Monday night makes and breaks reputations. Brian Urlacher gets his first chance to enhance Chicago’s claim as Middle Linebacker City. He has hard acts to follow.
The late Bill George preceded Monday night, so the first of Chicago’s great middle linebackers (some swear still the greatest) is remembered mostly in the minds of older fans and teammates.
Dick Butkus played on Monday night only four times. The Bears won only once, beating the Minnesota Vikings 13-10 in 1972 in one of those knock-down defensive brawls. It was enough to perpetuate the Bears’ bruising image personified by Butkus, though they won only four games all year.
Mike Singletary played in 23 Monday night games. Surprisingly, the Bears won only eight of those during the team’s heyday. They lost the first three of Singletary’s tenure by embarrassing scores of 24-7 to the Los Angeles Rams, 48-17 to Detroit and 20-7 to San Diego. The first two winning Monday night games of Singletary’s career were against the Packers in 1985 and 1986.
Win or lose, Singletary’s eyes became a Monday night staple.
This is the first Monday night game when every other player in the NFL can watch Urlacher and other Bears they have heard about but have seen only on highlights. Most could have watched the Philadelphia playoff game, which did little for the Bears’ reputation, but Monday night is different.
Urlacher has a hard act to follow after the performance of Baltimore’s Ray Lewis last week. While some observers want to anoint Urlacher as the league’s best, Lewis had 18 tackles in the Ravens’ upset of Denver, 11 in the first half. He chased down a lame Brian Griese along the sideline and had a big block on Chris McAlister’s 107-yard return of a missed field goal. He was AFC defensive player of the week.
Lewis was motivated by the irreverent remarks of Denver rookie running back Clinton Portis, like Lewis a University of Miami product, who suggested Lewis could be blocked.
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Lewis said: “I told [Portis] to stop ducking me. It was the lack of respect coming from another Hurricane. I don’t care who you are, you don’t diss someone who has paved the way for you.
“I love him to death, but he hasn’t done a thing in this league yet. He came in talking about what he can do, what my game is like. This was personal. Me and him, it was personal.”
Ravens tight end Todd Heap also caught two touchdown passes to show why the Ravens were content to send Shannon Sharpe back to Denver.
“That’s one thing I did learn from Shannon Sharpe–the biggest stage in football is Monday night, and you need to show up,” Heap said.
Still flying: Bears, take note: The Eagles’ starting defensive right tackle, Hollis Thomas, has been out all season with a broken foot. Their starting left tackle, Corey Simon, will miss his second game this week with a sprained ankle. End Derrick Burgess, one of their best pass rushers, is on the shelf until mid-November with a broken foot.
Yet the defensive line has 11 of the club’s 16 sacks and has done a solid job against the run, ranking eighth after finishing 18th last season.
One of the reasons is the Eagles’ offense. The Eagles have put up 87 first-half points, forcing teams to play catch-up and run less. Their first four opponents have averaged just 23.2 rushing attempts per game.
The next one: Just when everybody was looking for the next Kurt Warner or Tom Brady to emerge from quarterback nowhere, here comes Tommy Maddox, who has replaced Kordell Stewart, probably punching Stewart’s ticket out of Pittsburgh.
Maddox was Denver’s No. 1 draft pick in 1992 as a 20-year-old UCLA sophomore who immediately crashed. He bounced to St. Louis, the Giants and the Falcons, who cut him in 1997. He sold insurance for three years in Texas, got the itch to get back into football and signed with the New Jersey Red Dogs of the Arena Football League in 2000. He was league MVP of the short-lived XFL for the L.A. Xtreme in 2001. He sent letters to every NFL team, and the Steelers were the only one to call.
Al Luginbill, the only man to coach both Maddox and Warner, regards them as equals.
“Tommy will never be in a situation like Kurt is because that’s not the philosophy of Pittsburgh,” Luginbill said. “The bottom line is, they both can win. They’re both money players. Both have similar releases, both are tough guys. Kurt probably has a little stronger arm to the edge of the field, but he and Tommy are equally accurate.”
Dan Reeves, who drafted Maddox in Denver and hired him in New York and Atlanta, seemed to be the only NFL coach who liked him for a while.
“We thought his future was great, that he’d learn under one of the great ones and when John [Elway] retired, Tommy would be in his prime,” Reeves said. “Everyone said he was only getting another chance because I was giving it to him. I told Tommy to go somewhere else where there was not that pressure.”
Raiders’ chicanery: Leave it to the Raiders to find a loophole in the rules. After timeouts, changes of possession or other stoppages in play, players are not allowed to come onto the field and then immediately leave if they haven’t participated in a play. The first infraction results in a warning. After that it’s a 15-yard penalty for unsportsmanlike conduct.
However, there is no such rule to prevent such movement while the clock is running. Tennessee coach Jeff Fisher said the Raiders continually ran offensive players on and off the field Sunday, and most of them didn’t participate in a play. It was meant to confuse the Titans’ defense and prevent substitutions to match Oakland’s personnel.
When asked if it’s done with the intent to fake out a defense, Fisher said, “Yes, and they do a great job of it.”
Since Fisher is co-chairman of the league competition committee, expect a closed loophole next season.
Pass-happy: The 0-4 Rams have run 71 times and passed 175 despite playing in four relatively close games. That’s 28.8 percent runs. In their 1999 Super Bowl season they ran 43 percent of the time. When coach Mike Martz ignores the run, defenses can too.
The number: Butch Davis has coached the Browns for 20 games. Seven have been decided on the last play. The Browns are 2-5 in those games.