Bear Down Baffa

We got just what we wanted – a rematch of our Jan. ’06 post-season debacle when Steve Smith ran amuck at Soldierz, like a politician at a whorehouse, and nobody stopped him.  But the Bears could not exact their sweet revenge, even with Carolina’s 1-man show serving a 2-game suspension for sucker punching a teammate in a pre-season practice.  So the Bears return from their first road trip of the season 1-1, winning the game we should have lost, and losing the game we should have won.  So much for our 3-game win streak. 

In a battle of teams that won their openers despite being 9 ½ point dogs, the Bears dominated the first half like they watched Carolina’s pre-game walk-through.  Granted, there were more false starts than a Pop Warner game for the hearing impaired and the blind (22 penalties in all), but most of them were on Carolina.  They lost almost as many yards on penalties as they gained – literally.  Everything we did looked good – except for what we all hoped was a meaningless fumble by Geg Olsen.

Then we started the second half intercepting a pass and scoring a TD, giving us a 14 point cushion with 9 minutes left in the third quarter.  But then Geg Olsen fumbled a second time – on his second reception of the day – on our 25.  Not good.  We then proceeded to fall apart as if we were stuck with a slow-working poison at half-time.  Somehow we managed to play the exact opposite of the first half. And unfortunately for us, so did Carolina.  It was like they finally put their first stringers in.  We got out-played in all aspects of the game – even the penalties shifted over to our side.  Carolina finally took the lead with less than 4 minutes left.  And on our final drive, our offense shriveled up like it had been in the pool for hours.

Bottom line, we choked.  And in a 16-game season, you have to win games like this.  But what’s weird about our schedule is that all of our road and home games come in pairs or triplets.  We started with 2 on the road.  Now we’ll play 2 at home, then 2 on the road, 3 at home, 3 on the road, 3 at home and our last game on the road.  It’s like a baseball schedule.  And if we approach it like that, splitting our first 2 on the road isn’t all that bad.  But that means we need to win the next 2 at home.  Hosting Tampa next week will be huge, but we can’t exhale until we beat Philly the following Sunday night.

Orton Watch
Orton started out going 6 for 6 to 6 different receivers, but he missed a couple crucial passes that could have turned out huge.  I’m not saying he should be benched, because he did some things well.  I’m just saying he missed on some key plays, and that’s pretty big.  But in 53 passes this year, he’s yet to throw an INT – though there were 3 or 4 close calls today.  And for the second week in a row he had a higher completion percentage (59.4 to 57.1) and QB rating (71.0 to 55.3) than the opposing QB.  But get used to these numbers folks; his career QBR is a whopping 63.

The good news is Detroit and Minnesota are 0-2, though Green Bay is 2-0.  So we’re still in it barring this minor setback.  Ouch, that sounds like a Cub fan.  And that can’t be good, for anybody.

Super Bowl, Super Bears!

© 2008

This entry was posted on Mon, Sep 15, 2008 at 1:06 am and is filed under m) 2008 Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.