Rocky's Football Corner #8

by Rick Rockwell

Sports hyperbole, especially in football, must be increasing at some fantastic rate.

Take for instance, the case of the Chicago Bears.

Haven’t you heard? The Bears are headed to the Super Bowl.

Never mind that teams play a 16-game regular season and the Bears have won only six games. Sure, the Bears are perfect in those games but that doesn’t guarantee a championship berth.

Compare the reaction, as The Washington Post did recently, between the 2006 Bears and the 1985 Super Bowl Champion Bears. (That article appeared as a sidebar in the Post’s print edition but was not published in the online edition, which merely listed Mark Maske’s main story on the Bears. Much of the information in the sidebar came from Pro Football Reference.) Those 1985 Bears lost only one regular season game and blew out the Patriots in the Super Bowl. But by this point in the season, the media in Chicago had not made one mention of the Super Bowl as a certainty. Sure, the 1985 Bears cut that “Super Bowl Shuffle” video but that was much later in the season. In 1985, by game seven, not one Chicago newspaper had published a story linking the Bears to the Super Bowl. Compare that to this year when already Chicago’s two major dailies have published at least nine articles. And that count is likely to tick upward after the Bears play San Francisco this weekend and will probably win.

Perhaps the media forget that the Carolina Panthers beat the Bears in the playoffs last year and Carolina still has a team that could handle these Bears. Despite the hype, there are at least two other teams in the National Football Conference (NFC) that could give these Bears fits: the New York Giants and the Atlanta Falcons. Lucky for the Bears, only one of those three teams shows up on their regular season schedule: the Giants in mid-November.

Until then, you’ll have to learn to endure the media hype about the Bears going undefeated this season. The Bears are good, but probably not that good. (This is what Coach Dennis Green of the Cardinals was trying to say last week until he blew his stack in a fit of apoplectic rage.) Of the six teams Chicago has beaten this season, only the Vikings and the Seahawks have winning records, and neither one of those teams is among the best in the league. Given their weak schedule, the Bears could easily go 14-2 without too much effort.

With middle linebacker Brian Urlacher leading a staunch defensive unit and quarterback Rex Grossman healthy and throwing fine, the Bears are the annointed ones -- the so-called top NFC team. Their meltdown in Arizona ten days ago and then miraculous fourth quarter comeback shows the Football Godz are smiling on the Bears. Or maybe, that’s just the media.

Sports
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Chicago Bears
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