For a change, the Bears were exciting, amusing and ready for prime time Thursday night.
Now maybe they’ll be ready to return to the basics of being boring.
The Bears can be first without being famous, too. On a team whose limitations are limitless, bland is beautiful. But Thursday night, they were neither.
Instead, the Bears got lured into erroneous zones by a desperate opponent and wound up in a game of last possession wins. The Minnesota Vikings did 33-27 with Joe Cain, a linebacker, last seen trying to locate Cris Carter, a blur, on radar.
So went the tiebreaking touchdown. So goes show biz. The Bears posed for ESPN’s SportsCenter when they should have kept right on playing like the team from C-SPAN.
Let’s face it. The Bears are best when they’re dull. You give the Bears 22 minutes, they’ll give you time to duck out to the kitchen without missing too much. You can have a sandwich, and when you return, they’ll probably still have the ball. Playing football against the Bears can be like a round of golf with someone who thinks six hours for 18 holes is just about right. Eventually, you wear down and want to go home.
Thursday night could have been one of those nights, but the Bears just wouldn’t allow uptight Minnesota to excuse itself from the NFC Central race. The Vikings struggled early with and without the ball, dropping passes and missing tackles. The Vikings’ self-destruct mechanisms were humming. They have 688 penalty yards this season, compared with the Bears’ 428. That’s almost 2 1/2 football fields more. The Vikings were just asking to be put out of their misery.
But the Bears couldn’t pull it off, and their timing is poor. As December descends on the NFL, the league packs all the excitement of that Chinese swimming scandal. After Week 13, there were 15 teams-including Minnesota-with records between 7-5 and 5-7, and eight of those juggernauts are at .500. You can book it that a couple of 8-8 teams will qualify for the playoffs and be proud of it.
But that’s perfect for the Bears, whose secret franchise agenda is to go to the Super Bowl without sending any players to the Pro Bowl. This is Lunchpail A.C. The Monotones of the Midway. Heart patients have another choice now besides bypass surgery: season tickets to Soldier Field. Call it luck or call it pluck, but it’s worked for the Bears.
When they’re bad, they’re very bad. But they aren’t bad as often as they’re good and they’re almost never in between. After Thursday night, they’ve lost five games by a total of 74 points and won eight by a total of only 71. Talk about picking your spots. Still, just three franchises in the NFL have more victories than the Bears, and two of them-Dallas and San Francisco-are already enshrined as dynasties.
But the Cowboys and 49ers are highlight films. When the Bears are on their game, they’re a documentary. They’re all about efficiency and execution, but Thursday night they forgot to be tedious, too. Steve Walsh wasn’t the picture of poise on his 28th birthday. He bobbled two snaps and heaved an interception for a Minnesota score.
Walsh had to lose sooner or later, but he didn’t have to lose to the Vikings. The Bears didn’t get here by being fancy. They got here because they’re functional. So it was, amidst all Thursday night’s hysteria, the Bears got Walsh a turnover and he converted it into a touchdown for a 24-16 lead. That came on a strike to Greg McMurtry in the end zone. Walsh’s other TD pass was mostly Robert Green making pylons of would-be tacklers.
But the Bears, like so many prime-time series, couldn’t finish what they started. The Bears aren’t gifted enough to survive mistakes, and the worst one they could make now is thinking they are something they aren’t.
They could be leaders of the bland in the NFL, but that means hold the ball, and hold the thrills, too.
More Top Picks Backgammon