The Good: Martellus Bennett (2013-2015) – In the intensely unlikely event of this blog ever making it past the tight circle of *maybe* three people who follow me on Twitter and into the Greater Bears Internet, this will probably get me in trouble. Bears fans hate this guy. They hate him with the intense passion of a thousand supernovas, and at any point during his time with the Bears, you could go to Chicago, and on a night when the moon was full and the wind was still, you could close your eyes, clear your mind, and hear a thousand voices of a thousand mustachioed chuds screaming “stiiiiick to spooooooorts.” Let’s put it this way: Rob Gronkowski would spend his entire off-season on Gronk’s Cocaine Cruise, tag-teaming porn stars with Mojo Rawley, followed by staying injured for half the regular season, and he became a beloved folk hero, just good ol’ Fun-Lovin’ Gronk. Meanwhile, the Black Unicorn would take a weekend off to write a children’s book and record a mixtape, and some dickhead in a tshirt with a desert camo Bears logo would run to the Windy City Gridiron comments section to call him – you guessed it – a “locker room cancer.” Meanwhile, the typical racist NFL fan was too busy Making America Great Again to notice, but he was pretty much the best tight end this bullshit team had since Ditka, and helped form a Bears offensive Legion of Doom, where every skill position starter except Jay Cutler made the Pro Bowl and fooled us into thinking that the Marc Trestman era wasn’t going to be a screaming spiral into Incredible Hell. Of course, nothing good can last, and that team fell apart quickly, and Marty was shipped off to the Patriots after three years, and it was kind of openly acknowledged that it was purely because John Fox just didn’t like him. Fuck John Fox.
The Bad: Kellen Davis (2008-2012) – For reasons I’m going to delve into in just a minute with a whole lot of huge cusses, the Bears found themselves without the services of Greg Olsen in 2011 and turned to this guy. He was a big, fast, athletic dude who actually played offense and defense in college, and was pretty much the guy whose picture would be posted in the dictionary, next to the term “intriguing prospect.” And after his time in Chicago, it became clear that we fucked up bad by not giving him a try at defensive end, instead of tight end. Because for all his physical ability, he absolutely could not block or catch a thrown football, and as you might imagine, those are important traits for a tight end. But somehow, he started for two years, while Greg Olsen became a Pro Bowler in Carolina. If only there had been some way to keep him in Chicago, boy I wonder why that happened. I wonder. I wonder why.
The Horror: Mike Martz’s Anti Tight End Agenda (2010-2011) – Honestly, it is stupid to take sports seriously and personally, and even stupider to become riled up because of things that happen there. But I’m feeling dumb as hell today, so FUCK YOU, MIKE MARTZ, I’M GONNA PUNCH YOU IN THE STUPID GUTS, YOU SHITHEEL OF A WORM’S ASSHOLE. EAT HELL AND CHOKE ON A DISEASED TURD. FUCK ALL Y’ALL. YOU TINY SOULS. YOU MALIGNANT PROFESSIONALS. Whew. In the late 90s, Mike Martz was considered an offensive genius, and was the mastermind behind the St. Louis Rams “Greatest Show on Turf” offense. Somehow, he managed to take an offense with less than six current or near-certain future Hall of Famers and whip them into shape, a feat whose equal had not been seen since Norv Turner figured out that perhaps he could run Emmitt Smith up in between Nate Newton, Erik Williams, and Larry Allen somehow. But yeah, the dude was dumb, and his ideas stank, and by the time he was hired by the Bears, (because of course he had to be fucking hired by the Bears) his ideas were outdated by dumb, stinky NFL idea standards, and his offensive “genius” mostly resulted in quarterback injuries and lost games. And among his outdated ideas was an absolute hatred of the idea of a tight end as anything other than a third offensive tackle. Like I don’t know what the deal was, because it had no basis in football reality and had to be some weird psychological hangup, like maybe John Mackie had murdered his father or something. It was weird. So Martz waddled back into a league that had seen players like Antonio Gates and Tony Gonzalez revolutionize the game, and he oozed into a Bears locker room that already had a prototypical modern NFL tight end in Greg Olsen – who, after several failed draft picks spent on players like Bernard Berrian and Juaquin Iglesias, was the team’s only real receiving threat. And he looked upon this situation, and in his genius wisdom, he said, “no, this will not do at all, fuck you Greg, you’re a fullback now” and got the team to sign blocking tight end Brandon Manumaleuna. And, seeing as how Manumaleuna had magically lost the ability to block, and the guy who was both the team’s best receiver as well as Jay Cutler’s security blanket/go-to guy was barely ever on the field anymore, this worked about as well as it sounds like it should’ve worked, and it resulted in a season where Cutler got sacked fifty-two times, and the leading receivers on the team (Johnny Knox and Matt Forte) both only caught 51 balls. So obviously, they fired him after one season, and this is the Chicago Bears, so by “fired him,” I mean they offered him a contract extension, which he refused, and then kept him anyway. So with an offensive coordinator who clearly had neither any idea how a 21st century NFL offense worked, nor any plans to stay with the team past 2011, they did the Bears thing and traded Greg Olsen to the Panthers for next to nothing to keep him happy. The Bears finished 8-8, Mike Martz predictably left when the season was over, Kellen Davis sucked real hard, and Greg Olsen blossomed into a star tight end as part of a real NFL offense. Fuck Mike Martz.
The Sentimental Favorite: Desmond Clark (2003-2010) – You might have noticed by now that all the events that have unfolded so far on this here page have been since the beginning of 2010s. A big part of that is because for many years, the tight end position was just kind of irrelevant in Chicago. I mean, they always had one; it’s not like Mike Ditka was using the Run and Shoot in 1987 or anything like that. But they were usually either just blockers or blocker/receiver types who simply weren’t good enough to warrant a whole helluva lot of fanfare. We remember Emery Moorehead because he was a Super Bowl winner, Chris Gedney had an okay year once, and Cap Boso sure had a ridiculous name. James Thornton is weirdly internet-popular now, because he had the nickname “Robocop,” but fucking admit it, if you didn’t learn that he was The Future of Law Enforcement from me just now, you probably still learned it 15-20 years after he retired. Shut up. Stop lying. But yeah, aside from grainy footage of Mike Ditka, the tight end just never mattered at any point in my life, until Desmond Clark got signed. He never was an All Pro or anything, but he could block and catch, he was clearly a net positive for the Bears offense, and they finally had a tight end whose immediate replacement was not a top priority in video games. (In Tecmo Super Bowl III, you always signed Rodney Holman, even if your “Steve Walsh for Steve Young, just to cut him and cash in the 520 Free Agent Points” trade had been accepted) For once, there was actually a guy lined up next to one tackle or another that could get on the team programs and posters, so this dude will always have a special place in my heart for being the Bears’ first tight end of my life that actually mattered. Also, I once saw an old dude in Walmart in Norman, Oklahoma rocking a Dez Clark home jersey, and that had to be the least likely in-the-wild jersey sighting for me since the time I saw a stitched-numbers authentic style New York Giants Lewis Tillman at a Cleveland, Mississippi Blockbuster Video around 1994-ish.