Bear(ing) the News – A Chicago Bears Blog

Brad Biggs at the Chicago Tribune quotes J’Marcus Webb on his move from the left tackle spot to the right:

“Coach [Aaron] Kromer has definitely put me in the right spot.  “Consistency comes just working hard every day, coming in with a purpose, listening, watching film and being a pro. It’s mainly technique, technique when you are tired.”

For the life of me I can’t figure out why the coaching staff believes a move to the right side is going to make Webb any better.  They are right in that his problem is lack of consistency.  But Webb is wrong about solving the problem.  Poor technique isn’t the cause.  Poor technique is the product.   Consistency for his is a matter of concentration and in my experience it isn’t something that can be learned.  Here’s hoping I’m wrong.

There are a number of articles this morning in the local papers and on the blogging sites about the fact that general manager Phil Emery has decided that no negotiations for contract extensions will take place during the 2013 season.  This entry from ESPN NFC North blogger Kevin Seifert is typical:

“In telling reporters Wednesday that any contract extensions ‘will happen in 2014 and not during the 2013 season,’ Emery has guaranteed himself a team of highly-motivated players and also given new coach Marc Trestman maximum flexibility to evaluate the roster. At the same time, however, Emery has risked the traditional side effects of a team consumed by
individual contract status. He has also handed his highest achievers more negotiating leverage.”

There are a couple of things that surprise me about all of these articles.  One is that they all focus on what this means to quarterback Jay Cutler.  The most common refrain is that Emery will “happily pay up” for Cutler in the highly unlikely event that the Bears win a Super Bowl.  Emery’s not going to “pay up” Cutler for anything.  Right or wrong, the Bears will almost certainly franchise Cutler as quickly as possible if he performs this season.  And if I know my Bears, he won’t get a dime more in guaranteed money than is already guaranteed under that tag for the two years they can apply it.  The guy who will cash in, assuming both he and Cutler perform, is this year’s franchise victim, defensive tackle Henry Melton because if Cutler gets the tag, Melton can’t.

The second thing that surprised me is that no one mentioned the fact that half of the Bears starters will be playing for themselves as individuals in what is the ultimate team game.  Granted, that’s always true. Its one of the great paradoxes of team sport [1].  Place kicker Robbie Gould did finally articulate this even if none of the writers did.  Via Seifert:

“‘At the end of the day if you have all these guys [unsigned], they have to take care of No. 1,’ Gould told ESPN 1000 co-hosts Jeff Dickerson and Michael C. Wright.

Its ironic that this is coming from arguable the only player on the whole team who can play entirely for selfish motives.  You kick the ball through the uprights, buddy.  The one guy who only has to put his head down and do his job as an individual is the only guy who always feels the need to sound off.  Gould can afford to be selfish and don’t fool yourself.  That’s exactly what he is.  A real team player would have done what the rest of the team is doing – kept his mouth shut and minimized distractions.  This has more to do with the fact that they wouldn’t extend his own contract in the off-season than it does with the fact that they aren’t extending the guys who have to actually play together as part of a whole.

That aside, I think he’s right.  Putting so many players in such a position exacerbates the problem and encourages selfish play.  Its bad enough if the occasional individual is doing it.  If a significant number of the potential free agents on this team lean more in the direction of making themselves look better at the expense of the team, it could be fatal, especially with a rookie head coach.

I’m not saying that Emery is making a mistake.  Given the Bears salary cap situation, you could argue that they have no choice, anyway.  But let’s get the story straight.

[1]: See North Dallas Forty if you’ve never watched it.  Every football fan will love it.

Adam L Jahns at the Chicago Sun-Times writes about how the Bears will be taking it easy on contact in practice this summer.  Wide receiver Brandon Marshall, who had off-season hip surgery, seems to be on board:

“’We’re gonna be smart,’ Marshall said. ‘I’m going on my eighth year [and have] had a few hip surgeries. Nothing major, but at the same time, we start playing games in September. So that’s what I’m preparing for.

“’It’s important to get out there with your teammates, build chemistry, learn the offense, get reps. But if I’m not healthy, all that doesn’t matter.  So I’ll listen to my body and go as it tells me.’”

Marshall didn’t practice this off-season despite the implementation of an entirely new offense.  Brad Biggs at the Chicago Tribune reports that Marshall should be full go with no limitations now.  Quarterback Jay Cutler emphasizes the importance that Marshall be out there in his comments:

“‘We had Martellus (Bennett) out there, that was good,’ Cutler said. ‘We kind of wanted to see what he had. Had a bunch of tight ends. Joe (Anderson) had a good minicamp. We have guys coming along. But we have to get Brandon back up to speed offensively, learning the system. We have to get Alshon [Jeffery] back out there and get him up to speed. There are some key guys we have to get caught up.'”

Of course, taking it easy on Marshall’s hip is common sense.  But at the same time this situation is worth monitoring.   Working to be ready for September is fine.  But if Marshall’s “body” ends up telling him not to participate too often this summer in what are basically non-contact practices to learn a new offense, you have to wonder if he’s going to hit the target.

English author Samuel Johnson once said, “While grief is fresh, every attempt to divert only irritates. You must wait till it be digested, and then amusement will dissipate the remains of it.”  It sounds like something Brian Urlacher is going to have to keep in mind in the coming months.  Rick Telendar at the  Chicago-Sun-Times elaborates:

“Indeed, [Urlacher’s] in a bit of that hallucinatory It’s over/I’m not done! stage.  He says he’ll never come back to football. Then he lets this slip in the [TV host Dave] Dameshek interview: ‘My body feels good. Mentally I feel good. I’m excited to run out there and go through the grind of training camp and do stuff like that.’

“Present tense.

“Then he reverses field. ‘I’m sure I’ll miss it,’ he says. ‘’But right now I don’t miss it at all.’’

“When he’ll miss it is when training camp starts at the end of July, when the Bears take the field for preseason games, when the Green Bay Packers show up, when the air gets crisp and the tailgates are in full charcoal heaven. He’s never done anything else in the fall.

“He’ll feel the pain then. Not in his knees or back or shoulders or his once-busted wrist.

“He’ll feel it in his heart. Because — you never know — the Bears might win it all without him.”

I haven’t been able to muster much sympathy for Urlacher over the past couple months.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for all of the years of effort for the team.  But I’ve been more than a little upset that he chose to be insulted when the Bears offered him an above market level deal.  As far as I can tell, he still blames the Bears, specifically GM Phil Emery, for his departure despite that.  How he comes to that conclusion  is beyond me.  Though Telendar tries to explain it all as a stage of grief where, like many players, Urlacher can’t accept that its over, I honestly don’t think it had to be over.  I think the guy can still play.  No one – not me, not anyone I know – really understands it.

I guess when you come right down to it, the truth is that Urlacher’s not the only one who’s been grieving.  I’ve personally been stuck at anger.  But I always knew I’d eventually get past it and, in reading this article, I’ve come to realize that the reality of Urlacher’s situation is about to hit home for for both him and us.  I still don’t understand it but I think I’ve finally made it to acceptance.  Here’s hoping Urlacher manages to do the same soon.

Rest in peace, Brian.

Greg Gabriel at The National Football Post reviews the best assistant coaches in the NFL.

“Make no mistake about it: the NFL is a coach’s league.

“Except for maybe the quarterback position, the talent level from team to team is fairly close. The teams that have the best coaching staffs are the teams that have a chance to win. With that said, in my 30 years in the league I have come across some very good coaches — men that I have a huge amount of respect for because they have worked extremely hard to perfect their craft.”

It’s no coincidence that the only quarterbacks coach on this list (Pep Hamilton) will actually be an offensive coordinator this year. Good ones don’t last long.

Gabriel is a former Bears personnel man so there are a fair number of ex-Bears coaches on this list including current defensive backs coach Jon Hoke

I have, of course, always loved Charles Tillman. I am a Bears fan after all and he is a Pro Bowler. I get to see him every game and I thought I appreciated him. But Sam Monson at Pro Football Focus takes the analysis to a whole new level with this article. This is a must read for any Bears fan.

I know wide receivers are a different breed. But what kind of self-involved jerk actually gives himself a nickname? From Bob Sansevere at the Pioneer Press.

Bears general manager Phil Emery is now using statistics to guide his decisions. His interested has become so intense that he recently hired a statistician to fill a newly-created “analytics” postion in the front office. Gven that this is the case, I thought I’d pass along a link to an interesting and well-thought out article on the use of statistics in sports.

Enjoy.

Michael David Smith at profootballtalk.com describes comments that Packers quarterback Aaron Rogers made via Twitter during the NBA Finals. One of those comments took Magic Johnson to task for his almost entirely positive commentary on individual players and, as he did it, Rogers also took a back handed swipe at Monday Night Football commentator Jon Gruden:

Magic is quickly becoming the John Gruden of ESPN NBA coverage. Everybody is the greatest everything. #bedtime

—
Aaron Rodgers (@AaronRodgers12) June 21, 2013

Smith seems to agree:

I don’t watch enough of ESPN’s NBA coverage to know if Rodgers’ criticism of Johnson is valid, but I do agree with Rodgers that Gruden can be so relentlessly positive about every player that his analysis becomes pointless: When you call every player great it can serve to diminish the players who are truly great. Perhaps that’s why it took a truly great player to call Gruden out.

This is a surprisingly shallow comment from the usually thoughtful Smith. It reflects comments that I frequently hear after writing up my “Game Comments” after Bears games during the season. I usually devote at least one line to how I thought the television commentators did if I watched the game at home. This single entry draws more comments from people than almost anything else I typically address in the post. Like Johnson and Gruden, most people think I’m “relentlessly positive” in my comments.

There are a couple reasons for this. First, the Bears play a lot of night games and when they aren’t in prime time, they often get an afternoon slot where much of the country sees them. What that means is that the Bears naturally have been getting the best football commentators available for their games. If you were to look back into the history of this blog into some of those darker years where the Bears weren’t very good, you’d see many more critical comments as they drew the fourth or fifth announcing teams.

However, its the other reason that’s relevant here. I think many fans have a warped idea of just what constitutes a good color commentator for a football game, indeed for any sport. These men really aren’t there just to hammer on players for bad play. In fact, in my opinion, its the least of their duties. As a research scientist one thing became clear to me very early on in my career: any moron can criticize. You can always tell when comments on your work came from a young investigator in training because they pick on things that everyone knows are a problem but which few people think are a real obstacles to supporting a particular conclusion. The trick is to recognize when its appropriate to both listen to and offer a critical comment (i.e. when the criticism is important) and when its not. In the case of football players, everyone – even the best of them – makes mistakes. We all know that. For that reason whatever criticism a good commentator offers on individual players is usually in terms of individual technique. Beyond that, frankly, if Gruden isn’t too free with his critical comments, he’ll hear few complaints from me. I don’t care if he says if a player is great or isn’t great. I can usually see that with my own eyes.

What really makes for a top notch commentator – what really makes the difference between a Cris Collinsworth and some schlub off of a local television station somewhere – is the ability of the person involved to teach the viewer about the game. This is where Gruden excels. He’s always going to be the guy to notice some little point about how the defense is playing, where the mismatches are or where the offense is attacking in a particularly notable way. Almost all fans are limited by the fact that they aren’t good enough to actually get on the field and do the things that NFL football players do. We can’t go to mini-camp and learn about the ins and out of the cover two defense. Its these comments from the likes of Gruden and Collinsworth that are so valuable because they increase understanding of a game we all love and would like to know better but where opportunities to do so are limited.

This is far more important than criticizing the play of individuals because those types of comments die after the game is over or after the player involved is no longer on the field. In contrast, the lessons taught about how the game is played last a lifetime and whatever criticism we, ourselves, offer should be targeted with that in mind.