Tag: the good the bad and the horror

1990-2017 Devin-Time Hesters: Kick Returners

The Devin Hester: Devin Hester (2006-2013) – Whenever there’s a football player who’s super-fast and/or super-quick, you always hear the phrase “he’s a threat to score any time he touches the ball,” and it’s usually an exaggeration. Sure, Johnny Punt Return is good – hence the name – but if he gets pinned deep and the blocking isn’t there, he’s usually screwed. But for at least two years, Devin Hester really was that guy. Hell, his college nickname was Devin “Anytime” Hester. (Until Bears fans came up with that “Windy City Flyer” nickname that was some straight-up leather helmet nonsense.) Every time there was a kickoff, every time there was a punt, and that one time when there was a really long field goal, you’d lean a little closer to the TV, because the man was unstoppable. A kick return for a touchdown changed from a pleasant surprise to something you expected. Opposing teams started just giving the ball to the Bears with incredibly good field position, because it was a better strategy to punt the ball out of bounds as soon as possible at the 35 yard line than to risk Hester getting his hands on the ball at the 15. Hell, after a while, people started just taking the illegal procedure penalty and kicking out of bounds on kickoffs. It was unrealistic, to the point where your first instinct is to compare it to watching Michael Jordan in his prime, but then you realize that’s an insufficient comparison, and you have to move up to video games. 2006-07 Devin Hester was Tecmo Super Bowl Bo Jackson in real life. That’s it. That’s the only valid comparison to what was happening, like if he had been a less humble man, he would’ve just run to the one yard line, then reversed field and done a full lap around the field before actually scoring, but he didn’t, because he felt sorry for us, and an ill-timed Rex Grossman interception had us down by ten. The opening kickoff of Super Bowl XLI will probably always be my favorite Bears memory, (Look, I watched Super Bowl XX, but I was 5, so I had no idea what was going on beyond “FRIDGE GOOD” or whatever) because for one brief moment, it felt like holy shit, they’re actually going to do this. Of course, the rest of the game could best be described as a wroth Old Testament Jehova saying “lol no,” but at least we had that one play. In the end, nothing gold can stay, so he came back down to human levels eventually, but prime Devin Hester was a phenomenon, like an unbelievable tall tale unfolding in front of our eyes, roping a tornado and carving out the Grand Canyon, and then doing the Deion Sanders Primetime dance into legend. We didn’t watch Devin Hester, we bore witness to him, like Robert Oppenheimer watching the first nuclear bomb test, except Devin’s cool, he never hurt nobody.

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1990-2017 All-Time Team: Tight End

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. Continue reading 1990-2017 All-Time Team: Tight End

1990-2017 ALL-TIME TEAM: WIDE RECEIVER X

THE GOOD:  Brandon Marshall (2012-2014) – Y’all have to understand, I grew up in a time when a Chicago Bears wide receiver might as well have not been a thing.  The team reception leader was always a running back with less than fifty catches, and Ron Morris would start all year, get 30 catches for 400 yards, and you’d look at it and go, “there is nothing at all wrong with what just happened.”  And even after a hundred years and various failed attempts to modernize the Bears, it was still “where receivers go to die,” as once eloquently stated by Muhsin Muhammad.  (Moose became one of the most universally hated ex-Bears in history for that, but honestly, I don’t hear a lie.)  So even with living memory of Marcus Robinson and Marty Booker, what Brandon Marshall did in 2012 and 2013 was amazing.  He was unstoppable, like pre-Raiders Randy Moss or pre-name change Chad Johnson.  So much so, in fact, that after three seasons (including 2014, which was the Marc Trestman Implodes the Team year, when no one was any good) he was already in the Bears’ all-time top 10 for receptions and touchdowns, and was about 100 yards shy of hitting the top 10 in yards.  For all the idiot Bears fans’ bitching about him being a “locker room cancer,” (NFL Fan Code for “black dude who gives interviews about stuff other than Playing Hard, Praising God, and ‘Rise and Grind’ Nonsense”) Harlon Hill and Johnny Morris are probably the only argument against him being the beast Bears receiver of all time.  (Hill famously being a guy who eventually partied his way out of the league, which I’m pretty sure would get Locker Room Cancer status applied to him, had he not been a blond guy with a crew cut.  Gonna touch on this so much more the next time receivers come up)  But yeah, Marshall was easily the best Bear WR of my lifetime, and I’m legit worried that we shall never see his like again. Continue reading 1990-2017 ALL-TIME TEAM: WIDE RECEIVER X

1990-2017 ALL-TIME TEAM: LEFT DEFENSIVE END

(left/right means nothing here, and is just for organization purposes, WE’VE BEEN OVER THIS BEFORE, JERRY)

THE GOOD: Richard Dent (1983-1993, 1995) – Pretty much everything good I could say about this guy oughtta go without saying, but I really need to get a paragraph out of this, so here goes. This dude is an all-time great. He was a Super Bowl MVP, he had a million quarterback sacks, he was surprisingly good at dropping back into pass coverage for a big ol’ defensive lineman, and after a decade of me bitching online about it, he finally got into the Hall of Fame. Then, there was that time against the Bengals, where he was just completely, utterly blocked, but somehow managed to reach out with one hand and brutally throw Boomer Esiason’s dick into the dirt. And then, Boomer jumped up and squared up to him like he was going to try some shit, and Dent laughed in his face, and it was great.  Also, he was briefly part of the aforementioned semi-magical 1995 season, when they brought him back after taking a year off to win another Super Bowl in San Francisco.  Thing was, he came back for a couple games and seemed to do okay, but they still cut him in the middle of the season, probably because of Dave Wannstedt and the way he would start hissing and screaming “IT BURNS US” anytime someone would mention Mike Ditka.  So my conspiracy theory is that Richard knew this would happen and came back to warn us all, because he is A Good Man.  Stay woke. Continue reading 1990-2017 ALL-TIME TEAM: LEFT DEFENSIVE END

1990-2017 ALL-TIME TEAM: STRONG SAFETY

(like last time, the free/strong distinction has no meaning here, and this is just the second batch of dudes.)

THE GOOD: Mike Brown (2000-2008) – In the early 2000s, the Bears had put together a core of a handful of star players that probably would’ve resulted in at least one championship with competent management. Mainly, this was on defense, which featured perhaps the best cornerback the Bears ever had in Charles Tillman, seven-time Pro Bowler and potential Hall-of-Famer Lance Briggs, a guy who briefly the best defensive tackle in football in Tommie Harris, and Alex Brown, all all-around playmaker who was way better than his stats ever indicated. Oh yeah, and they also had impending first-ballot Hall of Fame middle linebacker Brian Urlacher, who was pretty much the face of the NFL around 2002-2003ish. And, gentle reader, are you guys ready for the HOT TAKES? Well, while all this was going on, Mike Brown was the best player on the Chicago Bears. Urlacher may have been the face and the heart of the defense, but Brown was literally everything else. Brains, balls, pancreas, everything. He was in all places at all times, and could single-handedly decide the outcome of a game, as evidenced by literally winning two straight games with defensive touchdowns in 2001. (That was a magical season, where the Bears were awful, but finished 13-3, becoming the first “that’s true, but you know they lost eight of those games by a total of 13 points” team to ever actually score an extra 14 points) Eventually, the cursed 2004 season happened, and began a long and horrifying string of trips to injured reserve that crippled the Bears’ defense, and lasted until he was let go in 2009, but had that not happened, I truly believe the Bears would be sending two guys to Canton soon, instead of one. The Bears with Mike Brown on the field win Super Bowl XLI. I will always believe this.

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1990-2017 ALL-TIME TEAM: LEFT TACKLE

(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.” Continue reading 1990-2017 ALL-TIME TEAM: LEFT TACKLE

1990-2017 ALL-TIME TEAM: KICKER

THE GOOD: ROBBIE GOULD (2005-2015) – I’m suddenly and horrifyingly realizing how hard it is to type things about a kicker being good at kicking, because a kicker only does like two things, and with a few glaring exceptions, they do it in the same way. Crap. But yeah, after the miserable failure of Doug Brien, the Bears got desperate and literally signed this guy off a damn construction site. From there, he went on to become one of the most accurate kickers in NFL history. And it was weird, because for the longest time, he had a reputation of having a really weak leg, and apparently, this pissed him off real bad, because he eventually got The Eye of the Tiger and turned into a dude who never missed from fifty yards or more. He’s currently on the 49ers, where he just had his best season, including a game where he kicked 5 field goals to single-handedly beat the Bears, and FUCK YOU, JOHN FOX.

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1990-2017 ALL TIME TEAM: FREE SAFETY

(DISCLAIMER: the free/strong safety designation means nothing here. A safety is a safety is a safety for these purposes, and I’m not far enough on the spectrum to differentiate right now)

THE GOOD: MARK CARRIER (1990-1996) – The 1990 draft was the first one I ever paid any real attention to, so I was really excited about this guy as a rookie, which was precisely the time period during which he exploded the entire goddamn league. He busted right out of the gate and led the league with ten interceptions, won Defensive Rookie of the Year, made the Pro Bowl, was on everybody’s All-Pro teams, and was really useful on Tecmo Super Bowl after using Mike Singletary on every play had made the game too easy. Thing is, such a statistically-rich season never happened again, and this led to the Internet Blood Libel of Mark Carrier being a guy who had one good year and sucked forever after that. This is all double-bullshit though, as he remained excellent, and just didn’t have quarterbacks trying to pick on the rookie (and failing miserably) anymore. As such, he made a couple more Pro Bowls and remained perhaps the only useful player to control on the default Bears roster in 1995’s Tecmo Super Bowl III. (Donnell Woolford had no hitting power, so running backs would just smear him, you see) So if you see anyone out in the streets badmouthing Mark Carrier, stab them. It’s okay, you’ll be okay, trust me. I am a scientist.

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The Good, the Bad, and the Horror: 1990-2017 Chicago Bears All-Time Team

INTRODUCTION: We all knew when this thing started so many days ago that it would eventually break down into an endless series of long, boring position-by-position breakdowns. So I’m just going to go ahead and begin the latest in my life’s long and unending series of online projects that I’ll never finish, which is the ULTIMATE POSITION-BY-POSITION BREAKDOWN. A position-by-position breakdown so vast, it’s actually four position-by-position breakdowns rolled into one. A position-by-position breakdown too large for a single blog post; a position-by-position breakdown to both please and horrify the gods themselves. My god, it will be beautiful. Of course, I’ll never finish it.

Continue reading The Good, the Bad, and the Horror: 1990-2017 Chicago Bears All-Time Team