For him, it almost constituted surliness.
“Thirteen and two,” Rashied Davis proclaimed to no one in particular Sunday in the winners’ locker room. “The worst 13-2 team in the league.”
So can we assume the Bears have a bit of a chip on their shoulders if one of the most mild-mannered guys on the team seems to have one?
“We just want to play and finish out the season with another victory against Green Bay,” Davis said. “That’s pretty much it.”
And that “worst 13-2 team in the league” thing?
“It’s just what I heard,” he said. “I heard it on the streets.”
Feeling it
One throw from Rex Grossman, one catch for 27 yards on third-and-7 from the Bears’ 27-yard line late in the third quarter Sunday.
Davis doesn’t exactly covet getting knocked silly, but for an NFL receiver, it is a badge of honor, a source of satisfaction. And so, when he appeared on the ESPN feature “Jacked Up” a couple of weeks ago for the hit he took on a kick return earlier in the season, he was, well, jacked up.
Otherwise, like most Mondays, Davis felt pretty good the week of the Detroit game.
“I may be fatigued and a little bit tired just from all the emotion and running I did that week, but I don’t feel any aftereffects, like being sore,” he said. “I felt it a lot more when I was kick returning a lot.
“You’ve got to see a silver lining in everything, and my body is a lot fresher than it probably would have been last year. I know it’s a lot fresher than last year. I feel good after games.”
Drillin’
Davis’ favorite part of practice?
“I like one-on-ones [against the first-team cornerbacks],” he said. “That’s a lot of fun. You’re [usually] going against the scout team, and those guys are good as well, but they’re not actually trying to shut you down and they’re not going to be overly physical because at this point it’s kind of stupid.
“You don’t want to hurt anybody in practice. You just want to give them a look, make sure we’re ready for the game, but you want to be smart about it.
“But it’s great competition [against the first-team corners]. I love watching Peanut [Tillman] and Moose (Muhsin Muhammad) go at it because Peanut, to me, is one of the better corners in this league, and I think he got snubbed [for the Pro Bowl]. I see him every day and I go up against other guys, and a lot of those other guys don’t match up with Peanut.”
Receivers room
Sure, there are serious matters to attend to during meetings and film study. But in the receivers room, anyway, there’s always time for teasing rookie practice-squad receiver Mike Hass and figuring out how to make the hours spent in the Bears’ smallest meeting room–“I guess because we’re the skinny guys,” Davis said–a little more festive.
On Monday, Davis, Muhammad and Mark Bradley went to Richardson Farms and chopped down a 3-foot Christmas tree to spruce up the place.
“Mike Hass has to decorate it,” Davis joked Wednesday. “And he’d better do it by tomorrow or he’s going in the whirlpool.”
Hass is not the only one they tease, and watching film provides plenty of opportunities.
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“Missing a block, getting knocked out, we’ll get on a guy,” Davis said. “Not literally knocked out but getting hit real hard, yeah. Blocking somebody and then getting thrown off, all that kind of stuff. You’ll get it. It’s your fault.
“Like we get Mike all the time. We just like to get him. He really doesn’t drop any balls, so we don’t really get a chance to get him.”
Anything out of bounds?
“Yeah, dropping the ball,” Davis said. “We take dropping a ball in a game seriously.”
Rex
The Pro Bowl announcements are met with disappointment. Davis believes quarterback Rex Grossman should have made the NFC squad.
“Everybody has bad games every now and then,” Davis said. “Shoot, no one’s perfect. Rex is really good, one of the best quarterbacks in the league, and I think he got snubbed in the Pro Bowl voting.
“I think he should have had some consideration. He had a couple of bad games, whatever. If he hadn’t had those bad games, I think he would’ve made it.”
Locker-room adventures
Bears players occupy themselves for endless minutes with a game that has no name. And no one is sure who made it up, but it entails throwing a volleyball or soccer ball across the room.
Points are earned by getting the ball to bounce at precisely the right spot on the lip of the adjacent locker-stall bench so it rolls halfway back.
“We made it up ourselves,” Davis said. “Hey, we have an imagination.”
Robbie Gould, said Davis, is “the best. No one beats him.” Gould shrugged modestly.
Davis, who played four years for the Arena Football League’s San Jose SaberCats until 2005, recalled that hi-jinks there included taking a player’s cell phone out of his locker, turning up the volume, hiding it in a meeting room and then calling him, thereby drawing a fine for that player.
“I wouldn’t try that [with the Bears],” he said. “I would probably get in a fight here. That’s a lot of money. It wasn’t that much there. In arena (where the average salary is in the mid-$30,000s), you might get fined a couple hundred, maybe $500. A $1,000 fine would be a huge fine in arena. Here, depending on how the coaches feel and how many times you’ve been fined and warned, it could cost you a couple thousand.”
The newlywed game
Their stove, Davis said with a laugh, is “virtually brand new,” and life with wife Dianna is like that of most newlyweds. “Maybe later in life when we have kids we’ll cook a little bit more, but we go out a lot,” he said. “We really like Mexican food.”
The two have a vast DVD collection and are more likely to buy a new one than to go to the movies.
“We like a lot of the same movies,” he said. “We like comedies. She likes the girly flicks, and sometimes I like them, sometimes I don’t. Anything with Denzel [Washington] we’ll watch. I like more action stuff, and we both like cartoons. `Cars’ was really fun.
“We’ve seen `Shrek’ together. Whenever Dreamworks Pictures comes out with a good one, we’ll go see that. `Madagascar’ was all right; it was cute.”
Together the Davises volunteer through the Bears Wives Charities, reading and handing out gifts to the children at a Lake County special-education school on Tuesday along with Tillman and John Tait and their wives.
When Davis is not at Halas Hall, he and his wife can usually be found together. Rashied joked that Dianna, a softball player at San Jose State, where the two met, “doesn’t like to do anything without me. She pretty much will drag me out of the house unless I really don’t want to go. I guess it’s all companionship. We started out friends, and we just like hanging out together.”
Where the two part company, however, is over video games.
“She hates them,” he said. “I try to get her to play in an attempt to allow me to play more, but it doesn’t work. She won’t touch them.”
Just the same, Davis, “a PlayStation, Xbox 360 guy,” has been dropping hints lately for Christmas morning. “I’ll probably get a few things,” he said. “I wish I could get my hands on PS3. It’s hard to get.”
Market sense
In a world of flashy NFL receivers, the Bears are not the most flamboyant guys around.
“That’s just how this team is,” Davis said. “I don’t really see any selfish players on this team. But just because somebody is flamboyant doesn’t mean he’s a selfish player. I don’t think Chad Johnson is a selfish player, and he’s as flamboyant as they come. I just think he’s proud to be one of the best receivers in the league, and he works hard enough to be that.
“With a lot of these guys it’s marketability. The guys who are real quiet don’t have a lot of [endorsements]. Like Marvin Harrison, he is probably the best receiver in the league–next to Muhsin Muhammad, of course–and he doesn’t get a whole lot of marketing because he’s not one of the more flamboyant ones.
“There’s not a whole lot of individuality in the NFL. You can get fined for a lot of different things. Those players, the more flamboyant they are, they get more marketing because their faces are always out there. People get a chance to see them. Other players, we always have our helmets on.”
Waiting game
Davis estimates that he averages 16 or 17 plays a game, coming in mostly on receiving downs. He has also returned 28 kickoffs this season, averaging 23.5 yards per return.
Against the Lions, Davis returned his first kickoff in three games, taking the ball 2 yards deep in the end zone and returning it 27 yards. He got another crack at a kickoff in the third quarter and had a 17-yard return to the Bears’ 22.
“That felt pretty good,” he said. “To get my hands on the ball every once in a while feels good.”
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When he’s not doing either, Davis often finds himself on the kickoff-coverage team if Ricky Manning Jr. is starting or needs a break, which he has done the last three games, including Sunday.
“I love it,” Davis said. “It gives me a chance to make a tackle every now and then. It’s one of my favorite things to do. I’m not the greatest tackler in the world, though I have played a little bit of defense, so I do know how to tackle. You go through fundamental stuff, little drills just to remind you. What you don’t use, you lose.”
Otherwise, Davis, unlike some of the others, sees no more playing time than usual Sunday.
“It wasn’t a surprise,” he said. “I just want everybody to stay sharp so we can get to the playoffs and win. That’s all I care about is winning in the playoffs right now. Winning every game, not just winning in the playoffs.
“It’s a great feeling to be 13-2. That home-field advantage, we have to take advantage of it.”
In the meantime, there’s always Green Bay.
“I don’t know,” Davis said with a sly smile. “I think we want to give Brett Favre what possibly might be his last loss.”
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