Bears Sun Sep 12 2010

The Season Approaches

By Brian Lauvray

The Bears faithful are in for an extremely painful and bleak fall. The Chicago Bears will only win 6 games and Footballic Ramblings has already busted out the self-hurt razors and delicious bourbon to help us forget about how awful this season will be. Now, as always, Footballic Ramblings is not a column written about the Chicago Bears for Chicago Bears fans. No, instead this column is an incredibly fun exercise in realism and fact about the ineptitude of the Bears and the blind optimism (some might use the word "clinical insanity") that their fans do possess. In any case, the Bears are going 6-10. That's it. No playoffs (again) and Lovie Smith will likely be fired mid-season if the Bears do not come out like gangbusters in the first quarter of the schedule (which they won't do).

The Bears, for a number of seasons now, have been mortgaging away their future (draft picks to Denver in the Jay Cutler trade) and myopically fixating on a player or two (Julius Peppers and Chester Taylor this past off-season) in the misguided notion that one or two players can fix problems that truly go to the core of the team. The Bears are still a very flawed squad; they have a secondary that's ripe for exploitation at the hands of a rapidly evolving and very much "pass-first" NFC North. Consider all three of Chicago's divisional foes are armed to the teeth with offenses that air it out all. the. time. The Minnesota Vikings? Without a doubt. Green Bay? Uhh, yes! Emphatically, YES. And of course, the Detroit Lions. Yep, the same MoTown Leos who went winless two years ago and who won a mere two games last season. The game done changed in the NFC North and yeah, the Bears are still stumbling around trying to figure it out. Meanwhile their incredibly vulnerable secondary is going to be crispy like toast all season long.

Upfront on defense the aforementioned Julius Peppers will be doing his best Sisyphus impersonation as he tries out his new one-man revue "How To Play Defensive Line As One Man". Just behind Peppers will be the ancient linebacking corp that ...GULP... is the strength of the Bears defense. Again, I cannot emphasize how old, slow and lacking in talent this Bears defensive unit is.

Offensively, and this is damning with faint praise, the Bears may score enough points in a few games this year to win the six games I've projected for them. Still, the offensive line is roughly the strength and consistency of the "Brand X" paper towels in a Bounty commercial. If the o-line continues its dismal play from the preseason Jay Cutler will be injured by Week 6 and then it's the Todd Collins Show, Bears fans.

Anyway, it's a scant two hours til kickoff so I bid you adieu and goodluck. Footballic Ramblings will be back tomorrow morning with a full review of Week One.