| I was not feeling overly optimistic about the Bears beating the Bucs. Yes, I did pick them to win, but I fully expected the Tampa Bay defense to do what the Packers did, only worse, and the Bear offense to not have an answer.
Instead, I saw the offensive gameplan I had been begging for against Green Bay. John Shoop must have been watching ESPN classic last week, and discovered you CAN legally throw the ball downfield as part of a planned attack. He gets an attaboy for coming up with a nice mix of runs and passes, which allowed Jim Miller to add play-action passes to his repertoire, resulting in 3 touchdown passes of more than 30 yards each. Coupled with a Bear defense playing aggressive and putting pressure on Brad Johnson, the Bears went to an 11 point 27-16 lead with 8 minutes to go. Then, the coaching staff wiped out their attaboys. Greg "Rerun" Blache (the coach who has never seen a buffet he didn't like) was the first to lead the rest of the Bears coaches down their regular path of idiocy. Good teams go for the kill shot. Good coaches realize that in the NFL, when you have your opponent down, you step on his neck and rip out his heart. You do NOT offer him a hand up to get him back in the game. The Bears defensive mix of selective blitzing, odd man fronts, and aggressively attacking the ball, gave way to a passive read and react prevent which let Brad |
Johnson have all the time he needed to find the gaps in the now soft zone coverage. The result was a Buc TD and successful 2 point conversion, making it now a 3 point game. Enter John Shoop. The sight of a potential Tampa Bay comeback of course meant the Bear offense would go into a conservative shell instead of trying to put the game away with another aggressive scoring drive. He could have sent a message to all that the Bears will do everything they can to win. Instead, he showed the Bear coaches will lose their spines in adverse situations, thereby handicapping the team. Even when Brad Johnson threw what should have been the game clinching interception around the 2 minute mark, the Bear coaches did not know how to react. The Bears first play was a screwed up handoff between Miller & Thomas, which sent the Bear coaches into physical paralysis and mental vapor lock. All the Bears needed to do was get a first down, and the game was over. Instead, the Bear coaches ordered Miller to kneel on 3 consecutive plays. You would have thought on 4th down, they would have at least sent Brad Maynard in to pooch-punt around the 10, making the Bucs chances even more remote. Instead, the Bears gave the Bucs the ball at their own 35 with about 20 ticks on the clock. Given what has happened around the NFL this season, this situation provided more than ample opportunity to cause major |
negative results for the Bears. 2 Brad Johnson passes to Warrick Dunn got the Bucs near midfield. An extremely stupid play by R.W. McQuarters on the second completion resulted in the Bucs being in game tying field goal range once the penalty was assessed. You can't really blame McQuarters however. I think he was simply trying to show he is a total team player. As such, he felt it best to follow the lead of his coaches and put his head up his butt at a critical time. The ensuing doink by Grammatica was more than the Bears deserved, but I'll take it. I have said repeatedly how important it is for a team to remain in the game the full 60 minutes. Well, that applies to the coaching staff too. Against Green Bay, they barely showed up. Against Tampa Bay, they did a great job for 52 minutes. Those final 8 were enough to cause some fans to develop drinking problems. The Baltimore Ravens won the Super Bowl last year, then decided their quarterback was their weak link. So they fired him. The weak link on the Bears is their coaching staff. I am convinced they are incompetent enough to prevent the Bears team from achieving the most from their abilities. So if this team makes it to the Super Bowl, and Ja-Moron is named coach of the year by the blithering, drooling, pompous sports journalists, I won't care. Ja-Moron and his staff ARE the Bear's weak link, so the entire staff should still be shown the door. |