Chicago Bears biggest mid-season disappointment
By Dan Salem
Hope is dead at the mid-way point of the NFL season, but only one team fell off a cliff. Chicago Bears biggest mid-season disappointment? Definitely yes and up for debate. Dan Salem and Todd Salem debate in today’s NFL TD Sports Debate. Two brothers from New York yell, scream and debate the NFL and sports.
DAN:
The NFL season is half over, or a little more, so I’d like to think we know which teams are good and which teams are bad. In truth, some are still playing the deception game, but not the good teams. We know who is good and the Chicago Bears are not a good football team.
The Bears are 0-3 at home and defeated the crappy Atlanta Falcons, awful New York Jets, and decidedly mediocre San Francisco 49ers. I see two, maybe three, more victories on the Bears’ schedule making them my biggest disappointment this season.
Other teams have disappointed; hell my very own New York Jets would easily top the list if everyone else but me didn’t project them to be terrible. The point is, I thought the Bears would be good. Not Super Bowl good, but playoffs good. Competing for a division title good. But everything about them is mediocre.
I love the league rankings for passing and rushing because they tell a blatantly obvious story. The Bears are 11th and 18th on offense for passing and running the ball respectively. On the defensive side they are unfortunately worse, ranking 23rd and 13th in passing and rushing. As an optimist those numbers can appear decent, but being realistic its obvious there is no playoff team here. One more stat seals things; the Bears are -42 in points differential. There isn’t a single team in the NFL with a winning record and a negative points differential; not one.
I want to like the Chicago Bears. I want them to be competing with Detroit and Green Bay for the NFC North division title. But even with a solid receiving core and good running backs Chicago stinks. Is this Jay Cutler’s final season in the windy city? Am I over reacting about how bad this football team is? My instincts are screaming that someone gets fired. Coach, quarterback, GM, the house is getting cleaned.
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TODD:
Biggest disappointment of the year is quite the label to tab on Chicago. I’m not with you on the literal title because I thought the Bears would be solidly mediocre prior to the year and had high hopes for both Tennessee and Tampa Bay, so….
In the spirit of what you are saying, I wholeheartedly agree. The Bears have been a bust, mostly on the offensive end. How can a team with Brandon Marshall, Matt Forte, Alshon Jeffery, and Martellus Bennett not be even a top 10 offense?? Marshall and Jeffery have been nicked up for multiple weeks, but both Forte and Bennett have been stellar all year. The quartet as a whole should be unguardable. The only logical conclusion is that Jay Cutler isn’t getting it done.
The funny thing is, Cutler’s numbers have been fine this year. In fact, he’s been a little better than previous years through eight games. It’s just one of those instances, like with Joe Flacco or Matthew Stafford, where the quarterback is good but not elite. He is a notch below and in this league, if your QB isn’t elite, the rest of your team must be to pick up the slack. And so here we are with the Bears at 3-5 in a tightly bunched division.
As far as Cutler’s future, he just signed his big, fancy new contract with the team. In the offseason the Bears bet on Cutler rather than Josh McCown. That seems prudent, even with the team’s struggles this season. It is very hard to find a quarterback even as good as Cutler has been.
I don’t buy that coach Marc Trestman is in trouble either, though. There have been reports about his backing within the organization and whether they support him, but he was too damn popular just last season to have lost it all already.
The NFC is a cluster; the Bears have a divisional-heavy schedule the rest of the way, as well as games against Dallas and New Orleans. Even sitting in last place at the moment, they are far from eliminated. You are overreacting. That said, I’m with you on eliminating them! They don’t have it this year. They still have too many defensive holes and need to make some sort of tweak on the offensive side to get things rolling again. That doesn’t mean they are a bad team. They just aren’t a good enough team.