Post-honeymoon

Bears’ fans are a gullible lot, by and large.  Tell them their team is good, and they’ll hear the word “great,” along with the phrase “one of the greatest of all time.”  Tell them their team is great, and Soldier Field turns to bedlam.  The Chicago media spent months telling fans how great their team was, even though it wasn’t.

This dance has been going on for as long as I can remember; that willingness to drink McCaskey Kool Aid has always struck me as an odd initiation rite, and one I’d just as soon take a pass on.  What’s different this time is fans have put down the Kool Aid not even midway through the season and gone so far as to ask who poured such crap in the first place.  The media, not wanting to end up on the work end of a pitchfork, is passing blame onto the Bears’ front office and coaching staff.  And that’s where we stand six games into the season.

In all the ways that count in McCaskey World, Lovie Smith was the ideal Bears’ coach, given his love of defense and unfamiliarity with the forward pass.  To borrow a lyric from the Talking Heads, with Smith it was all “Run, run, run, run, run, run, run away” to a first down or a punt, it didn’t matter which, because Coach figured that at some point his defense would score a touchdown or set up a field goal for a kicker with the last name of Gould.

But after nine years of Lovie Smith rope-a-doping critics who wanted him to open up his offense, the McCaskeys decided on a change, lest the villagers rise up in revolt.  Only the Kool Aid mix known as Marc Trestman didn’t work, and neither did the one labelled John Fox.  The mix called Matt Nagy tasted good for a season, so much so the Chicago media went into overdrive pedaling the 2019 vintage.  That was a mistake.

Now we have a situation where Nagy runs the ball seven times total in a game and declares, “I’m not an idiot” as to why that strategy is doomed to fail.  If I’ve learned anything in life, it’s to take any such declarations with a grain of salt, or two.