It’s obvious a fandom is completely beaten down and without hope when all they ask for is for their team to just be bad and unnoticeable.
To merely fade into the background of an NFL season as nothing more than a name in the standings. But no, it’s never that easy in Chicago with the Bears. They’re still news when they’re awful, and even more so when they insist on being dysfunctional, weird, and incompetent to a degree unmatched by anyone.
The thing is, it would have been a bad enough day at Halas Hall on Wednesday without the confusing and mysterious resignation of Alan Williams as defensive coordinator. While the heart of it still remains out of the mainstream as crazy rumors fly around on Twitter, it is worth asking why one needs a lawyer to speak for him during a “health concern.” We’ll leave that for another time when we know more.
Buried underneath that rubble was the fact that the Bears put their starting left tackle, Braxton Jones, on IR with a neck injury that no one seems to know when it occurred. He played the whole game against Tampa. Was it on the plane? Drive home? Has he been carrying it all season, possibly contributing to his poor play. That’s a bad day all to itself, and worthy of a ton of scrutiny.
It’s the third item on a Wednesday for the Bears.
That would have been enough on its own. And yet there was Justin Fields airing out his coaches in his weekly presser, probably rightly, and then calling the media back to the locker room so he could “clarify,” i.e. mostly likely had a member of the PR staff tell him to make it clear that he wasn’t bus-tossing a coaching staff and particularly an OC in Luke Getsy that have done exactly nothing to put him a position to succeed, no matter how limited he might actually be.
What’s been clear is that Fields has been overloaded with instruction and changes from last season, and the whole thing has made him gun shy and hesitant. Both Fields and the coaching staff have overcorrected from the run-happy tactics of last season, which both recognized wouldn’t be a long-term idea for success on its own. But that hardly means it should have been abandoned as it has through the first two weeks of this season.
But it’s always this way with the Bears. They have to be weird and notably so while they’re also wasting everyone’s time. It certainly trickles down from ownership, a group of sheltered weirdos who have never held another job other than driving this team into the ditch, and as a close friend described them, spend their free time drinking room temperature chocolate milk in some speakeasy in the far northern suburbs. And they have a habit of hiring other weirdos to actually run the football team, and we keep getting this. Birds of a feather and all that.
They can’t just blow draft picks or make bad signings, though they can do that a ton. They have to announce the hiring of a coach without actually telling him. Or have coaches fired without actually firing them. Or have ownership hire a coach over their GM’s wishes. Or their All-Pro center clobbers another offensive lineman with a weight at a gun range. Or dozens of other stories that seem to only happen to this organization that has lost its relationship with the rails long ago.
It never ends, and all we ask is to suffer in peace. We don’t want the Bears on national TV any more than you do. We don’t want them talked about in the 24-hour news cycle. We understand we’re used as the comfort blanket to make other fandoms feel like it could always be worse. We know it will always be that way. We don’t need it on the front page. And yet…
We’d long to just be Arizona. Inconsequential and out of sight. It’s the saddest, forlorn hope.
And now, back to Jude Bellingham
Remember that thing I said about Jude Bellingham either being the best midfielder in the world or about to be?:
And as for John Kruk …
Announcers aren’t really supposed to feel everything that goes on the field, but we’ll excuse John Kruk for the call on this Nick Castellanos play that saved the game for the Phillies yesterday afternoon just because it’s probably what every Phillie fan was going through:
Boy, that’s a roller coaster.
Again, in fairness, the proper play was to let that fly drop for a foul ball, and there’s no way Kruk could have anticipated Castellanos throwing an absolute dart off the spin, given Castellanos’s history of being a defensive goober. Sometimes, you just gotta take the ride.
Follow Sam on Twitter @Felsgate and on Bluesky @felsgate.bsky.social
