(Again, like the strong/free safety thing, left/right doesn’t mean anything here; these are just the guys I decided to type about first when #7 came up on the random number generator, and left comes before right on the Tecmo Super Bowl team data screen . It makes sense to me, and that’s all that matters, pissant.)
THE GOOD: Keith Van Horne (1981-1993) – This dude never made the Pro Bowl as far as I can remember, he was never part of an all-decade team, and I’m assuming he’ll never be in the Hall of Fame. But he was always there for thirteen years, and while he was never an offensive line superstar like Jim Covert or Jay Hilgenberg, he was always at least good. And living with the reality we live in now, where finding offensive tackles who are at least good enough to start in the NFL is something the Bears try (and usually fail) to do every other year, that’s hard to fathom. Imagine it: Thirteen years of not having to worry about something. My god. Also, it’s funny, because I just remembered how when I was a kid, this guy seemed like the largest man in the history of the non-WWF world, just massive. And looking him up now, he was listed at 265 pounds, which is probably 50-75 pounds less than a 6’7″ offensive tackle tends to weigh in the modern world, which might have something to do with how 13-year starters don’t happen anymore. Love too take “supplements.” Anyway, I’d just like to say thank you, Keith. If you threw a party and invited everyone you knew, you would see the biggest gift would be from me, and the card attached would say “thank you for being a pretty good offensive tackle for a decade-plus.”
THE BAD: (tie) Gabe Carimi (2011-2012) and Chris Williams (2008-2012) – The guys get lumped together, because the story with each guy was so similar. The offensive line sucked, so they went into the first round of the draft to fix it, coming out with a shiny new tackle who would fix everything. Then, after a brief flash of hope here and there, (a huge one in Williams’s case, when he shut down Jared Allen back when that was impossible to do) there would be an injury. And that’s when we would find out. Both guys had preexisting injuries – a back with Williams and a knee with Carimi – that not only moved them down the draft boards of most teams, but completely off of them, as in teams who knew better made sure to avoid them entirely, at all costs. But the Bears’ GM at the time, Jerry Angelo, was the Wile E. Coyote of the NFL. He was a real, live, certified brain-genius, and he could see things that other teams didn’t and would make moves other teams wouldn’t. And no matter how many times he was proven wrong, and no matter how many times his new draft pick would send the team whistling off a cliff to the mockery of the Road Runner – in this case, represented by the Green Bay Packers – he would keep doing ignorant shit, because one day, he would show them all. While other teams would take a flyer on “first-round talent” with red flags on their record in the fourth round or later, he’d do it in the first. And so there we’d be, with our ACME offensive tackle laid up with an injury, only to never be the same player we drafted upon their return. They’d get moved to guard, then they’d get shipped out of town. Then, Jay Cutler would get dumped on his head and forget three more phone numbers, and I’d run to the internet and scream some indecipherable gibberish about “The Doom of 2010” until my family members stopped speaking to me.
(he’s the one on the left)
THE HORROR: Marc Colombo (2002-2005) – Oh boy, another blown 2000s first-round pick, but WITH A TWIST~! So here this guy is, having a hell of a rookie season, and everything’s just super-great, then – BAM, his knee is fucked. And like super-fucked, I mean really screwed, like if it had been any worse, his ligaments would’ve caught on fire and killed a priest. And it’s a horrible, never-gonna-be-the-same-player injury, and he’s out for something like thirty games, gone until about the halfway point of the 2004 season. And man, I’m sure I’ll end up going into this further somewhere, but that season was awful. Mike Brown had his first of many horrifying, season-ending injuries, and the Bears went through so many quarterbacks that by the end of the year, the starter was a guy who had retired to hang out and surf at the beginning of the year, and the backup was Jeff Freaking George. And furthermore, my life at the time was terrible. Broke to the point of losing something like twenty pounds from not being able to afford food, one of my kittens died, (the other is actually still around, believe it or not) I had to abandon my car at the side of the road because I couldn’t afford to fix it, and I was stuck in an apartment with a roommate who refused to pay bills of any kind, and later had some sort of bizarre asthma attack/seizure ass-apocalypse that somehow covered the only bathroom in human feces that I had to deal with. Everything was terrible, and the Bears were making it worse. But one of the only five wins that year came courtesy of Marc Colombo, and it was wonderful, and that game uplifted me with the Power of Sport. This dude, thirty games gone, career theoretically ruined, makes his return on special teams, and in his first game back, blocks the field goal that saves the game, in a storybook ending not seen since that time when Bryan Robinson (R.I.P.) blocked one to beat the Packers in the first game after Walter Payton died. Pure magic. Then, a week into the 2005 season, the bastards let him go, just waived him, cut him, or whatever. Gone. And while the Bears were struggling with the horrors of tackles like Chris Williams and the withered ghost of Fred Miller, leading on a winding path to the gruesome nightmare of J’Marcus Webb, do you know what Colombo was doing? Starting for the Dallas Cowboys for five years, and being pretty good while doing it. Nice, job, Jerry.
THE SENTIMENTAL FAVORITE: Andy Heck (1994-1998) – I’m going to warn you all now that over the course of this all-time team thingy and of the entire blog, I’m going to talk a lot about the 1995 season. Man, the 1995 season will always go down as one of my favorite Bears seasons of all time, even if it did end in a horrifying collapse, where the team started with a 6-2 record, but finished 8-8 and missed the playoffs. Even into the 90s, the Bears had been stuck in a 1940s mindset on offense: just run the ball forever, pass only when absolutely necessary, and then mostly just dump it off to a running back or a white boy with a crew cut. But all of a sudden, they had grown up and become an actual post-merger NFL team. They had their first thousand yard receiver since 1970 – TWO of them in Jeff Graham and Curtis Conway, in fact – and Erik Kramer had an absolutely magical year where he smashed most of the team’s single-season passing records, (Such as they were. Believe it or not, they’ve still never had a 4,000 yard or 30 TD quarterback) and was legitimately robbed of a Pro Bowl spot by Steve Young , who had missed half the year by the time the voting started. Hell, back to the running game, they still had a 1,000 yard season by Rookie of the Year Rashaan Salaam. (again, R.I.P.) And underneath all of this, the secret MVP was the stout-ass offensive line they had built, featuring James “Big Cat” Williams and a few criminally-underrated guys like Todd Perry, but mainly this guy. He was the foundation from which all good things sprang, and went the entire year without giving up a single sack, (according to some football magazine that Teenage Me bought in the summer of ’96, which was lost forever after I cut out the picture of Bryan Cox to put on my wall) which is huge, considering that he was the guy up against the dudes paid to get all the sacks. 1995 was probably the height of my sports fandom, for some bizarre reason, and it never occurred to me until just now how much of it not being completely intolerable was because of Andy Heck.