Reggie Williams once came into the Chicago Stadium and lit the Bulls up for 36 or 40 points–some obscene number. The Bulls won, but on this night nobody they had could stop him, not even Scottie Pippen. Yet Williams never had a reputation as an explosive offensive player. He’d come out of Georgetown as a defensive specialist good on the dribble and with a decent midrange jumper, but he’d never developed the shooting touch it takes to become a reliable scorer in the NBA, where the interior defense is tougher and tends to push midsize players outside. At the time of his career game against the Bulls he was a journeyman with the Denver Nuggets.
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Yet those losses didn’t fully explain the Bears’ transformation from a Super Bowl contender (or so they seemed until they got drubbed in the playoffs by the Philadelphia Eagles) to the 3-9 team that lost last Sunday in Green Bay to the Packers. Plainly put, after the Bears blew a 21-0 lead in their third-week loss to the New Orleans Saints, they played like a team without confidence. As the losses mounted and their bad breaks seemed to multiply, they were coached without confidence as well. Perhaps the Bears could have salvaged their season–or at least what remained of their pride–by upsetting the defending Super Bowl champs, the New England Patriots, three weeks ago; but they blew the game on the field and on the sideline as well. The Bears played a marvelous game and built a big lead. Emboldened by some Bears miscues, the Pats rallied, but they still needed to score twice and time was running out. Then defensive coordinator Greg Blache called an ill-advised blitz on third and long. The Pats’ Tom Brady threw a bomb for a touchdown, and with the Bears’ offensive line unable to sustain a reliable ground game when it counted (that had been a hallmark of last year’s team), the Pats soon got the ball back and drove again for the winning touchdown.
Confidence can mask flaws–it did with the Bears last year–and when it evaporates it reveals them. Williams lost his shooting eye after that seemingly definitive outburst against the Bulls, and he was soon out of the NBA.
Favre, as ever, kept the Pack in the game, leading them to a field goal, so the Bears were up by eight with a minute left in the half. But they declined to simply take that lead into intermission. They combined time-outs with draw plays to Leon Johnson, who’d replaced Anthony Thomas in the backfield because Thomas had a broken finger and because he was clearly running with more confidence anyway. But Johnson coughed up the ball at midfield. Favre now had a chance to give Green Bay more points with 22 seconds to go. He hit a pass, but an incompletion left the Pack outside field goal range with time for one more play. Favre hurled the ball toward the end zone and the Bears’ Damon Moore picked it off. Looking for someone to lateral it to on the old ladder play, Moore fumbled at midfield, but then a Packer did the same–this looked like a rugby game between drunkards, if that’s not a redundancy–and the Bears’ Roosevelt Williams plucked the ball out of midair with nothing but open field in front of him. If McQuarters had thrown a block on Green Bay receiver Javon Walker, Williams would have scored. As it was, Walker dragged him down. The Bears had not only kept the Pack from exploiting Johnson’s error but almost padded their lead. Nevertheless, the chaos left a bad feeling; cracks were showing in the Bears’ facade.
In baseball, the popular term for what makes a team successful is chemistry. In football they say, “Players make plays.” In all sports, winning produces winning–which is the story of last year’s Bears in a nutshell. The common denominator is confidence, something the Bears seem to lack–or, having obtained it briefly, relinquish at the slightest wave of opposition. The Bears should have beaten the Saints, which might have helped them prevail against the Buffalo Bills, and they should have won their first game at home against the Lions, and they should have held on to beat the Eagles and the Pats, all of which would make them 8-6 and on the verge of the playoffs, even with their injuries. Realizing this, however, only reduces their confidence further. It’s a vicious circle, and the only escape is to start over, which is what Chicago fans refer to as “next year.”
