survival remaining for the Chicago Bears roster. One more injury-less week and the preseason will be considered a success, having only lost last year’s seventh-round pick Marquess Wilson to an injury of significance.  One more week.

Four positions to focus on tonight.

Backup Quarterback

Marc Trestman’s decision to move Jimmy Clausen into the backup role tonight means the organization has decide whom they’d like to win the spot. Both Trest and Emery have made no attempt to hide their excitement over Clausen since he auditioned for them a few months ago.

A few thoughts on this:

1. Why play Cutler at all tonight? Jay will receive ample work next week against the Seattle Seahawks during the “dress rehearsal”. Wouldn’t it make sense to give his potential backup a few series behind a starting offensive line and with the weapons he might be tossing to in regular season action?
2. Clausen’s biggest advantage over Jordan Palmer is Palmer won’t sign elsewhere. Bears can keep him close by without serious risk of losing him.

Third Wide Receiver

I’ve argued for months the Bears lack of depth at the wide receiver position is playing with fire and they’ve gone from relying upon an unproven 7th round draft pick who produced a whopping 2 catches a year ago to a collection of journeymen.

With Chris Williams feeling more like a speed specialist, Josh Morgan has an opportunity over the next three weeks to assume this role and his track record in the league would lead most to believe the job belongs to him.

According to Jim Miller on the preseason opener, three wides is the most utilized offensive formation in the NFL. He also said that night Jordan Lynch played Division III college football. So he could be very wrong.

Read More …

The 2013 Chicago Bears season came to a fittingly sad conclusion.

Chris Conte, one of the emerging stars of the previous campaign who seemed to have not only lost his way in the secondary but his confidence as well, missed an assignment. The physical side of the game had let him down all season long. Now the mental side was delivering a final, crippling blow. Peppers leaps. Kuhn blocks. Rodgers scrambles. Cobb scores. The culprit was Conte. Not only had he, in that moment, become the poster child for this devastating loss. That wasn’t enough to pour onto the slumping shoulders of a beleaguered safety. No, in that moment, Conte became the symbol of the entire season’s defensive futility.

Shots were fired at Conte from every discernible angle. Once news of an off-season surgery surfaced many, myself included, wrote off Conte’s potential future with the Chicago Bears. When Marc Silverman of ESPN Radio bet Tom Waddle Conte would not play a down for the Bears this season, Conte met that challenge with a Twittery terrific, “fuck u all.”

Read More …

NFL sold me their Preseason Live package. They might as well have sold me the Brooklyn Bridge. Most of the night the program failed to load. When the program loaded it was awful. I shall keep you up to date on the battle I began with folks at the league last night. Apparently I’m not alone.

A few thoughts…

• If you’re Martellus Bennett, what are you thinking this morning? You are away from the team because you’re an insane person and last night you watched two tight ends with a tenth of your ability – Rosario and Miller – flourish in what should have been your role. Maybe, I don’t know, stop being crazy, apologize and get yourself back to practice.
• Anybody can look at the numbers and state Jimmy Clausen played well. But what struck me was how confident he looked from the second he walked onto the field. He was lost throughout his tenure in Carolina. He looked like he didn’t belong in the NFL. Last night he looked like he very much did.

Read More …

I posed a simple question to DaBearsBlog’s followers on the Tweet machine. What do you, as a Bears fan, hope to see during Bears 1st preseason game tomorrow night? 

My favorite answer came from @sjaskovi:

I hope to see none of the starters.

But while I have begun notorious for my preseason cynicism I will admit the Bears do need to see SOMETHING over the course of this preseason.

(1) They need to see a backup quarterback emerge from the Jordan Palmer v Jimmy Clausen competition. Anytime either man is on the field this August I think every Bears fan should be paying awfully close attention.

(2) They need to see the ball long-snapped to their punter and holder accurately. This is the only “starter” I want to see in all four preseason games.

I disagree with the assessment that anything happening defensive tonight has any relevance but here are some more responses I liked.

Read More …

I received a list of questions from Charged.fm relating to the 2014 Chicago Bears. These are my answers.

1) After an injury-riddled 2013, what should we expect from Jay Cutler this season? Will Mark Trestman’s offense help solidify him as a great starter in this league?

I think fans need to accept Jay Cutler is going to throw interceptions. Part of what makes him special is his belief he can fit the ball into spaces other quarterbacks would not even consider and the downside to that belief is turnovers.

Comfort in Trestman’s offense, the weapons around him and finally a stable, talented offensive line will all contribute to this being by far the best year in Jay Cutler’s career if he can remain on the field.

2) As we know, Cutler is one of the most injury-prone quarterbacks in the game. For this reason, having a good backup quarterback seems like a must in Chicago. How worried is the team about their backup quarterback situation now that Josh McCown is in Tampa Bay?

Well, fans were concerned about Josh McCown this time a year ago. Why wouldn’t they be? All the word since his workout is both GM Phil Emery and Trestman like Jimmy Clausen quite a bit. I was hoping to see the club bring Kyle Orton back but it doesn’t seem to be something they are interested in doing.

3) The Bears defense was among the worst in the NFL last season. The team signed Jared Allen, Jay Ratliff, and Lamarr Houston this offseason, but didn’t do much to upgrade at linebacker or in the secondary. Are the Bears in for another long season on the defensive side?

A healthy Charles Tillman is a HUGE upgrade to the secondary as both he and Tim Jennings are only a year removed from being Pro Bowl corners. They drafted Kyle Fuller and Kelvin Hayden is healthy so they are set in the nickel.

They have no safeties. It is the most glaring flaw of the roster and I wouldn’t look for it to be corrected until next spring.

People seem to forget what happened to their linebackers a year ago. They intended to start a veteran trio of Briggs, DJ Williams and James Anderson and bring along Bostic and Greene. But injuries to 2/3 of the corps forced them to start rookies who were not ready for game action. If Williams and Briggs stay healthy, providing stability in run support, look for Mel Tucker to maximize the athleticism and speed of Bostic and Shea McClellin both in space and in the pass rush.

4) Who do you think will be the two starting safeties be when the season begins?

Read More …

NFL fans have the patience of my orange boy cat (named Bear, pictured above) once he knows his wet food has been moved from the can to the plate. There’s a lot of walking in circles. His sweet-tempered meow morphs into a more desperate, restless MEOORRRRE. He is so hungry for a taste of what he knows is so close he is unable to control himself.

Telling an NFL fan training camp and the preseason are meaningless is the equivalent of placing Bear’s plate on the ground and then holding him ten feet away. Telling them what I’m about to tell them, that 2014 is but a stepping stone to the mountaintop, will elicit more than a MEOORRRRE. It’ll end with my blogging hands scratched until blood is drawn.

2013’s edition of the Chicago Bears established a new direction under the leadership of Marc Trestman and excommunicated the old direction (Lovie) and leadership (Urlacher). It was only an 8-8 campaign but for a fan base desperate for big league offense it left even the most pessimistic fan with a firm understanding the arrow is pointed in the correct direction.

2013, coupled with Emery’s 2012 offseason, were the first step in what Pat Riley calls  “the innocent climb.” Here is a publisher’s summary of that notion:

The innocent climb is the surge that occurs within a team as they are accomplishing more because of the synergy that occurs within a team. Innocence means understanding that the team comes first and being carried along by that; being naive means being ignorant. Innocence doesn’t mean being naive. Teamwork and all of its benefits happen when everyone puts the team first. innocence comes when the leader believes in something and puts him or herself out to accomplish that.

Climbing innocently began with the establishment of this new direction and the building of a new identity. But something funny happened on the way to Soldier Field. Trestman and Emery were successful at a more rapid rate than expected and produced a championship-caliber offense in the first year of this new program.

Read More …

You walk into a bar. A fella says, “What do you think of the Bears this season?” You sit there in that moment, raise the cold glass of Bud to your lips and realize the fella just ordered a sandwich that don’t fit his mouth. He expected a “they’ll be pretty good”. He’s getting a lot more.

Thoughts…

• Optimism in camp is usually a synonym for bullshit but there seems to be some legitimate optimism surrounding the linebacker position. Shea McClellin seems finally able to utilize his athleticism. Khaseem Greene and DJ Williams have been making plays. Lance Briggs has stopped bitching and moaning about the ghosts of defense past. Hell, even Christian Jones has received praise from Phil Emery.
• If you don’t know much about Greene, he’s a sound man. CLICK HERE to read an article detailing his decision to wear number 52 as a tribute to his friend Eric LeGrand.
• The only way Phil Emery is cutting Pat O’Donnell is the rookie having a couple nightmare performances in the preseason and Tress Way is sound. Emery can say what he wants about the best players making the squad but there would be a significant egg stain on his cheeks should he be guilty of wasting a sixth-round pick on a dud punter.
• Side note: Tress Way is a great name.

Read More …

Kyle Fuller interception! He’s going to be great!

But Jordan Palmer THREW the interception! Get Jimmy Clausen out there!

These are meant to be written in jest but I can 100% assure you in some miserable cubicle somewhere a Bears fan is following camp updates on Twitter, sweating profusely through his free Joseph A. Bank suit shirt and having these very same thoughts.

Here would be my rules for enjoying the information as it exits Bourbonnais without committing the family savings to its relevance.

#3 Practice Field Results Don’t Matter

There is a simple fact individuals forget when it comes to camp results. For a Bears player to make a positive play, another Bears player needs to make a negative one. Someone must throw the pass on a brilliant interception. Someone must miss the block when a new defensive end gets to the quarterback unabated. When a receiver makes a great catch down the sideline, someone was tasked with covering him.

For instance, Larry Mayer of the Bears Tweeted this:

LM: #Bears QB Jordan Palmer hits WR Chris Williams deep down right sideline, beating CB Kyle Fuller.

This is presented by Mayer, who has never Tweeted or written a negative word about the Chicago Bears since a McCaskey started signing his checks. But nly one of those three individuals is going to be depended upon for success in 2014 and it ain’t the first two.

#2 Reps Matter in Total/Location

Read More …

“Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I assure you, it’s much more serious than that.”

-Former Liverpool manager Bill Shankly

The ritual of Sunday mornings is unique to each American football fan and this one is no different. Mine and the lady’s fancy coffee maker has the pot warm when I wake, usually no later than 6 AM. I accumulate my morning news – NY Times Arts section, Drudge & Huffington because I’m too lazy to not have my politics aggregated for me on both sides, Guardian soccer.  After a shower and a visit to the marble throne I’m on the 7 train from Queens to Josie Woods bar in Manhattan where I proceed with the ritual of push-pinning jerseys to the rafters and selecting which games will go where on the myriad of televisions. (Pats and Eagles fans are sent way, way, far away from us.)

Josie Woods isn’t a great bar. Hell, I’m not even sure Josie Woods is a mediocre bar. But Steph is there. Maciej is there. Reverend Dave is there when he’s not contracting insect-borne illnesses on the dark continent. Sometimes Noah shows up! Brian and Wayne and Alicia and Vinny used to be there. Josie Woods is the canvas on which the portrait of my Bears fandom has been laid these last fourteen years. The Art Institute in which that portrait has been displayed? You’re looking at it.

Read More …

I call it The Joe Anderson Boner.

“What is The Joe Anderson Boner?” you ask. Well, I shall tell you now. The Joe Anderson Boner is the yearly occurrence in the pants of Bears fans caused by the over-hyping of meaningless performances in the summer leading up to the NFL season. It might be the result of a few Larry Mayer Tweets that resemble something like, “The player who really jumped off the field in Bourbonnais today was Joe Anderson” or a 7 catch, 110 yard receiving performance in the second half of a preseason contest wherein Joe Anderson is being covered by someone of the skill equivalent to Loni Anderson.

This is not idiosyncratic to Bears fans, mind you. Every team has their summer boners. My brother Jon, a diehard New York Jets fan, once made a tee shirt that said “Kellen is the Answer” due to the boner-inducing camp performances of Kellen Clemens.

Read More …