You know, I almost did it. The NFL almost beat me, or more accurately, I almost escaped the NFL. It was all too much: I couldn’t take another season of endless truck commercials, another season of nonsensical and inconsistently-applied rules, another season of mindless flag-waving, another season of pink footballs that will never help anyone, or another season of wondering how many players on the field will die before they hit fifty. Most of all, I couldn’t take another season of disappointing Bears football. But I thought 2017 was another disappointing season? Quiet, Voice in My Head; I’m getting there.
Yeah, the Bears suck right now. They’ve sucked for a while now, and while over-excited blog posts to come will probably contradict this statement, they’ll probably continue to suck for the foreseeable future. And they’ve sucked historically, even though that’s not the narrative the team, the league, or the dipshit fans like to put forth. According to common knowledge, the Chicago Bears are a storied franchise with a rich history of unparalleled excellence on ***THE FROZEN TUNDRA OF SOLDIER FIELD*** or whatever. In reality, they’ve won but a single NFL championship in the last half-century, and that lone Super Bowl title – won as part of a failed dynasty that theoretically should have been able to win several – is all the separates this team from the likes of the Cleveland Browns or the Detroit Lions. (lol sorry Neil) The Bears should be the New York Yankees of American Football. They should be the ancient team in the huge city that just wins and wins and wins and wins, until their rare misfortunes are nation-uniting moments, universally treasured by decent people everywhere. But instead, they’re the Chicago Bears. They’re the team that never wins anything, and exists in the collective consciousness as the joke from a Saturday Night Live sketch.
R.I.P.
But somewhere in that doomed 2017 Bears season, right as I was about escape this nonsense forever, the worst thing that can happen to a fan of a doomed football team happened. Hope. Somewhere between Akiem Hicks emerging as a star, Kyle Fuller finally justifying his draft position, and Tarik Cohen occasionally pulling some “Tecmo Bo in excellent condition” nonsense, I realized that this is a young team with a lot of quality parts in place, and are a good offseason or two away from being downright respectable. And add to all of this the thought that after roughly 70 years without a franchise quarterback, we might have finally found our guy.
I know, he didn’t exactly rewrite the NFL record books for rookie QBs, and it’s insanely premature to proclaim him to be The Guy. But sports fandom has little to do with facts, logic, reason, sanity, or restraint. He just feels like he could be the guy. He doesn’t panic like Rex Grossman, he actually seems to give a shit unlike Jay Cutler, he hasn’t yet had an old racist scream at him until it broke his spirit like Jim Harbaugh, and he doesn’t have an airline-sized bottle of Jack Daniel’s hidden in his thigh pads like Kyle Orton. When he takes the field, it feels like he’s in control of the situation, and is physically capable of doing anything a QB needs to do to win. It’s exciting. It’s a kind of excitement that I haven’t felt since the Bears were led by… uhhh… Cade McNown… or Rex Grossman… or Jay Cutler…
Fuck.
Nevertheless, despite the shadow of doom that hung over the 2017 season, and the shadow of shittiness that hangs over the 2018 season to come, I feel more positive about the general state of things than I have in a long time. I’m not dumb enough to be the guy that screams THIS IS OUR YEAR, PACKERS SUXX all over various social media outlets, but I am dumb enough to be the guy to say “hey, maybe it could be okay soon” on what will assuredly be a massively popular blog. (I’m never checking the stats, shut up, just let me have this) I feel good, even though I should know better by now. Because this is how it starts. This is how the madness starts. And I am here for it. Hopefully, it’ll at least be entertaining for you to watch me collapse into gibbering nonsense and endless position-by-position roster breakdowns as it all falls apart.
This is The 46 Discourse, and it’s all downhill from here.