Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Cure for the (orange and) blues.

G-ddamn it is depressing reading the coverage about my team this year. All of the coverage focuses on the offense and how it looks like it won't be very good this year. The thing is, I don't remember a time when the Bears offense was any good, and I still managed to be excited about the team before. And I'm pretty sure I remember lead-ups to seasons that weren't as insanely pessimistic as this year. But, ask anyone, the Bears have the worst quarterbacks in the league, the worst offensive line ever, and they'll be lucky to win a single game this season. Well, fuck that...

Here's how you get excited about the Bears this year. Yesterday, while I was floating around in a Dramamine haze somewhere above Utah I began to wonder how good the defense can be this year. Ever since Lovie took over the team, with the exception of the first half of last season when most of our defensive starters were injured, the defense and special teams have been the reason to watch the Bears. Even during Smith's first season as coach, with Terry Shea setting the all-time low for offensive ineptitude (and how could anyone even think that this year's offense could approach that year's... Shea didn't even know what players he had out on the field half the time!) the defense was pretty special. It was even better three years ago, and when combined with the explosion of Devin Hester onto the special teams scene, we made it to the Super Bowl. Sure, during the Super Bowl run the offense came up big a few times, but that offense wasn't going to take any other team even into the playoffs. The defense and special teams were so good at times that it almost seemed like a mistake for the other team to even try to run an offense...

Which gets me to this year. I think there's a great chance the defensive and special teams units will be even better this year than they were in '06. Hester is now a special teams veteran who's been in the system for two full years already, and teams are even more afraid of him than they were in '06. On top of that, it appears that we're going to have the healthiest defense going into the beginning of the season that I remember us ever having, and our defensive line is likely to be significantly deeper and stronger than the '06 version. Add Dvoracek, Anthony Adams, Marcus Harrison and Israel Idonije to the four freaks from that year (Ogunleye, Harris, Brown, Anderson) and we've got a potentially terrifying d-line rotation. Add a healthy Mike Brown to that mix and... well, I started thinking: Is it possible for a defense and special teams combo to be so good that opposing teams actually decrease their chances of winning a game the more times they touch the ball? And how would that register, statswise? If a team plays against us this year and goes three-and-out more often than not, and then if it has to deal with trying to punt to our special teams unit, the offense won't even have to move the ball forward before they eventually start out in field goal range. And if you add to that the possibility of touchdowns on punt returns and touchdowns on interception runbacks, well, there could conceivably be stretches of games where the other team would've been better off actually allowing our offense to hold onto the ball by giving up a few first downs now and then and hoping for their own defensive break...

Okay, yeah, that's maybe stretching it, but that's what I'm hoping for this season: more than one game where our opponents actually find themselves lowering their chances of winning the game by trying to run their offense, to the point that they're chances of winning actually decrease the more touches their offense gets. If the Bears can pull that off, I think I'd be even more excited about it than making the playoffs. And I think this is the year we can do it!

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