Already, this is a very unusual Bears team. It employs receivers, plural, who actually have led the NFL in categories involving pass catching.
Rookie Mark Bradley’s 17 catches for 331 yards led the league during the exhibitions. This is meaningless outside of Chicago, where it is viewed as a possible omen of a budding 20th-Century offense.
More importantly, they will begin their season with one Muhsin Muhammad on their payroll.
When playing for the Carolina Panthers last season, Muhammad led the NFL in touchdown catches with 16 and in receiving yardage with 1,405 yards on 93 catches.
Chicago has embraced him as a traveling dignitary. Teammates sit at his feet and stare at his hands eager to absorb his knowledge of such a foreign concept as catching a thrown football.
Not that it hasn’t happened before around here. As recently as 1970, a Bears receiver named Dick Gordon led the league with 71 receptions and 13 touchdowns. In 1964, another Bear named Johnny Morris led the league with 93 catches for 1,200 yards.
So just because generations of Chicago fans never have witnessed anything quite like Muhammad doesn’t mean the Bears haven’t known it is legal to throw a football.
But receivers never quite have caught on in these parts.
The request arrived the other day to list the three best Bears receivers ever. The questioner didn’t think an answer of “none” would fly. So the reply went like this:
Mike Ditka. He wasn’t even a wide receiver, but it was necessary to expand the pool of contenders.
As a tight end (another concept out of the past), Ditka caught 316 passes for 4,503 yards and 34 touchdowns from 1961 to 1966. That still ranks him fourth all-time in all three categories, the only Bear ranked that high in all three. It was Ditka’s presence that opened things up for Morris.
2. Harlon Hill. His 20.4-yard average per catch and 40 touchdowns from 1954 to ’61 made him a three-time Pro Bowl player, a record for a Bears wide receiver.
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3. A three-way tie among two-time Pro Bowlers Morris and Gordon and pre-Pro Bowler Ken Kavanaugh, whose statistics from the 1940s with three years off for World War II can be blamed for every shortcoming in Bears passing that followed.
Kavanaugh caught only 162 passes in his whole career, all with the Bears. That’s 20 fewer than Dennis McKinnon and 22 fewer than Willie Gault while they were in Chicago.
Yet Kavanaugh’s 50 touchdown catches still rank No. 1 among Bears receivers, an astonishing one touchdown per every 3.2 catches.
Ever since, the Bears brain trust has convinced itself that it is really not necessary to pass very much.
The part about passing well somehow got completely lost in a subsequent shuffle of coaches, quarterbacks, playbooks and receivers.
The retirement of Jerry Rice this week should remind the Bears of just how far behind they have fallen in a passing game that took over the NFL some time ago and grabs bigger chunks of the sport every year.
In the 20 years Rice played, starting with the 1985 season when the Bears last won a Super Bowl, he caught 1,549 passes while 15 different Bears leading receivers caught 1,295. Rice gained 22,895 yards while 12 different Bears receiving yardage leaders gained 17,066 yards. Rice scored 197 touchdowns while 13 different Bears wide receiver touchdown leaders caught 111.
Receivers come and go in Chicago, mostly go. The Bears’ last five yardage leaders — David Terrell, Marty Booker, Marcus Robinson, Bobby Engram and Ricky Proehl — all are playing for other teams now. A sixth, Curtis Conway, played in San Francisco last year.
This is the city of running backs and middle linebackers. Receivers are tolerated. When the weather gets cold and the wind starts whipping around Soldier Field, receivers aren’t needed. That’s Bears weather. That’s when runners and linebackers dig their cleats deep into the mud and slug it out.
Such were the conditions on Jan. 8, 1989, at the NFC championship game in Soldier Field: 17 degrees, wind out of the west at 29 m.p.h., Bears vs. 49ers.
Jerry Rice caught five passes for 133 yards and two touchdowns, a 61-yarder from Joe Montana in the first quarter and a 27-yarder in the second. Game and era over, 28-3.
That was a long time ago, 11 Bears leading receivers ago and 11 losing seasons ago.
Maybe Muhammad and maybe Bradley have arrived to signal the Bears are beginning to learn a long overdue lesson.
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