Suck party weekend

This is hardly going to go down as the worst weekend in my life - August 8, 2004 pretty much has its weekend sewn up - but it's gotta be top five. Which I suppose says more about my sheltered existence than anything else. Nonetheless, it was not very good. First, Drew and I did the second root beer taste test on Saturday, and it was massively disappointing. Roommate Katie asked us what the moral was after it was over, to which I replied, "Either we don't like root beer as much as we thought, or... I don't know." We tested 25 root beers (probably a few too many, in retrospect, but I only started to feel it right at the end), and I only gave out four above-average grades - and two of those were to the house brands of Target and Walgreens! I don't want to ruin the write-up so I'll stop there for now, but suffice it to say it was disappointing.

Then, of course, came Sunday. Half of me saw this coming and half of me hoped it wouldn't. But there's no getting around it: the Bears played terribly. Half of that is due credit to the Colts - barring the one big run in the first quarter, they really held Thomas Jones down fairly well (15 for 112 looks great, but take away the one 52-yarder and it's 14 for 60, which is fine but nothing spectacular). The other half is a vicious cycle involving the defense. It could not stop the Colts. The bend-but-don't-break philosophy is fine if you're going to put up several touchdowns a game, and especially if you're going to get a bunch of turnovers and hang onto the ball yourselves - the Saints game, in particular, worked this way. This game, though? Not so much. The Bears turned the ball over five times, negating the three they got back. And Manning and the Colts were only too happy to take 5-8 yards on virtually every play. The Bears' D was so worried about the long pass that they played the safeties too deep and let Manning have every short pass he wanted - so Manning just kept moving the chains and moving the chains. This resulted mostly in field goals (although they gave up the Wayne TD despite playing the safeties deep), keeping the score looking close, but looking at TOP and total yards tells you the story of the game:

TOP
Colts: 38:04
Bears: 21:56

Total Yards
Colts: 430
Bears: 265

Ugly. You know why this happened? The defense was so scared of the big play that it played overly safe, feeling fine as long as it held the Colts to few or no points. What no one seemed to think about was that (a) the time on the field was not good for the defense and (b) the time off the field was not good for Rex Grossman. With minimal exception, Grossman's best games during the season came when the defense shut down the other team quickly (with either short drives or turnovers) and allowed the Bears' offense to get back onto the field and Grossman to do his thing. In this game, the Bears' defense spent a ton of time on the field because it refused to try and stop the Colts cold. Manning seemed flustered by blitzes, yet, fearful of allowing the big play, the Bears rarely blitzed. The tackling was woeful. Peyton Manning isn't a future first-ballot HOFer because he can only beat you one way, guys - Manning was willing to take what the defense was only too happy to allow. So while the game looked closer for longer, in reality it was never that close once the Colts grabbed the lead.

To recap: Devin Hester was awesome, and Thomas Jones was okay, and the rest of the team pretty much sucked. The Colts played well, don't get me wrong, but the Bears really looked bad, and given how historically bad Indy's D is I don't think we can give them all the credit for that. Maybe the Bears can get back here, but Grossman needs to mature a bit more first, among other things. It wasn't all his fault, but he looked like a rookie making his first start, which is not what you want from your starting QB in the Super Bowl. Bottom line: the Bears didn't deserve to win, and frankly should probably consider themselves lucky to have lost by as little as 12. Ugh.

Oh, and was it me or did the commercials SUCK? I think this was the worst crop ever. There was only one that I really thought was okay - the Bud Light one with the axe guy - and even then I only really liked it for the last line. And what was with all the damn suicide jokes? GM and Washington Mutual found jumping to your death funny enough to include it in the plots of ads? Good Lord, people. It was even worse than Frito-Lay and Coke using black history to sell products; at least those ads had respectful tones, even if they were cheap money grabs at heart.

The Coke GTA parody was okay, but not great. The only other memorable one - for the wrong reason - was the absolutely vile Doritos ad implying that the cashier and the guy with the mustache have sex on the register. Gross. Federline's Nationwide ad might have been funny if we hadn't all seen it ten times already. The Snickers ad was moronic. And whatever happened to that one that was supposed to feature a marriage proposal? Did I miss it somehow?