Last week was ugly, so…

Why Do I Like the Chicago Bears This Week?

I.

Always.

Like.

THE.

Chicago.

Bears.

Stat of the Week

Mitch Trubisky. Baker Mayfield. Marcus Mariota. Daniel Jones. These are (were) the four quarterbacks of the teams ranked directly above the Chicago Bears in passing yards per game. The Bears are currently throwing for 97.5 yards per game, more than 40 yards per game fewer than the 31st ranked team.

Last year, the New Orleans Saints were last in this statistic. They threw for 187.4 yards per game.

If these numbers don’t dramatically improve for the Bears, this could the worst passing attack in modern football history.

From Twitter on Monday

I put the following commentary on Twitter Monday, but I wanted to repost it here. It should help towards understanding how I’m going to be writing about the 2022 Bears, and their quarterback, moving forward. 

There was always going to be a contingent of Bears fans who started panicking once the team started losing ugly – an inevitability. These were the “Justin Fields will own the division” and “11 wins are possible” crowd. True believers; nothing wrong with it.

For the first year of a new program, there are definitive positives on the field. (I’ll have a piece about some of them tomorrow.) And you hope that over the next 13 games we simply continue adding to this list, building excitement / momentum for 2023.

But you have to understand that the Bears are far closer to the worst team in the league than the best. We could be looking at a group picking in the top 3 next spring. But two picks in the top 35 might be EXACTLY what this roster needs. (That’s where these fancy WRs are.)

I’m going to stay macro for the remainder of the season and cease the micro stuff. It’s not going to make me a particularly fun follow on game days but that’s where I’m at emotionally/mentally with this team and I feel it’s the smartest way to engage them.

Top “5” Folks from Minnesota (in video form)

This was NOT an easy list to compile. But I’m happy with my choices. And for all you Bob Dylan fans, I apologize. But I would rather listen to my cats scratch the couch cushions than an 11-minute Dylan mumble. So, I guess I don’t really apologize. I do apologize to the Judy Garland fans, though.

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5. Mitch Hedberg

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4. Terry Gilliam

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Maciej Kasperowicz is one of the most interesting people I know. He makes his money in the coffee game. He’s a DJ. He was single-handedly keeping several movie theater chains afloat pre-pandemic. He’s a passionate sports fan. He is also awaiting trial on The People Versus Pearl Jam, where he’ll argue the popular grunge outfit sucks in front of a jury of his peers. If you missed it, here’s Maciej’s guest column on the movies of 2019. And be sure to give him a follow on Twitter, if that’s your thing.

DBB: You are in the rare group of people whose movie opinions I respect and cherish. So I ask you this. Who is the Alfred Hitchcock in Bears history? (I am providing no further explanation for that question. It’s on you now.)

Maciej: Look, there’s an easy answer to this. An undeniable, legendary talent through multiple phases of a long career, but a fucking asshole in real life? It’s Ditka. But I wanted a more interesting, if less direct answer, so I started thinking of Mike Brown staring into the backfield from the secondary like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, Singletary bearing down on a ball carrier like the airplane in North by Northwest, the 2018 Bears swarming Jared Goff and his receivers like the birds in The Birds, and Hitchcock’s real time experiment in Rope as a metaphor for that half season of Kordell Stewart (that’s admittedly unfair to both Rope, which I like better than Hitchcock did, and Slash, who at least was an incredibly fun video game quarterback, in different ways).

And then Jay Cutler, fresh off his divorce to a woman whose character on The Hills wasn’t that far from a Hitchcock blonde, started making a crime film on his Instagram stories. Granted, with a line like “Thelma there, while she looks nice and sweet, is a savage with loose morals,” Jay seems to be aiming more for early John Huston than Hitchcock. But who knows where his new art may take him.

DBB: First, what do we laymen coffee drinkers not know about the coffee industry that we should? Second, compare the experiences of a perfect cup of coffee to a exhilarating Bears win.

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