The Bears have been an unusually difficult team to get a grip on this year. Though they embarked on the season optimistic about making the playoffs, optimism soon turned to despair. Yet if the Bears and their fans were despairing, they weren’t hopeless. While compiling a record of 4-11 going into this weekend’s final game, the Bears nevertheless put together victories in Green Bay against the Packers and at home against two legitimate Super Bowl contenders, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Indianapolis Colts. They also posted a less stunning but overall more impressive victory over the New England Patriots two weeks ago, when for one game it all came together.
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The team’s shifting fortunes have been reflected by the divergent paths traced by their two highest-profile players: Cade McNown and Brian Urlacher. McNown began the season as the player to watch, a young quarterback pressed into service perhaps prematurely but as the hope for the future. Urlacher, by contrast, began the season on the bench, but as McNown went bust he emerged as a legitimate heir to Chicago’s long line of distinguished middle linebackers and became the sign of hope. The two are ending the season as the Bears’ version of the masks of comedy and tragedy–one renowned for his “goofy grin” while the other, despite possessing all the attributes Bears fans usually love in a player, has been labeled a loser.
With McNown dragging the team down fast, it’s no wonder fans have seized on Urlacher as the sign of what must be better days to come. I realize I’ve focused on him every time I’ve written about the Bears this season, but this is no time to stop. Urlacher’s performance has diminished a little toward the end of the year, no doubt under the exhaustion of his first 16-game pro schedule and the increased attention opponents have devoted to him, but he still gets off a hit or two a game that find him rising from the pile with that already infamous grin on his face. What is amazing about Urlacher is that, as good as he’s been this year, all signs indicate he’ll soon be even better. He is fit as can be, but he hasn’t yet put on the bulk that will serve him better as a middle linebacker. (Dick Butkus arrived from the University of Illinois carrying baby fat and only later grew into the broad-shouldered, thin-waisted bull he was in his prime.) Yet it’s worth pointing out that in the National Football League a young, inexperienced defensive player has it all over an offensive player with the same faults–especially in a town as traditionally defense-oriented as Chicago. Dick Butkus thrived for years on abysmal teams but he never took any blame for the losses. Much the same way, Urlacher, for all his youthful mistakes, has avoided blame even for the defensive lapses, as when the ‘Niners’ Terrell Owens caught a record 20 passes in burning the Bears defensive backs.
