It’s clear a fandom is completely defeated and without hope when all they’re asking for is for their team to just be evil and unremarkable.
Only to 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 terrible, and even more so when they insist on being dysfunctional, weird, and incompetent to a degree unmatched by anyone.
The point is, it would have been bad enough in Halas Hall on Wednesday without the confusing and mysterious dismissal of Alan Williams as defensive coordinator. While the core of it still remains out of the mainstream as crazy rumors spread on Twitter, it’s worth asking why needs a lawyer to speak for him during a ‘health issue’. We’ll leave that for another time when we know more.
Buried under that rubble was the fact that the Bears placed their starting left tackle, Braxton Jones, on IR with a neck injury that no one seems to know when it occurred. He played the entire game against Tampa. Was it on the plane? Driving home? Did he wear it all season, which may have contributed to his poor play? That in itself is a bad day and deserves a lot of research.
It’s the third item on a Wednesday for the Bears.
That in itself would have been enough. And yet there was Justin Fields he let his coaches know in his weekly press release, probably rightly so, and then called the media back to the locker room so he could “clarify,” which is to say that a member of the PR staff probably told him to clarify that he that wasn’t With a coaching staff and especially an OC in Luke Getsy that has done exactly nothing to put him in a position to succeed no matter how limited he is.
What is clear is that Fields has been overloaded with instructions and changes since last season, all of which has left him timid and hesitant. Both Fields and the coaching staff overcorrected on last season’s run-happy tactic, which both recognized would not in itself be a long-term idea for success. But that doesn’t mean it should have been abandoned, as it was in the first two weeks of this season.
But it’s always that way with the Bears. They have to be weird, especially while also wasting everyone’s time. It certainly stems from the ownership, a group of sheltered lunatics who have never had a job other than driving this team into the ditch, and as a good friend described them, spend their free time drinking room temperature chocolate milk in a or another speakeasy in the distance. northern suburbs. And they have a habit of hiring other crazies to actually run the football team, and we keep getting this. Birds of a feather and all that.
They can’t just screw up a draft pick or make bad signings, although they can do that a lot. They need to announce the hiring of a coach without actually telling him. Or firing coaches without actually firing them. Or have ownership hire a coach about what their GM wants. Or their All-Pro center destroys another offensive linemaN with a weight on a shooting range. Or dozens of other stories that only seem to happen to this organization that lost its relationship with the rails a long time ago.
It never ends, and all we ask is to suffer in peace. We don’t want the Bears on national television any more than you do. We don’t want them talked about in the 24 hour news cycle. We understand that we are being used as a comfort blanket to make other fandoms feel like things could always be worse. We know this will always remain the case. We don’t need it on the front page. And yet…
We would long to just be Arizona. Unimportant and out of sight. It is the saddest, lost hope.
And now back to Jude Bellingham
Remember what I said about Jude Bellingham, who is either the best midfielder in the world or about to be?:
And as for John Kruk…
Announcers aren’t supposed to feel everything that’s happening on the field, but we’ll excuse John Kruk for calling out this play by Nick Castellanos that saved the game for the Phillies yesterday afternoon, just because this is probably what every Phillie fan was going through. :
Boy, that’s a rollercoaster.
Again, in all fairness, dropping that fly on a foul ball was the right thing to do, and there’s no way Kruk could have anticipated Castellanos throwing an absolute dart off the spin given Castellanos’ history of being a defensive goober. Sometimes you just have to take the ride.
Follow Sam on Twitter @Felsgate and on Bluesky @felsgate.bsky.social