It was not a year to remember. It was a year to forget. But how could they? For those who lived through it, it was the football season from hell, a nightmarish year that was part black comedy, part stark tragedy.
If it were a book, it would be written by Stephen King. It if were a movie, it would be scripted by Brian DePalma. The year was 1969, the worst season in Bears history. Try to forget it. Just try.
It began, really, the year before, when Jim Dooley replaced George Halas as coach and came within an eyelash of getting the Bears into the playoffs. During that season, Gale Sayers’ knee was wrecked and a free-agent running back from Wake Forest named Brian Piccolo finally got his chance to play.
Also during that season, Virgil Carter, a cherubic-looking rookie quarterback from Brigham Young, came off the bench to guide the Bears to four straight victories before suffering a broken ankle. This was the genesis of the quarterback controversy that would be the central theme of the 1969 debacle.
Going into the final game of the 1968 season, the Bears needed only to beat the Green Bay Packers at home to win the division title. They lost 28-27 to finish at 7-7.
“That was the most inspirational game I ever played in in my life,” recalls former center Mike Pyle, who was a starter on the Bears’ 1963 championship team. “When we started the next season, I didn’t think we were any worse than that team that had missed the playoffs by two points.”
Indeed, the Bears had Sayers back; had discovered that Piccolo was a more than adequate NFL running back, a do-everything kind of guy in the mold of the New York Giants’ Joe Morrison; had two quarterbacks-Carter and Jack Concannon-that they were comfortable with; and had linebackers Dick Butkus and Doug Buffone at the core of a typically tough Bear defense.
“We were definitely not just a 1-and-13 team,” Pyle insists. But that is what they were. You could look it up.
“It seemed like everything went wrong,” remembers Sayers, who would gain more than 1,000 yards, lead the league in rushing, be named MVP of the Pro Bowl and find that while “it was a very successful year for Gale Sayers, it did nothing for me. It was a very, very dead feeling after the season. It was a season when nothing worked for us. It was a season where it seemed every time we did things right, the other team did them twice as right.”
And when they did things wrong, which was frequently, inevitably they were punished for it.
They went to camp with a quarterback controversy, which was resolved when Concannon was handed the job after a preseason in which neither quarterback looked particularly good. Carter presumably was the backup, with rookie Bobby Douglass waiting in the wings.
Had the season played out that way, perhaps some of the horrors ahead could have been avoided. The offense was pathetic in a 17-0 opening loss in Green Bay, and then came the two games that effectively ended the season before it started.
Against the Cardinals, the Bears lost 20-17 when Mac Percival missed a 26-yard field-goal attempt on the final play. But what really cost the game was a comic mixup in the first quarter when Concannon, after calling a play in which the ball was to be snapped at the first sound, suddenly stood up and called time out.
Before the word “time” was out of Concannon’s mouth, Pyle had centered the ball, which bounced off Concannon’s knee, went 20 feet in the air and into the arms of Cardinal linebacker Larry Stallings, who went 62 yards for a touchdown.
Remembers Pyle, “Concannon had set the line and gone through the audibles when Sayers said, `What’s the play?’ He’s the guy who was supposed to run the ball. Jack said `time out’ when the next sound was supposed to be the snap count.”
The next week in New York, it was the defense’s turn to mess up. With the Bears leading 24-21 and just over a minute left, Fran Tarkenton hit a wide-open Morrison with a 26-yard touchdown pass. Morrison was open because both Buffone and defensive back Bennie McRae had misunderstood Butkus’ defensive call and blitzed when they should have been in a zone defense.
Bears defensive assistant Jimmy Carr later explained that Butkus had yelled “Pow” while McRae thought he’d said “Poc” and Buffone “actually knew the defense but got excited when he saw a chance to rush Tarkenton and sack him. McRae missed the signal completely and came up to engage (a Giants flanker) and left the entire left side of the secondary unprotected.”
As Buffone laughingly recalls it, “It was Butkus’ fault, but he blamed it on us.” There was plenty of blame to go around the next week when the Vikings hammered the Bears unmercifully 31-0. It was the Bears’ home opener, and the lowlight came when Garry Lyle blocked Fred Cox’s field-goal attempt straight into the kicker’s arms. Cox ran for a first down.
With the record now 0-4, Dooley made the decision that would splinter what was left of the team into tiny fragments. Concannon had played poorly in two games and relatively well in the other two. The Bears had led both of those into the fourth quarter. But Dooley decided to replace him, and he replaced him not with Carter, but with the rookie, Douglass.
If the team had been 2-2, Dooley explained later-much later-he would have given the reins to the more proven Carter. Actually, if the team had been 2-2, he probably would not have replaced Concannon at all.
For most of the rest of the season, Carter would sulk and Concannon would neither read the papers nor talk to reporters. Because of Douglass’ inexperience, Concannon came in on third-down-and-short plays in a 13-7 loss to Detroit. Actually, with his running ability, Douglass was an ideal third-and-short quarterback.
The Bears’ defense was outstanding in a 9-7 loss to the unbeaten Los Angeles Rams the next week, but the Vikings, who would go to the Super Bowl that year, buried them again 31-14 to run the record to 0-7.
Then came the “showdown” with the Pittsburgh Steelers to determine which was the worst team in football. On that day it was the Steelers, by far. In fact, the Bears’ defense was so dominating in a 38-7 romp that one Pittsburgh executive exclaimed: “If the Christians had had Dick Butkus, they’d have beaten the lions.” All the victory did, however, was deprive the Bears of the first selection in the next year’s draft. The Steelers also finished 1-13 and won a coin flip for the No. 1 pick: Terry Bradshaw.
But that is another story. This one took a tragic turn the next week when the Bears went to Atlanta and were hammered 48-31. “Our defense went from the best to the worst in one week,” fumed Dooley.
But that wasn’t the worst. The worst was that Piccolo, who had been playing with a persistent cough all season, had to come out of the game and was sent for tests that would reveal he had cancer.
“I remember that in training camp I only missed one day of practice,” recalls Buffone, “and that day Brian was out, too. We both had the flu and he was coughing a lot. We got into the regular season and we were in the locker room and Brian was coughing and I said, `You ought to get that checked.’ He said, `Aw, I’ve got cancer.’ He was only kidding around like he always did. We went to Atlanta and he couldn’t breathe. He just couldn’t go. That’s when they sent him for the tests.
“We were going to win a game for him, but we couldn’t even do that.”
“I think it was the Baltimore game (a 24-21 loss) that we dedicated to Brian,” recalls Sayers. “We played a hell of a game, but again we couldn’t put it together. We went to the hospital after the game and gave him a losing game ball.”
With three games left in the season and the Bears at 1-10, Dooley finally gave Carter a start against the San Francisco 49ers. The young quarterback, throwing mostly short patterns, went 31 for 49 for 301 yards and three touchdowns, but again the Bears, with Butkus on the sidelines with a knee injury, were beaten badly, 42-21.
The whole sorry kettle of fish boiled over the next week when Carter, who says he was promised the whole game, was pulled at halftime of a 21-3 loss to the Packers in Wrigley Field. In one of the more infamous locker room scenes of all time, the usually mild-mannered Carter went ballistic, calling Dooley “gutless and a liar.”
While Concannon sat nearby cooing, “Where you gonna be next year, Virgil?” Carter snapped: “Anywhere but here.” Reminded that the Bears could insist he play out his option, Carter uttered the line that touched off the infamous “chickenbleep” incident.
The next day Halas fined Carter $1,000 because of the insult. “I’m not going to get into a personality duel with a guy who’s played 6 1/2 games in a league that’s 50 years old,” said Dooley, just before dressing down Carter in front of the whole squad and then dismissing him from the team for the final game against Detroit.
Halas explained that Carter was not suspended and would receive his full salary, but he watched the game from the stands. Concannon, in a move that seemed to make no sense at all in light of all that had gone on before, was named starting quarterback for the final game. “Will miracles ever cease?” he wondered aloud. The Bears lost a lusterless 20-3 game to the Lions and, at the annual alumni dinner that night, Halas put the season into perspective. He blamed it on the press.
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Next: The Cubs break a million hearts.