Camp is still weeks away and with it comes the anticipation of analyzing every single throw from Justin Fields and Andy Dalton for days and days and days.

• Scott Dochterman at The Athletic has the fascinating tale of the Rock Island Independents: “At the intersection of 18th Avenue and 10th Street stand two brick ticket booths that serve as enduring markers to NFL history…For more than a century, those structures have stood at the entryway to Douglas Park, which once hosted an NFL charter franchise. In this gritty Mississippi River town, the booths are the only remaining relic from a foregone era when professional football consisted of mid-sized industrial towns and major communities.”
• Jim Miller doesn’t think the Bears will get a long-term deal done with Allen Robinson, pushing the drama back to next off-season.
• Here’s the YouTube link to a terrific Hoge & Jahns podcast with the great Jeff Joniak, a man I believe resides among the top radio play-by-play voices in the NFL.
• Is Eddie Goldman actually weighing retirement? Honestly, after the the craziness of the last year plus, nothing would surprise me. But Goldman is one of the best run-stuffing defenders in the league and the Bears would not be able to replace that production.
• Mike Ditka said some stuff about Matt Nagy and Justin Fields. I agree with both ideas, which now leads me to think I’m wrong.
• Bow Wow thinks the Falcons will regret not drafting Fields.
• ACTUAL BEAR NEWS: Outside of LA, a small bear attacked some men on Mount Wilson, as they waited for the fireworks to start. A reporter approached one of the men a day or so later. “Are you going back there next July 4?…”Oh yeah,” Kenneth responded.” I hope the bear returns for the rematch.
• Aaron Rodgers used this off-season to work on his mental health – which is another terrific example of pro athletes opening up about a major issue too long relegated to the shadows. He has also been defending his silent approach to his situation with the Packers – one of the strangest to play out in modern NFL history. Meanwhile, Rodgers hasn’t met with his receivers.

Updated NFC North odds:

Green Bay remains the favorite at -121, which could only be the number if DraftKings believed Rodgers will end up playing for the Packers. Minnesota and Chicago – +225 and +350 respectively – are sitting at pretty good numbers. Detroit is +2000 and those odds are still too low.

DBB is on a short vacation. We’ll return with new content Tuesday, July 6th.

One of my three favorite sports moments of all-time, and probably number one.

Reverend Dave and I are in all of these clips. And we’ve never been more patriotic in our lives.

DBB is on a short vacation. We’ll return with new content Tuesday, July 6th.

DBB is on a short vacation. We’ll return with new content Tuesday, July 6th.

DBB is on a short vacation. We’ll return with new content Tuesday, July 6th.

“It’s a pretty special place.”

-Bill Belichick on Soldier Field

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I remember the first time I saw it.

December 1st 2001.

Noah and I had driven from New York to Chicago, with a layover in some shitty town in western Pennsylvania.  We drove north up Lake Shore Drive en route to our cheap hotel room booked, ironically now, in Arlington Heights.

It appeared out of nowhere. Not through a Lake Michigan fog or Arthurian mist, mind you, but through the naïve haze of “I don’t know where the fuck I am and WAIT IS THAT SOLDIER FIELD????”

I got emotional. I couldn’t help it. It was only a few moments but in those few moments I thought of a lifetime of seeing this team, loving this team, admiring this building, in all the weird ways an out of town fan had to in the years before NFL Sunday Ticket.

I thought about the photograph of three year-old me in a Jim McMahon shirt. A shirt I still have, and until very recently, was kept on a King Louie stuffed animal.

I thought about my Steve McMichael and Richard Dent Starting Lineup figures. And how I would play with them on this Chicago Bears football field carpet I got for Christmas.

I thought about going to Jets games in the Meadowlands, in our family’s season tickets, dressed all in Bears shit and cheering every time the out of town scoreboard updated in the building. After a while the section joined in those cheers and became Bears fans.

Until that moment on Lake Shore, Soldier Field was a character on television. Gordon Shumway. George Costanza. Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer. You don’t meet those people because those people are not real. But here was Soldier Field. Real. And in a day I would get to walk through those gates.

What Do I Love About Soldier Field?

A buddy of mine, a construction guy in Woodside, met me at our local last Friday and asked me about “the Soldier Field thing”. I explained it to him as best I could, handing him my phone and Twitter feed for ten minutes while he laughed and laughed and laughed. His response was great. “You can’t get rid of Soldier Field. That’s like Fenway.” (I guess he’s a Red Sox fan but I don’t know that much about him.)

That’s what I love about Soldier Field. It’s a piece of American sports history. I travel to old, historic cities like Bruges and Dinan. I drink in old taverns, with stories etched in the barstools. When we sit and watch a football game at Soldier Field we become part of that building’s history, part of the story.

The fact that it is actually IN the city is one of its coolest elements. Soldier Field is a part of Chicago’s cityscape in a way that no other NFL stadium can claim to be. New York doesn’t have that. Los Angeles doesn’t have that. San Francisco and Houston and Dallas and Washington DC don’t have that. When you leave the building, marching with thousands upon thousands of other either jubilant or despairing fans, you’re deposited directly back into town. Back onto the L. Or into Kroll’s. Or into an Uber with Lou Malnati’s as the only logical destination.

The Bears are Chicago. Soldier Field is a big reason why.

Does Soldier Have Flaws? Of Course.

Does the building have enough men’s rooms? No. (Does any sports facility?)

Is it supremely cold in the dead of winter? Yes. (But so is the rest of the city. You want to move the whole town to the tropical climate of Arlington Heights?)

But you know what Soldier’s most pronounced flaw is? It’s the folks who sell their tickets to the out of town fans. Having been in that building 15 times, I have never seen the building more than 60 or 70% Bears fans. A third of the seats (at least) are always inhabited by those cheering for the opponents.

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1995 is a seasonal beacon for the Chicago Bears organization. It is the oasis in the desert of poor quarterback play, with Erik Kramer delivering the best positional performance in franchise history. They won three straight games in October, scoring 31, 30 and 35 points. (They would lose two later scoring 34 and 28.) They finished 9-7, missed the playoffs, and wouldn’t record another winning season until the ridiculous, fluky magic of 2001.

What does this game have?

• One of Curtis Conway’s finest afternoons with the Bears. I put this game right up there with Marty Booker’s 2001 performance against the Bucs and Brandon Marshall’s 2012 game in Tennessee. (I’m probably forgetting a few.)
• Rookie Rashaan Salaam. I remember being at Gunnell Oval in Kearny, NJ – dressed in my Kearny Florist Little League pinstripes – high fiving John Cali when we found out the Bears took Salaam. (The tragic fall of Salaam was detailed in this terrifically sad piece by Tim Rohan for SI.)
• What amazes me about NFL highlights from the 90s is just how slow the game looks. There is no way Mark Brunell would be as productive in this current NFL with that arm. The delivery takes forever and the balls travels through the air in slow motion.
• Where did I watch this game, you ask? There used to be a bar in Rutherford, NJ called the Jersey Sports Cafe and it was owned by a family friend. The guy was a huge Cubs fan so he had a satellite the size of a Buick on his roof pulling in the Chicago TV feed. From the ages of about 12 to 15, my dad would take me here and let me watch the Bears play. I was not legally allowed to sit at the physical bar so we took a a barstool and slid it about 3 feet away. Was it a great viewing experience? No. Was it my only option? Yep.

Justin Fields.

Justin Fields.

Justin Fields.

There, it’s out of my system. We can move on.

2021 is very unlikely to be a championship-caliber campaign for the Chicago Bears. Andy Dalton doesn’t win Super Bowls. Rookie quarterbacks don’t either. But that doesn’t mean the whole of Chicago needs to resign themselves to a middling, meaningless 17 games of football. Because while all the excitement around this franchise seems centered on one side of the ball – and more specifically one position – the Bears are still paying an awful lot of men and awful lot of money, to stop the other team from scoring.

So what if Khalil Mack does more than generate pressures and receive analytical praise? What if he actually buries a dozen quarterbacks this season?

What if Robert Quinn looks like the Robert Quinn that played in the NFL for all those years previous to landing at O’Hare and trying his first Portillo’s hot dog?

What if adding Eddie Goldman back into the mix does what it should: devours opposing internal linemen, freeing Roquan and Trevathan to shut down rushing attacks?

What if Eddie Jackson doesn’t get multiple pick sixes called back for penalties this season?

What if Akiem Hicks has one more year in those legs?

What if Sean Desai is the next great defensive coordinator for an organization that’s had a bunch of them?

One might read that list of questions and think, “Well that’s a lot of what ifs, isn’t it?” And maybe it is. But all of these individuals have set precedents for success. They have all done the things in the league they are being paid to do in 2021. It’s not unfair to ask them to be the players they are being paid to be.

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