Dare to win. Dare to lose. Raymont Harris has a word for it.
“Exuberating,” said Harris, the man who did not catch the pass that could have beaten Green Bay.
Indeed.
In a season without moments, in a coaching career without clarity, on a day without regrets, against the rival without comparison, the Bears, the laughingstock, Dave Wannstedt, the coach, Erik Kramer, the restored quarterback, the whole burning bunch of Soldier Field failures took a chance.
Took a chance and lost.
Dumb? Positively. Irretrievably stupid. Foolish. Idiotic. Grotesquely, absurdly unwise.
And absolutely wonderful.
Everything about the play that may define Wannstedt forever as a Bears coach was wrong. The decision. The play. The execution.
It smacked of too much desperation, too much outright ache, too little trust and not enough remorse that it failed.
But it was exactly the right thing to do.
“A no-brainer,” Wannstedt said, before the fact as well as after the Bears went for two points when one point would have tied the game.
The Bears stood to a man in favor of it, with Bryan Cox offering not only a loud and tedious lecture on playing to win, but issuing a personal vote of confidence to Wannstedt, kind of like getting a pat on the head from the butler.
“Great call, great call,” Cox said. “I would rather have Dave Wannstedt as my coach than anybody. I want an aggressive coach who’ll show us some pride, show us some emotion, give our guys a chance to make a play.”
What were the stakes? The difference between being the worst 1-6 team in the NFL and the best 0-7 team is lost on me.
So the Bears didn’t make it, might not have made it even if Kramer’s pass to Harris had not been overthrown. There were enough Packers to deny Harris the end zone.
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There are times to risk everything and this was the time.
What this team needs is something good to happen to it, something stunning and provoking, something to lift it out of its own self-loathing, remove it from Jay Leno monologues and bad jokes. (Why doesn’t Iowa have a pro football team? Then Illinois would want one.)
The prudent and cowardly thing to do was to play the game as if the outcome mattered. Take the point. Stop the Packers. Hope to win the coin flip in overtime.
“If I felt we were not playing as well as the other team, and we had a chance to win the game, I would go for the win,” Packers coach Mike Holmgren said. “I have not had to make that decision.”
This is Wishy speaking for Washy. Coach talk. The translation is the Bears couldn’t beat the Packers, so they had to take the best chance they had. And Holmgren is right.
Every coach this side of Barry Switzer would have played for the tie. The rule, somewhere in the coach’s primer, is don’t lose the game before you win it.
Wannstedt violated that rule even earlier by trying to sneak into the end zone on fourth down with Kramer instead of taking a field goal, the judicious choice.
“I can definitely say I was across the goal line,” Kramer said. “I was on top of some linemen and I got pushed back. When they unpiled, I was not in.”
So in one game Wannstedt makes two decisions that will either endear him to Bears fans or disgust those who think he has already been here too long, and the second group is likely to be much larger than the first.
This is Wannstedt’s first contribution to the lore of the Bears-Packers rivalry. To be that bold against this team at this time is the most admirable thing Wannstedt has done since he took the whistle from Mike Ditka.
“I was so excited,” Harris said. “This is something we’ve been working on since training camp and I was going to be the recipient. I pictured myself scoring and everyone loving us.”
A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a two-point conversion for?
Exuberating. Absolutely exuberating.