The Chicago Bears evacuated training camp Wednesday in a caravan of luxury SUVs northbound on Interstate 57, thereby rendering RD’s pub a celebrity-free zone for another year. From now on, what happens in practice stays in practice, and the players are spared the daily gauntlet of adoring children and autograph hounds. Plus, they can, more or less successfully, avoid reporters between game days.Now, it’s time to get to work installing wild and crazy stuff that will set the NFL ablaze
Right.
Three weeks and three days before the season-opener at Green Bay, there is little concern about the Bears’ defense.
Teams win Super Bowls with defenses like this one.
But not with offenses like the Bears fielded last season.
The thing is, the Bears offense doesn’t have to be a lot better to take the next postseason step (win a game) or two (reach the Super Bowl) or even three (throw a championship parade down Michigan Avenue). Just enough better to score one more field goal per game. Or two, to be safe.
“I’m not going to get caught up in stats,” offensive coordinator Ron Turner says. “If I worried about where our offense ranked statistically, we’d have done different things to get our ranking higher. We wouldn’t have won 10 games, but we’d have been ranked higher.
“Last year, we did what we had to to do win games.”
Effectively, that meant teaching rookie quarterback Kyle Orton how not to lose games: Take care of the ball, and when the defense gift-wraps possession deep in enemy territory, score.
But to be a real Super Bowl contender – as opposed to hallucinating, as the Bears did in 2005 – a team’s offense must be able to win games on occasion. The time will come when a quarterback must drive the field and get a touchdown in 90 seconds. Orton is not yet that quarterback, and that’s why his rookie accomplishments earned him a demotion to third string on the depth chart.
Rex Grossman might be that quarterback. Mostly due to injuries, he has played fewer games in his three NFL seasons than Orton did last year. But Grossman has the ability to make big plays, and so he tops the Bears’ depth chart. Unfortunately, sometimes those big plays are mistakes that benefit the opposing team.
That’s why the Bears signed veteran starter Brian Griese, who has proven himself quite capable of moving the ball downfield with a minimum of mistakes. On the other hand, Griese’s only playoff experience in eight seasons came his rookie year in Denver, where he watched from the bench as John Elway won the Broncos a Super Bowl.
Suddenly, though, the Bears might have the deepest QB corps in pro football. Not the best corps, mind you, but that’s OK. They don’t have to be great. They simply have to be good enough to win when the defense yields, say, 18-20 points.
“We’ve got to be more productive this year,” Turner agrees. “I know that to go farther, we need to take care of the football like we did last year, and we need to run the football like we did, but we also need to be more productive passing. That doesn’t mean throw it more. That means throw it better and more efficiently, and make plays when they’re there.”
Whether the Bears quarterbacks – one or all of them – can do that remains to be seen. If they can, though, a Super Bowl could be more than a dream.
