I have run this site
every day for eighteen years.
It’s been my pleasure.
But be warned, I’m still going to be writing quite often, including a renewed focus on my game previews in-season.
A Farewell (as Editor) Haiku
But be warned, I’m still going to be writing quite often, including a renewed focus on my game previews in-season.
Enjoy the holiday. Data has some excellent work on Wednesday.
Something tells me the new editor (a) won’t be doing links collections very often and (b) won’t find the cat pun as funny as the current editor. Nevertheless, here are a few things worth looking at as we venture into the holiday weekend.
Enjoy the weekend! If you drink, don’t drive. With the availability of Ubers now, there is simply no excuse to put folks in harm’s way due to your negligence. Once the alcohol hits your lips, your hands shouldn’t hit the steering wheel. It is a rule that works.
Still working out some kinks with Robert’s login.
After looking forward to adding a Center all offseason, fans may have been surprised to see Cody Whitehair named the #Bears starter — I was!
But after diving into his tape, this move makes a LOT of sense. I break down Cody, Musty, and Center as a whole:https://t.co/a5JuV555LQ
— Robert Schmitz (@robertkschmitz) June 26, 2023
A self demotion.
for going haiku crazy.
warrants a haiku.
For 18 years, this website has operated with a singular editorial voice. And it is time to acknowledge that voice has gotten stale.
Maybe it was writing the 50th haiku of this calendar year. Maybe it was waking one morning, realizing I had nothing for the site, and just embedding some random tweet. Whatever the case, it has become clear to me that this site I love so much is in desperate need of a new vision and a modern approach. Enter Robert K. Schmitz, who will become our second editor-in-chief on July 10th.
I have admired Robert’s work, mostly on Twitter and YouTube, for several years. He possesses a unique voice, detailed and passionate, and has mastered multiple formats with which he delivers that voice. His tape study videos are the best I’ve seen. His engagement with fans is measured, balanced and often quite funny. He’s not a “hot take” guy. He’s not one of these Bill Simmons rip-offs, writing columns like How the Chicago Bears are Like Your Ex-Girlfriend. He’s not someone who approaches sports with a mocking tone. For a long time, I debated bringing him onto the DBB roster, but I always thought a lateral move was beneath him. Now, it’s his show.
But I’m not going anywhere. I am simply moving upstairs. I’m a McCaskey now. The Blogger Emeritus. I will continue to operate the DBB Twitter handle. My game previews, which are about 3% football content these days, will still arrive each Friday during the season. And when I have something interesting to say, I’m still going to use this platform to say it. But the content on this site, day-to-day, will be completely under Robert’s control. In order for him to make DBB his own, I must give him full autonomy. (And I must admit, I’m incredibly excited to watch the Chicago Bears without a notebook in front of me.)
I’m 41 years old, and I’m both a young and old 41-year-old. I still have the passion and enthusiasm I had when I was a kid, especially when it comes to the Chicago Bears, to the cinema, to learning and writing. But I’m also an antiquated curmudgeon, set in my ways, unwilling to adapt. In order for DBB (the site) to maintain its relevance moving forward, it cannot continue to be led by someone who has no interest in All-22 tape or the NFL Draft. Robert’s arrival is not about me stepping away from the site. Robert’s arrival is about ensuring DBB, this passion project, continues to grow.
The future is bright around here.
We are a few weeks away from football practices starting. Some stadium drama, but not much.
Normally this kind of statement is hyperbolic, but Tremaine Edmunds is literally one of the biggest inside linebackers in NFL History (based on recent combine tracking data) https://t.co/CjBavbO6im pic.twitter.com/EGdLxWNwmr
— Robert Schmitz (@robertkschmitz) June 15, 2023
One of the more underrated elements of this off-season has been the Bears fortifying their linebacking unit into one of the best in the sport.
True story. About a year ago (I think) I got word from a source close to Ted Phillips that the former team president was cutting his workday short to pay a visit to Virginia McCaskey. Virginia’s family was concerned the illness with which she was suffering at that time might be the one to finally take her out. Ted, essentially a member of the McCaskey family, did not want to miss what might be a final opportunity to thank the matriarch of the Chicago Bears for giving him the opportunity to lead the franchise he loves. I wrote a column about it called In Praise of Virginia McCaskey. I never wrote “Virginia McCaskey is dying.” As a matter of fact, I deliberately did not speculate on her health, even joking about the notion of “good health” for someone in their late-90s. And yet days after my column posted, I was inundated with folks on social media criticizing me for Virginia McCaskey’s continued existence.
You see, what happened was, nobody read the post. Nobody read what was, in fact, my attempt at a living eulogy, a column I have been told Virginia read and enjoyed immensely. They simply read the first paragraph and ran with, “DaBearsBlog says Virginia McCaskey will be dead in minutes.”
I don’t know Marc Silverman (Silvy) personally, but I feel like I do, and he has been a pivotal part of the success of DBB. Here’s what I imagine happened last week. Someone in Lake Forest told Silvy that the team is frustrated with Chase Claypool’s progress. Silvy went on his radio show and shared that information. But he didn’t say, “CHASE CLAYPOOL IS A BUST AND THE BEARS REGRET THE TRADE!” He actually said there were frustrations, which there usually are when injuries are involved, and the ball was now effectively in Claypool’s court. He sounded, at least to me, completely measured and perfectly reliable. But the next thing you know, it is a nationally aggregated headline and the whole of #BearsTwitter is “forced” to respond, themselves having no earthly clue what anyone inside Halas Hall thinks about anything.
Here’s what I know about Chase Claypool. I know he was an incredibly productive receiver over the first two years of his career, averaging 60-860-5. I know Ryan Poles loved his unique set of skills enough to deliver the Steelers a second-round draft pick in the middle of the 2022 campaign. And I know that Claypool was relatively unproductive in the months that followed, unsurprising since he joined the worst team in the league and his quarterback fought through injuries over the final month. Do I think Claypool is going to be a star in Chicago? I have no idea. Do I think Claypool is going to be out of Chicago after the 2023 season? I have no idea. But I am willing to wait until he has a full off-season with a quarterback who likes him a quite a bit so that I can judge him over the course of a full campaign.
And I can tell you what someone inside Halas Hall told me about the Chase Claypool story: “They are out there running around in shorts. What is there to be frustrated about?” (This person was on vacation and accompanied their text response with a picture of blue water and a green beverage.) The subtext of this comment: frustrations with Claypool, and Claypool’s overall production, are not that important big picture. If wasting a second-round pick brings this building down, the structural integrity never existed at the start.
So why did this innocuous Silvy comment gain such traction? The answer is not complicated. The sports media landscape is now a conglomerate of aggregators; folks who do none of their own research, cultivate none of their own sources, write at about a seventh-grade level, and get paid by the click. They scavenge the internet for anything they can turn into a search result on Google. It seems a miserably hollow existence to me, but to each their own. These aggregators feed off the notion that NFL fans are the most impatient human beings to be found in the whole of the sports world. Everything has to be a scoop. Every post has to be posited as news.
These aggregators also believe fans are stupid and more often than not they are proven correct. I’ve always said about the phrase “snake oil salesman” that we only know that phrase because people bought a ton snake oil! Off the record, the folks doing this work will tell you their mandate is simply to create as many posts as possible. They don’t care about the veracity of the content because they are shielded by the notion that it is not their content. They’re just the messengers. Google Chase Claypool and here is what the aggregators will tell you.
