Rex Grossman has prominent eyebrows that give him an impish appearance even inside a football helmet. This triumph over anonymity is something Grossman shares with the Bears’ last two championship quarterbacks, Jim McMahon and Bobby Wade. A single-digit uniform number is another. Both McMahon and Wade wore number 9, and both harbored reputations for recklessness on and off the field. But it takes more than that to make a championship quarterback. Grossman’s predecessor with number 8 was Cade McNown, a mixer to be sure, going back to his days ignoring parking tickets at UCLA. But he never had the arm strength to sling his left-handed passes properly, and in the end he was chased out of town as something of a Peck’s bad boy who had none of the lovable rashness associated with that role. Grossman has arm strength to spare, and arm strength is to quarterbacks what speed is to wide receivers and height to basketball players–the essential that can’t be taught. Grossman’s relatively short and squat by the standards of present-day NFL quarterbacks, being listed at 6-foot-1 and 222 pounds, but he has the sturdy legs and wide backside of a baseball power pitcher, as well as the arm.
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Held back through most of his rookie year as the Bears pretended to be playoff contenders, Grossman made a statistically unimpressive debut three weeks from the end of the Bears season, completing only 13 of 30 passes; but his ability to throw deep kept the Minnesota Vikings’ defense honest, and his ability to avoid even a single interception safeguarded a 13-10 victory, which a fellow rookie, cornerback Charles “Peanut” Tillman, sealed with an interception of his own, outfighting dangerous Randy Moss for a pass in the end zone that would have given the Vikes a game-winning touchdown in the final minute. The following week Grossman looked altogether more comfortable. He weathered a couple of bad early breaks–a Justin Gage fumble on his first pass, a crisp slant, and an interception on a slightly overled pass tipped by Marty Booker–to throw a 59-yard touchdown pass on the Bears’ very next play from scrimmage. Grossman dropped straight back and zinged the ball on a line to Booker, who was running a straight fly pattern down the right sideline. The Washington Redskins defender got turned around and stopped running, leaving Booker to catch the ball in stride and go the rest of the way untouched. The Bears’ defense had just stymied the Skins’ offense after the interception, forcing the Skins to settle for a field goal, and the touchdown put the Bears up, 7-3. It was a beautiful play that promised–as Grossman chased Booker down to claim the ball and carry it to the sideline–many touchdown passes to come (there’d be one more before the day was done). Grossman instantly became the embodiment of the Bears’ hopes for the future.
And so it was that Jauron headed for the exit, officially removed from his duties on Monday. The day before, the Bears gave no one any good reason to retain him. Following a game plan that must have called on him to stay mobile in the pocket and make his own decisions, Grossman bombed away as if to show what a strong arm he had–especially after the Bears fell behind 14-0 in the second half. But he couldn’t hit anything long. When his right middle finger apparently snagged a Kansas City lineman during one wild heave, Grossman was done for the game and the season; it was hard not to see that finger as symbolic of a last gesture toward the Jauron era. The Bears’ coaching staff gave backup quarterback Kordell Stewart little help in adjusting to the game, and he badly mismanaged the clock as the Bears drove deep into Kansas City territory just before halftime. A running play left the Bears inside the 10-yard line with 12 seconds to go, and instead of taking the field goal and going to the locker room, the Bears opted to squeeze in one more play. Stewart did the one thing he couldn’t do. Given an auxiliary receiver on the sideline to throw over if he needed to avoid a sack and a grounding call, Stewart instead threw the ball straight to him, and Bobby Wade made the rookie mistake of making the catch, staying in bounds, and running out the clock. If nothing else sealed Jauron’s fate, that did. The Bears did march for a field goal to open the second half, but this was the last exhibit of respectability they had to offer this season. Even their determination to play hard no matter what went awry toward the end, when overexuberant pass-interference penalties on Tillman and Jerry Azumah and an unsportsmanlike-conduct penalty on R.W. McQuarters for arguing the calls led to a Kansas City field goal on the way to a 31-3 finale.
