Watching the Bears this season was like watching some amazing, intricate machine trying to get itself to work right. There were moments when everything fit together, when the Bears rolled rapidly over the opposition. These moments, however, were few and far between after the season’s first game, so that watching the Bears was more often than. not frustrating rather than satisfying. Our popular culture is full of such frustrating mechanisms–great machines that always seem to be malfunctioning or misfiring, like the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars. To watch the Bears two years ago was to realize everything football could be–brutal yet graceful precision, power and finesse. No team had manifested the forms of the game so well since the decay of the Pittsburgh Steelers dynasty. But over the last two years, watching the coaches tinker with the ever-misfiring mechanism, and watching Ditka tinker with the tinkerers, has been like watching Star Wars sequels in which the Millennium Falcon is transformed from a humorous, all-powerful special effect into a cheap plot device. Watching a team play below its potential can be fascinating at the same time it’s frustrating, but it isn’t like watching great football, and great football is what we’ve become accustomed to.
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Many people’s initial response to the Bears’ 21-17 loss to the Washington Redskins last Sunday was dismissal. “Bear overexposure” is the redundant pun of the moment (not that it has much competition), and I, too, admit to welcoming a few months without the daily intrigues of the Bears’ soap opera–a feeling that seems to be shared by most of the Bears, including Mike Ditka. The idea of paying only the scantest attention to the NFL draft and the Bears’ mini-camp and the Bears’ training camp and the Bears’ exhibition games, and then finally beginning to look in on them along about September, is not only pleasant but almost exciting. None of us needs another year in which we start worrying about Jim McMahon’s shoulder in June and stop worrying about his hamstring in January, with William Perry’s weight, Otis, Wilson’s petulance, and Mike Ditka’s jock itch to occupy us in idle moments in between.
The Bears’ 1987 postmortem will not be as telling as last year’s. Last year, the Bears were outplayed and outcoached and deserved to lose. What’s more, the Skins’ excellent game plan of a year ago–the expert mixture of sideline passes and runs off tackle–went on to haunt the Bears this season, as various opponents used similar plans. The Bears showed no such weakness in structure Sunday; the Skins’ game plan was slightly more open, slightly more effective than the Bears’, but it certainly did not bring the Bears to their knees, as it had the year before. Sunday seemed a confrontation between two teams of similar strength and comparable desire; the team that got the breaks and made the fewest mistakes won. The reasons for the Bears’ loss, beyond these, are almost incidental.
Ditka talks often of the Bears “system,” but what he fails to recognize is that what made the Bears great two years ago was that they had greater players than the opposition while still managing to play as a team. And the Bears system has flaws. These, we hope, can be adjusted. Most of the players, meanwhile, are on the far end of their all-too-short NFL careers. Already Mike Singletary–great player that he is–is not the player he was. And new, lighter, faster defensive ends like the Minnesota Vikings’ Chris Doleman look more like 1985’s Richard Dent than Richard Dent does. Meanwhile the NFC’s Central Division is getting tougher, the Vikings are proving themselves one of the best teams in the league, and the Packers have the talent to contend if they ever got a coach who has more ideas than facial tics. The holes in the Bears’ scheme are easy to spot: they need a cornerback and they need help on the offensive line. Yet they will soon require help on the defensive line (where Perry must slim down to below 320) and at linebacker.
