The Bears just finished a season in which their two best players–Brian Urlacher and Rex Grossman–were out with injuries for weeks on end, making it difficult to gauge the first year of head coach Lovie Smith. After an upset win over the Minnesota Vikings to open December, the Bears flirted with the idea of making the playoffs, but they finished with four straight losses to close at 5-11. Smith established a reputation for calm leadership with the youngest team in the NFL; but then, calm leadership was exactly what management had rejected in firing coach Dick Jauron, who’d guided last year’s youngest team in the league to a 7-9 record. Had the Bears made any progress whatsoever? There were reasons for optimism, especially in light of the injuries–rehabilitation has combined with opportunistic draft picks to provide the stuff of many a Super Bowl contender–but the signs of progress were piecemeal and open to debate.
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To begin with, a lot of Bears fans–who by the end of the season had gone from bitter disappointment to simple surliness–might dispute my choice of the two best players. Urlacher came under fire for missing games with a hamstring injury that nagged him from the first day of training camp and a calf injury that required surgery at midseason, but when he was blindsided by an article in the Sporting News calling him the most overrated player in the league–a shameless if successful bid for newsstand sales from a once-proud publication, the so-called bible of baseball–Bears fans were rightfully riled. No one knows Urlacher’s shortcomings better than they, and while they criticized him last year for soft play and this year for being injured, there’s little doubt of what a beast he is when healthy. The Bears didn’t win a game this season without him, which perhaps says more than any individual statistic can about his importance to the team and–more specifically–to the concept of team defense. With Urlacher the Bears’ defense functioned as a unit; without him it produced brilliant plays–most by the maturing defensive end Alex Brown and linebacker Lance Briggs, if not rookie Tommie Harris–but also cataclysmic collapses, most in the secondary.
The Bears are a mirror image, with most of their skilled young players on defense. Urlacher, Briggs, and rookie Hunter Hillenmeyer–forced inside to replace Urlacher–make a good crew of linebackers. Brown and Harris look solid in the defensive line, especially when bolstered by Adewale Ogunleye. Rookie Ian Scott looks like a possible run blocker when he “fills out” at defensive tackle, and if Michael Haynes has never lived up to his billing as a first-round draft pick, he may yet solidify the line as a situational player who fills in at all positions. Like Urlacher, Charles “Peanut” Tillman suffered injuries this season, but he remains a tall and athletic cornerback, increasingly teamed opposite rookie corner Nathan Vasher as the season went on. If Mike Brown returns to form as a safety with a nose for the ball, the Bears will need only to find another safety and a nickel back–with Bobby Gray, Jerry Azumah, and perhaps R.W. McQuarters to pick from–to field a formidable defense.
I prefer to think fans got a better idea of what this team and this coaching staff were capable of in the earlier game against the Packers, when the Bears went to Lambeau Field and, led by Grossman, pulled off an upset win in the second week. That win served only to build up unreal expectations. Even so, if the Bears could win one game with Grossman and four games on defense alone, it’s tempting to consider where their season might have gone had they had him all year. It’s worth noting that an 11-loss record earns the Bears an 11-loss schedule against the league’s patzers next season. So, as a way out of 2004 and into 2005, celebrate the Bears’ misfortunes; they looked so bad against the Packers that there truly is no place to go but up.
