It was infuriating to watch the Bears play the Dolphins a week ago. They lacked passion at Soldier Field that Sunday. They lacked guts. There is no more difficult experience for a sports fan than believing you – with a wing-sauce soaked beard and Guinness-foamed mustache – care more about the outcome of your team’s contest than the team itself. (This is the case far more often than fans know.)

There was nothing infuriating about yesterday’s embarrassment at Foxboro. It is impossible to be angry about a result so predictable. The Bears coaching staff was shown just how far they are from being able to compete mentally with the elite coaching staffs in the sport. The Bears players, especially their stars, were shown how stars are meant to perform on the grand stage of the NFL Sunday. The Bears general manager was forced to sit through another sixty minutes of his prized free agents, $15M of defensive end this season, donned their invisibility cloaks for the eighth consecutive week. Lamarr Houston removed his cloak just long enough to put the punctuation mark on this shambolic sentence.

The Bears right now are the most lethal combination in sports. They have star players not performing to their potential and a coaching staff unable to elevate the play of lesser talent. Calling them mediocre would be an insult to mediocrity.