For Halloween the Bears cleverly came to a football party disguised as themselves, a team of screaming incompetence and diminishing prospects, entirely unrecognizable from the Bears who had managed to get halfway through the NFL season without real shame or obvious humiliation.
So fooled were the Redskins that they jumped out to a 45-0 lead before slapping themselves on the forehead and agreeing that the joke was on them. They thought they were playing a real football team when it was only a bunch of mugs and Cade McNown.
“We had a lot of fun today,” said Redskins running back Stephen Davis, letting the Bears know there were no hard feelings.
The Redskins remained too sheepish to prevent McNown from throwing three second-half touchdown passes, matching exactly his number of interceptions, making the final score a deceptive 48-22, just to keep with the theme of the day.
“Football is a game of ups and downs,” McNown explained.
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When you are behind by six touchdowns before you get your first one, the prevailing direction would seem to be down. How far down is not yet clear, but the Bears better hope their ladder has an extension.
“Nobody knows what is going to happen next week,” McNown insisted. But of course we do. More of the same. Maybe worse. Green Bay. Brett Favre. The oldest border war in professional football.
The Bears were completely unmasked by the Redskins, the defense exposed, the offense humored, the coaching disgraced. This is the Bears as they really are, not the Bears as imagined or desired or briefly gloried, losers now of three in a row.
“I thought until today that we could walk out and compete with anybody,” said Bears tackle Mike Wells. “Throw the No. 1 offense in the league at us, and look what we do. It’s devastating to our psyche. It’s going to be a struggle to bounce back.”
The Bears were down two touchdowns almost before the national anthem was over. “Fourteen-0 is a big hole for our club,” said Bears coach Dick Jauron.
A divot is a big hole. A watch pocket is a big hole. A milk saucer is a big hole. So, climbing back from something so vast as a game that looked early like revenge for the once and famous 73-0 rout by the old Bears of the old Redskins, this was a matter of getting out with good health and a smattering of dignity, both of which the Bears avoided.
First, the dignity. It disappeared with running back Curtis Enis and center Olin Kreutz getting kicked out of the game for fighting, and the word is used more loosely than as a compliment. Kreutz kicked at the Redskins’ Kenard Long when Long was on the ground, and Enis came flying in from ambush and whacked another Redskin from behind.
“Both of them thought they were protecting a teammate,” Jauron said. That’s their story and they are sticking to it, when more obviously it was cheap-shot frustration. Maybe a head-on tackle of Davis, who had 143 yards and two touchdowns, might have shown more concern.
Or catching Dan “Big Daddy” Wilkinson, who lumbered like a woolly mammoth for 88 yards with an interception off starting quarterback Shane Matthews. All the cheerleaders and half the press box could have caught Wilkinson, but none of the Bears could or bothered to try.
“I was like an old Ford trying to get some gas at the gas station,” confirmed Wilkinson.
As for the injury, it isn’t necessarily a bad thing in the big picture. Matthews re-gimped his hamstring, this with the score a mere 31-0, leaving the remainder of the day and maybe the season to McNown.
“I’m more concerned about how we got beat than my injury,” Matthews said. “This was embarrassing. I’ve never been part of anything like this.”
Well, Matthews shouldn’t have to worry about it any more. All the future shame should be McNown’s. There is no reason not to turn tomorrow over to tomorrow’s quarterback.
Coaching instinct is to try to win the next game, but the only game the Bears should be aiming at now is Opening Day 2000. The Bears have to know if McNown is the three-touchdown thrower or the flailing, erratic short-armed quarterback he most often is.
Matthews now has taken his second bullet for McNown. That’s enough.