Kevin Butler wins a game. The Bear defense wins a game. Well, OK, the Bear defense doesn’t lose a game. Todd Sauerbrun kicks the ball like it has air in it. The Bears don’t have to X-ray their mail for a week.
This is as close to familiar Bear football as it is likely to get, though what happened Sunday in the New Jersey Meadowlands may not mean much.
For the Bears, the playoffs are as near and as far as ever.
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“Forget about the playoffs,” quarterback Erik Kramer said. “We’re not playing well enough to think long term.”
A realist.
Making more out of the Bears’ three-point win over the New York Giants Sunday is as foolish and pointless as polishing gravel.
What is wrong with the Bears is still wrong with them, and they can’t play the Giants every week. Each with a three-game losing streak, the Giants and the Bears were like two free-falling bungee jumpers with only one cord. The Giants are still plummeting. The Bears get to dangle a while longer.
“The important thing was our offense didn’t turn the ball over once,” said coach Dave Wannstedt, overlooking a Kramer fumble that led to a Giants field goal. Winning is great camouflage.
This was a game won as the last three have been lost, desperately, without conviction, without providing anything to build on.
“There’s a bunch of guys out there playing as hard as they can,” Wannstedt said. “I know that doesn’t mean anything if you don’t win. But it has to be said.”
Effort without consequences is calisthenics.
The Bears had no sacks, and the Giants are next to last in the league in preventing sacks. The Giants start every game by asking, “Paper or plastic?”
The Bears’ secondary treated Giant quarterback Dave Brown like he signed their checks, and the Bears’ defensive front still doesn’t have enough thumbs to plug a dike. If Jim Flanigan, John Thierry, Chris Zorich and Alonzo Spellman were Dutch, Holland would be Lake Amsterdam.
The most impressive accomplishment for the Bears was the offense managing to close out each half with scores.
“We’re in those 2-minute things twice a game,” Kramer said. “That’s really the best part of our offense. Maybe we ought to think about putting 2-minute drives in our game plan.”
Whatever works. Michael Timpson scored on a flanker-around play, and even Curtis Conway tried a reverse pass, the first non-Kramer pass thrown this year.
“We have to fight and scratch every week,” Wannstedt said. “People may not like it, but that is how it is. What you see is what you get.”
The Bears won because the Giants declined to risk a 49-yard field goal with less than a minute to play, choosing instead to fail on a fourth-and-4 pass. A team going nowhere without enough courage to kick a ball deserves to have lost nine games.
Giants coach Dan Reeves said it was more prudent to try to get closer, and even his kicker, Brad Daluiso, did not disagree. Daluiso had missed a game-winning 48-yarder, indoors, against Seattle earlier in the season.
Butler had, coincidentally, missed a kick that cost a game just last week and had already blown a kick 10 yards shorter than the one he made to win from 37 yards.
“I told him not to worry,” Wannstedt said. “You’ll have to kick one later that means something.”
Daring may be all that separates the Bears from the Giants. For the Giants, apparently, no victory is too small to avoid, and the Giant fans greeted the missed fourth down by chanting, “Reeves must go!”
“I am dumb in a lot of things,” Reeves said, “but I am not deaf.”
The Giant coaching job was turned down by Wannstedt in favor of the Bears. Sunday’s chant, to keep the same meter, could have been, “Wanny must go!”
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The point is, things could be worse.
Better, too.