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?

Let them know why you're wearing the crown

Sorry, America. I wouldn't have been terribly upset had the Saints won, but you don't turn the ball over that many times, in a snowy Soldier Field, and expect to win. Or, evidently, compete. Grossman had another mediocre-but-inoffensive game while Jones and Benson ran all over the Saints and the defense looked much improved. Another two weeks off and I think this team is ready to silence all the doubters.

Although Bill Simmons' recent column was semi-complaining about everyone hating the Patriots, he makes a good point about the state of following sports in this country today:

Sports has evolved into a 24/7 event, between the instant highlights and internet coverage, thousands and thousands of Web sites and blogs, an infinite number of fantasy leagues, a never-ending slew of sports radio shows, sportswriters screaming at one another on TV and everything else you can imagine. Every game and event is digested and processed almost instantly, and then it's rehashed and digested again, and then it's beaten into the ground, and within a few hours everyone feels obligated to come up with their own unique angle on things -- even if it's extreme, even if it's insane, even if it's blisteringly nasty or vicious, even if it's completely nonsensical or inane.

This is totally, 100% true. There's just too much, especially in football, which in taking over as the new national sport has inherited the bloated following that comes with that mantle, magnified even further by the cable and internet age. ESPN.com uses video games to simulate possible outcomes of football games, and even writes recaps to go with them, as though the games have actually happened in any sense. Naturally, they're never right (the Bears were picked to lose both their playoff games, and the computer took San Diego over New England and NE over Indy).

But with all this coverage, people inevitably look for the best story and then not only run it into the ground, but seem to go after anything that might stand in its way. The best story was the Saints. They helped New Orleans recover from Hurricane Katrina, they have exciting rookies, Drew Brees had an MVP-like year, they'd never earned a bye before. They were the sentimental favorite. And I'm not blaming anyone for that. But why did "the Saints are the sentimental favorite" seem to go hand-in-hand with "the Bears can't win, won't win, forget it, they stink." It's like everyone forgot that:

(a) The Bears won 13 games
(b) In October, the exact same pundits were suggesting the Bears could go 19-0
(c) The Saints, a warm-weather dome team, were coming into Chicago in January
(d) The Saints' defense really wasn't very good

Dome teams don't always lose outdoors to better teams - just look at the Colts last week - but it seems to happen more often than not. People looked at the Saints' offense, the fact that the Bears' D had looked mediocre recently, and handed the Saints the win because they were the team that didn't have Rex Grossman. Which is all well and good except that they were also the team that didn't have Brian Urlacher, Adewale Ogunleye, Nathan Vasher, Charles Tillman, and the rest of that playmaking defense. You know who the Saints did have? Fred Thomas. How'd that work out?

People also continued to jump on Grossman, effectively handing him the blame for a loss that hadn't yet happened. They forgot, further, that Grossman actually has a very good arm and just makes bad decisions sometimes (because he's basically a rookie, still). No one seemed to consider that the situation favored Grossman not being put in a position to win the game - the Bears could afford to run the ball a lot and the Saints were likely to be affected by the weather. Yet every analyst on ESPN.com picked the Saints on Friday.

And in perhaps my favorite twist, Gene Wojciechowski wrote the following three columns:

December 18: "Least impressive 12-2 team ever"
January 14: "Bears are softest team in last four and should have lost to Seattle"
January 21: "Um, okay, I guess the Bears are good"

Well, sorry, Gene, and everyone else. Once again the Bears proved that you can bash them all you want, but when the time comes, they get it done. 39-14, no less, a game that wasn't even particularly close for most of the second half. The much-maligned offense got into the end zone plenty (helped by short fields thanks to the defense's forced turnovers) and the D looked great for most of the game. And now it's off to Miami.

Which means we have to spend two weeks listening to the talking heads say how the Bears have no chance in the Super Bowl because of the huge edge the Colts have at the quarterback position. Seriously. Can't wait.