Chicago Bears: Week 1

Opponent: Cincinnati Bengals
Location: Home
Outcome: Win
Record: 1-0 (0-0)

0-1 (0-0) Green Bay Packers
0-1 (0-1) Minnesota Vikings
1-0 (1-0) Detroit Lions

Ah, the return of football Sundays. Glorious, glorious football Sundays. So the Bears are one of 16 teams to start the season with a win. It's a good feeling. I imagine it's an even better feeling to Marc Trestman who is one of only four Bears coaches to win their first game as a new head coach. Anyway on to the game review. 

Offense

We had four out of five starters on the offensive line playing their first game in a Bears uniform. Two of those four were playing their first NFL game ever. With those two thoughts in mind, let me hit you with three other game stats: zero sacks, zero pre-snap penalties, and zero sacks! Ok, so that was only two stats, but come on! ZERO SACKS against a very good Bengals front line. Oh yeah, and our new tight end caught a touchdown pass, Brandon Marshall was Brandon Marshall, and Matt Forte ran for a touchdown up the middle. On top of that, Cutler was able to spread the ball around to five different receivers. Marshall of course had the most, but he is our number one receiver. The only real bad play I remember was the interception, and when I saw a clip of it later, it was obvious that a defender got a hand on Cutler as he was throwing which probably threw off his aim. I'm trying to keep my optimism in check since it was only one game, but if it's a sign of things to come, we're in for a great season on offense.

Defense

Charles Tillman was sick as a dog and dehydrated on Sunday and still managed to come up with two interceptions. Unfortunately, that was the primary bright spot for the day on defense. Overall, tackles were sloppy, the defensive line had no teeth whatsoever, and the Bengals had two scoring drives of over 90 yards in the first half alone. Julius Peppers was never even a blip on the radar. But I will say this: they came through at the end when they really needed to. After the Bengals got a touchdown early in the 3rd quarter, they never scored again. Hopefully there's just a bit of rust to knock off, because I'm not sure how to respond to a Chicago Bears defense that is only ok.

Special Teams

He didn't get a return for a touchdown, but Hester had some good returns. The Bears started with great field position all day long. On top of that, Robbie Gould raised the bar on his previous franchise record for a long field goal by hitting a 58 yarder (with room to spare) to end the first half. Special teams has not lost a step under the new coach, Joe DeCamillis.

Overall it was a great team win. The offense and the defense both came through in the end when we needed them, but play of the game in my book goes to rookie right tackle, Jordan Mills. The Bears were trying to run out the clock with under 2 minutes remaining and had just come up short on 3rd down. Defensive lineman, Rey Maualuga, apparently didn't like being beaten by a rookie and ended up throwing Mills to the ground well after the whistle. I love Mills's post-game quote. 

“When he came up, I locked on,” Mills said. “I was not letting him go no matter what. Till that whistle blew, I was not letting him go. He kind of got a little frustrated, pushed me. I wanted to retaliate, but that would have been selfish on my part, so I kept my composure and we got the first down.”

That's a team player! He kept his cool. He didn't retaliate, and the resulting personal foul against Maualuga ended the game. It gave the Bears an automatic first down and they were able to take a knee to run out the clock for the win. BEAR DOWN!!!

Fantasy Football Rookie (Week 1)

As I mentioned on Tuesday, this is my first year participating in fantasy football. I thought it would be fun to write about.

(Just a note . . . since Pat does his Bears recaps after the weekend, I thought it would be best to post these before the weekend, just to space them out. This also makes sense in that this is about my decision-making in setting up my team as much as it is the results. I may come back and edit the post later with my numbers, or I may include that in next week's post, or I may just ignore them altogether . . . really, I'm not expecting to do well.)


Tuesday Night - 

The draft! I really didn't know what I was doing. I made sure I had at least one backup for every position, and mostly tried to pick players I was familiar with, even if they weren't the top player on the board at the time. Beyond that, I didn't have much of a strategy.

Once it was over, I was looking at the stats on my roster, and it seemed like a couple of my "backups" were actually looking better than my "starters." I made one swap right off the bat, but after checking to make sure none of my potential starters were playing in Thursday night's opening game (I do have Joe Flacco as a backup quarterback and the Ravens as my backup defense/special teams, but I chose them as true backups, for bye weeks or sudden injuries), I decided I had plenty of time to tweak my starting roster.


Wednesday Morning - 

Looking at some NFL analysts' predictions, the swap I made last night was . . . well, not to say it was wrong, but definitely not as obvious a decision as the Yahoo! numbers indicated. So I switched back. And then, after more hemming and hawing and reading and trying to figure out which experts I should listen to, I decided that, at least for Week 1, I'm going to leave my starters as I drafted them. Smart or not, these are the choices I made, so let's see how they do for me.

Thinking along the same lines, I'm quickly realizing that it would be easy for me to get sucked into all the nitty gritty of running a fantasy team, listening to the chatter, trying to make trades and search the undrafted players each week, looking for hidden gems based on who has the most promising matchups . . . but, no.

This is my team. This is who I have to work with. Maybe later in the season, once some of the bye weeks are over, I'll look at who's available and maybe drop some of my backups to sign a couple new players, MAYBE! But for now . . . if I don't just limit myself to what I already have, I'll drive myself crazy.

(On another note, how did I end up with FOUR players from the Lions on my team?! I HATE the Lions! Now, I don't have an issue with any of the guys I drafted specifically, and two of them are new to the team this year anyway. But still, it just feels wrong.)


Thursday Night - 

Football is finally back! "Game's starting now..." *da-dum, da-dum*


(Best radio commercial ever.)


Friday Morning - 

And Joe Flacco completely blew away his projected points, and the projected points of both my starting quarterbacks . . . and he's not one of the players I was even considering when I was looking at the numbers earlier this week. Clearly my fantasy football career is off to a fantastic start.

Wait For It...

I know, I've been quiet for a while. I'm going to get better at that, I promise.

This last month was an interesting one. Last time I checked in, I was having a bit of a crisis, and Pat and I were getting ready to head out of town. I actually ended up staying in Lombard for three weeks. I may or may not go into more detail about that later (let's be honest, I probably won't . . . although a couple other things of note happened while I was there, so maybe I actually will . . .) but for now I'll just leave it at, my dad's recovering well. (And the last three weeks did nothing to help my weight-loss, so I guess my crisis is on hold for now.)

Anyway, today I signed up for my first ever fantasy football league. It's with some friends from back home (along with a few people I don't know). We had our draft tonight and it was a rather nerve-wracking experience. Not only had I never done this before, but I only decided two days ago to join (Pat bullied me into it), and I hadn't done any research, so I was making all my decisions on the fly through a mixture of the player rankings and my gut . . . which admittedly is pretty useless when it comes to players outside of the Bears and the NFC North, but hey, I don't want to play with a bunch of guys I don't know anything about. I may not have always picked the best player, but I'd rather have fun playing guys I've at least heard of before.

My final roster is as follows (bold names are my starters . . . for now):

Quarterbacks
Cam Newton (CAR)
Eli Manning (NYG)
Joe Flacco (BAL)

Running Backs
Matt Forte (CHI)
David Wilson (NYG)
Reggie Bush (DET)
Eddie Lacy (GB)

Wide Receivers
Calvin Johnson (DET)
Pierre Garcon (WAS)
Marques Colston (NO)
Steve Smith (CAR)

Tight Ends
Kyle Rudolph (MIN)
Brandon Pettigrew (DET)

Kickers
David Akers (DET)
Kai Forbath (WAS)

Defense/Special Teams
San Francisco
Baltimore

Defensive Players
Lance Briggs (CHI)
NaVorro Bowman (SF)
Bobby Wagner (SEA)

So, that's my team. I guess we'll see how they do for me.

In other news, the library will be open on Sundays again . . . starting the same week that football does. Well, I won't be spending all afternoon there the way I was during the spring, I guess. Still, it'll be nice to get back to the routine of going over there every week, instead of the sporadic visits I've been making all summer.

(Oh, and since you're probably still wondering on the title, the name of my fantasy team is "Wait For It...")

And We're Back!

I've been meaning to write this for a while now, but at least I got it in before the regular season started. :) Photo and tickets to the game last night, courtesy of my friend Nathan.

Now that the Bears have their 3rd 4th preseason game under their belt, I feel that I can actually make some educated observations about this relatively new team this year.

Defense
The defense seems like it's picking up right where it left off last year. Yes, we've lost Brian Urlacher, but we've got enough veteran leadership with Tillman, Briggs, Peppers, and others that the team will move on. Things will get very interesting around week 2 or 3 when middle linebacker D.J. Williams is recovered from his injury. Right now Jon Bostic is doing a great job, but the Bears didn't sign Williams to a (potentially) $1.75 million contract to be a back up, at least not at the beginning of the year. It should be interesting to see how that turns out in a few weeks.
Outlook for the year: Solid

Special Teams
We lost Dave Toub to the KC Chiefs, but we also lost Devin Hester as a wide receiver. Yes, that second part is a positive. Now that Lovie Smith is gone, the Devin Hester experiment is finally and officially over. He sounds excited to bring his focus back to the return game. I'm excited to watch it! He's had slumps before, and I'm eager to see if he can come back again. I think he can. In other news, dedicated specialists Patrick Mannelly, Adam Podlesh, and Robbie Gould will continue their excellent work.
Outlook for the year: Solid

Offense
This is going to be the hardest to nail down. I'm excited to see Jay Cutler play without (legitimate) excuses to hide behind. I think he has much higher potential than he has been able to achieve for the last 4 years with the Bears, and I'm eager to see him reach that potential this year. He's had unstable coaching, play calling, targets, and protection for most of his time here. This year, those handicaps should be gone and I'm looking forward to a Bears team that can let its offense do some of the talking. We look to have a strong offensive line this year (never thought I'd say that), we have plenty of great targets for our QB to throw to, and we have an offensive coordinator who will not only get the plays to the QB well ahead of the play clock, but will probably call some creative plays while doing it. All the pieces are there, I want to see them fall into place.
Outlook for the year: Excited, but cautiously optimistic

The Bears have looked good in the preseason both as a team and as individual players. But as Brad Biggs pointed out, their pre-season opponents had a combined record of 23-41 last season so it's not like they're the cream of the crop. In addition, the 2008 Detroit Lions proved beyond all doubt that a preseason record means absolutely nothing by going 4-0 in those games and then 0-16 in the regular season. But all in all, I like what I'm seeing so far. No matter what happens, it's going to be an exciting year for the Bears.

Bear Down!!!

...

The last couple days have been intense.

Naturally, I'm about to make it all about me.

On Wednesday, I learned that my brother's best friend's younger brother had been hit by a car. I don't know the details of what happened, but it was bad. He was on life support. He wasn't gone yet, but it was an inevitability. I just couldn't believe it. It seemed impossible that he could be there and then suddenly gone. I never knew him well, but he'd been on the periphery of my life for a long time. I was friends with his sister when we were in high school -- never super close and we haven't kept in touch, but I'd been to their house a few times -- and our brothers have been best friends for years. I couldn't imagine what his family was going through.

On Thursday morning, I got an email from Pat telling me to check Facebook and to call my mom. I haven't been on Facebook much recently; if I was, I would have seen the post as soon as I woke up.

Chris's family was donating his kidney to my dad.

My dad has had kidney disease for years. He had his first transplant in 2000, on New Year's Day in fact. But apparently, transplanted organs don't last forever, and he's needed a new one for some time. Last year, I was going through testing to see if I could be a donor, and it was looking good for a while, but my last couple tests had been less than conclusive, and the doctor wanted me to lose another 10 pounds anyway before he'd consider the surgery, so we were going to wait until I lost the weight and then run the tests again.

I never lost the weight.

In fact, I've been moving slowly in the opposite direction, to the point where I'm almost back where I was three years ago, before I made the decision to get healthy. Which would be frustrating regardless, but with this transplant situation hanging over my head, it makes me feel even worse about it.

And I've been trying... not hard enough, obviously, but TRYING... to get back to making healthy choices. And -- yesterday's stress eating aside -- I feel like I've been doing better recently. Earlier this year, I was at a pretty low point, where I really didn't give a crap about anything. And now, I feel like, mentally... I'm not back to where I was at the peak of my efforts, but I'm closer. I'm moving in the right direction again...

And then this happens, and it messes with my head. Because it was supposed to be me.

After my initial weight loss, I've slipped and started and slipped again so many times in the past couple years, and if this is the time that I finally don't slip... what does that say about me? That subconsciously I never wanted to go through with donating?

Well, eff that.

(Perhaps this would be a good time to start seeing a therapist.)

So anyway... that's where I am... all of my own crap mixed in with the already conflicted emotions of the situation. But back to the current events...

My dad had the surgery last night. He's doing well. Pat and I are driving out for the weekend once he gets off work. There's a service for Chris on Sunday.

The past 24 hours I've been alternating between a numb haze and ALL THE EMOTION, and I have a feeling this weekend is going to be more of the same.

IT'S FINALLY OVER!!!

If you somehow missed the drama that is our computer situation, here's a couple links to catch you up:

My Kingdom for a Trouble-Free Computer (April 3)
Blargh... (May 6)

Even if you don't feel like clicking the links, the dates alone will tell you that this has been going on for A WHILE (and my laptop had already been having issues for several weeks when I first wrote about it). So basically, I had an intermittent laptop through March and April... and then no laptop at all through May and June, as we finally had Staples send it away to a repair depot just after my May 6th post. These guys, we were assured, would fix the issue we were having, along with anything else they found wrong with it, and we'd essentially be getting it back in new condition, probably in a couple of weeks.

Obviously, that didn't happen.

But although it was frustrating and inconvenient not to have my own computer, between my smart phone for little things and Pat's desktop for big things, I got by. There were file incompatibility issues (the desktop used Office 2003, the laptop had used Office 2009) and just the general awkwardness of using a computer that wasn't my own, but it wasn't too bad... aside, of course, from the fact that we hadn't planned on this arrangement lasting more than a few weeks. We'd paid good money, we'd expected results, and as weeks turned into months, the frustration (if not the inconvenience) continued to grow.

AND THEN, we came back after the Fourth of July weekend to discover that the desktop monitor was dead for some reason. Thankfully it was only the monitor and not the computer itself, so we were able to hook up to our TV and use that for a monitor... only we don't have one of those nice new flat-screens, it's an old TV, and everything looks incredibly fuzzy and distorted, no matter what resolution we pick. I mean, it was nice to be able to get all our data off the computer, and to use it if there was something we absolutely couldn't use our phones for (I was doing a little bit of blurry blogging these last couple weeks), but for the most part we were computer-less.

MEANWHILE, either the computer depot that Staples uses is full of morons, or they had a string of incredibly bad luck. I'm not even going to recount all of the updates we got over the past couple months (and getting those updates was like pulling teeth). Suffice it to say that they tried one thing after another after another, went through faulty parts and needed to replace them multiple times... and in the end, they finally gave up and sent the laptop back to the store MORE BROKEN THAN IT WAS WHEN WE SENT IT TO THEM!!!

The good news in all of this is that Staples gave us a full refund, plus a compensatory coupon, and so last night we bought a brand new laptop -- my first one since 2001 (!!!) and a nice upgrade from the old one -- for about $60 more than what we would have paid for the repairs. Obviously it would have been better to get this resolved months ago, but I'm just glad it's finally over.

Jay Cutler is on the Clock

I've been very quiet lately. Work’s been busy. I've been spending time outside. I just haven’t been spending as much time sitting on the computer. Anyway, I thought I’d do another Chicago Bears post to get me started again.

If you've read my posts on the Bears before, you probably know that I’m a fan of Jay Cutler. I’m not his #1 fan or anything, but I have a lot of respect for him. I chose the picture above to illustrate a point. Jay Cutler is the best QB the Bears have seen in a long time, but there has been entirely too much of what you see above happening. Some of it is Jay’s fault for holding onto the ball too long and trying to make a play out of nothing. Most of it is the organization’s fault for having been too much in the “getting off the bus running” mindset for far too long.

The days of the QB who is simply a game manager who can simply hand the ball off to the running back are long gone (well…except maybe for Minnesota). Cutler has been in Chicago since 2009 and this is the first year that the Bears have truly decided to surround him with the supporting cast that a successful quarterback needs to have. Getting Brandon Marshall last year was a great move, but with the injuries that plagued the rest of the receivers last year. Defense against the Bears was simple. Over-cover Marshall, then squish Cutler when he had nowhere to throw the ball. Now he has the makings of a good offensive line to protect him, and a play caller who knows something about calling plays. From what I saw, Mike Tice was able to put together a reasonable o-line for what he had to work with, but a good play caller he was not. Now we’ve got a guy who is supposed to be a real whiz kid when it comes to play calling and from what I’ve seen from OTAs, the plan is to nip the sack count in the bud.

Now to get back to the title of the post and my long and meandering point. Assuming the line performs like it’s supposed to and Mark Trestman has a reasonable game plan in his head, Jay Cutler is out of excuses. As I’ve said before, I’m firmly in the camp who believes that those excuses up to this point have been legitimate. I imagine it’s hard to look like a great QB when you’re getting knocked on your ass every other play. However, if he doesn’t have a stellar year this year, Jay Cutler will have no one to point the finger at but the guy in the mirror.

That said, I think the combination of the surrounding cast and the last year of Jay’s contract will add up to one heck of an offense this year. With Alshon Jeffery coming in with a little more experience under his belt, a tight end who can actually catch a ball, and someone who understands that “run Matt Forte up the middle” doesn’t actually work, I’m excited to see what the Bears offense can do this year.

BEAR DOWN!

Music Monday: Special Star Trek Edition

A year ago I started a weekly feature to share some of the music I enjoy. It fizzled out by the end of the summer, but I thought it was time to bring it back, if only for a single post. A "One Night Afternoon Only" special event.

What's the occasion?

If you're a regular reader, you already know I recently had a birthday. And while I didn't get my laptop back from Staples like I was hoping (it's been WELL over a month now... c'mon, guys, get it together!), I did get some actual presents, including two CDs from Pat (yes, I still listen to CDs, now get off my lawn) -- the soundtracks for Star Trek and Star Trek Into Darkness.

I know I've already mentioned that the music is one of my favorite things about the Star Trek reboot, so you can imagine how excited I was to get these. And I figured what better occasion to bring back Music Monday.

Happy Blogiversary to Amy!

Today is the second blogiversary of one of my favorite bloggers, Amy at Lucy's Football. Her past week of posts have been an epic countdown to this moment, filled with the "Best of Lucy's Football" (according to the masses anyway; there are many wonderful posts that didn't make the Top 7) and other bloggery goodness.

For me, it's been just over a year since I first stumbled across her blog, and probably just under a year since I started reading it regularly. And Amy is one of those people who I love having in my life (if only virtually) because she is so passionate about what she loves. Sometimes it's books, a lot of times it's people, but the one that really jumps out at me is her love of the theater.

Now, I am not a theater-lover. I'm not a theater-hater, and I like to think I have a greater appreciation of the arts in general than a lot of people do, but theater just isn't one I've ever been really passionate about. But the way she feels about theater is the way that I feel about music, and the fact that it's such a huge part of her life... well, it makes me nostalgic and more than a little sad, because I haven't made the effort these past seven years (oh God, has it really been that long since I graduated college?) to keep music in my life. Last summer I decided I was going to join the Dubuque Chorale so I could sing again, and then my social anxiety got in the way and I chickened out. I keep wanting to go to the Dubuque Symphony, but they only have a few concerts a year and I'm always either out of town that weekend or forget until it's too late.

But Amy makes me remember what having that passion in my life feels like, and her theater stories go a long way in keeping that dream alive in me rather than just letting it die.

So, Amy -- even though this got a little more self-centered than I'd intended -- here's to two years of blogging, and hopefully many more. The internet wouldn't be the same without you!

It's My Birthday!