Bear Down Baffa

It was a matchup of the oldest rivalry in the NFL in a city where there’s nothing to do but drink beer, eat cheese and watch football.  This rivalry has brought us 181 regular season games (which the Bears lead 92-83-6) but only one playoff game (which the Bears won 33-14 in 1941).  It involves 21 championships (Green Bay 12, Chicago 9) and 50 playoff appearances (25 each).  It has always been played in GB or Chicago (except for one game in Milwaukee in ’74 and one in Champaign in ‘02).  It brought us a 61-7 Bear victory (‘80), a GB 10-game winning streak (’94-’98), and the Charles Martin incident (’86).  And it has given us the two greatest players in history in Bret Fahrvergnügen and Walter Payton, and the two most important NFL men in Vince Lombardi and George Halas.

Lombardi and Halas

But I say rivalry, schmivalry.  I don’t really give a shit how we do against GB, as long as we get to the post season.  So I don’t really give a shit that we lost to GB because we won the division.  But Lovie decided to play our starters despite having nothing to gain by winning.  This makes sense only if a) we want to work out the still existent kinks in our offensive scheme, or b) we want to keep the Pack out of the playoffs.  But guess what – neither of these things happened.  And we lost for the first time (against a mortal team, that is) in over 2 months, mustering up our fewest point total all year (3), which includes the Giants game when Tom Collins and his 8.1 QBR took the helm as Cutler rested his concussed vagina in the second half.

The Photo Speaks for Itself

The Butler (and his vagina) did not look good (and by that I mean he played like shit), completing only 54% (21-39) of his passes (one short of the most passes he’s thrown all year), while throwing 0 TD’s and 2 really bad INT’s.  And though he did avoid one sack by completing a left-handed pass, he was sacked 6 times (for a total of 51 yards) and finished with a QBR of 43.5 – the seventh lowest of his 68-game career.  I hate to say it, but a playoff-ready QB he is not.  Forte did manage 151 all purpose yards, and somehow Rashied Davis caught 7 passes (5 more than he’s had all year) for 63 yards.  But as my high school football coach used to say, our O-Line performed like a tampon in pass coverage – they plugged the hole but they didn’t do the job.

There’s a CB, a S and a LB on Cutler – SOMEONE Should be Open

Our defense kept (jackass) Aaron Rodgers relatively quiet.  Though he was 19-28 (68%), he threw for his fourth fewest yards on the season (229).  We only sacked him twice, but we held him to only 10 points – his second lowest all season.  We also held GB to 60 yards rushing, had 2 takeaways and prevented them from packing any fudge.

Our special teams surprisingly under-delivered.  Both teams punted 8 times, with us starting in GB territory only once, and GB barely starting in Bear territory twice.  But GB had a starting field position advantage of 6 yards, and we started inside our 20 on almost half our drives, as they managed to kick around Hester.  But the good news is he should be due come playoff time.

Eat a Bag of Shit, Uncle Jerry
Despite beating the Skins in Washington and finishing 10-6, the Giants failed to make the playoffs for the second straight year.  I believe this is karma for my Uncle’s repeated thrashing of the Bears despite them being his hometown team, and obviously the greatest sports franchise in history.  So there is a silver lining to this loss, as winning would have allowed NY to get in.  I will point out that his emails have stopped, but I couldn’t let the Giants’ embarrassing slide go by without this parting, heart-felt request.

Game Ball
It was slim pickins in the game ball category this week.  But Peanut Tillman came up big with two turnovers – even though neither of them lead to any points.  We punted 3 plays after his fumble recovery, and after returning his interception 42 yards to the GB 15, the Butler threw a pick in the end zone 3 plays later.

Summary
The Bears are the #2 seed, and after a first round bye, we’ll host a divisional game against the highest winning seed of (#6) GB at (#3) PHI, or (#5) NO at (#4) SEA.  And if by some miraculous miracle we win, we would host the NFC championship against anyone but (#1) ATL.  And if we do have to go to ATL, it’s comforting knowing that Cutler was the only QB to beat Matt Ryan in ATL in his 3 years there (until Brees did it last week).  So all things considered, we’re in a better position than just about anyone (other than our blog, of course) predicted, so we should all be happy (except my Uncle Jerry, who is probably crying himself to sleep).  But I hope we spend the next 13 days working on the offense because it still has a ways to go.  With that said…

Super Bowl, Super Bears!  And as MacGruber would say, “Let’s pound some Cunth!”

© 2011

This entry was posted on Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 2:03 am and is filed under k) 2010 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.