Bears Blitz

Published by BabylonDon on August 30, 2009
Article Source: Bleacher Report - Chicago Bears

Is Jay Cutler a bad leader? Is he embroiled in a blood feud with Brian Urlacher? Did he “throw Devin Hester under the bus”? Will Sunday night’s pre-season tune-up game against Denver, be a violent grudge match, living up to the pre-game hype?

Well…No

Training camp and pre-season is hard. Hard on everybody. Rookies trying to break into the league, veterans trying to regain their form from past seasons, coaches working to put it all together into that one core, that will take a team all the way to the Big Game.

And sportswriters.

Yes, sportswriters. Poor, beleaguered wordsmiths, with the unenviable task of making two months of drills and calisthenics seem interesting. Training camp is actually pretty dull stuff, so if the media punches up all the mundane exercise with a little drama, it’s forgivable, right?

Well…No. Not really.

Take Jay Cutler, for example.

Cutler arrived in Chicago, and walked straight into a media circus. His acquisition was unparalleled in Bears’ history. A Pro-Bowl QB, who will challenge the very notion of what Chicago fans have come to expect of an offense. It was perhaps the most aggressive trade the Bears ever put together. A cause for celebration, right? You were giddy, I was giddy, the anticipation for the upcoming season was as positive as anything you could hope for, right?

Well… 

Happy doesn’t sell papers. Not two days in a row. Cutler IS the story of this season’s Chicago Bears, but how many times can you say that? So what to do? 

Create controversy.

Jay did leave Denver under contentious circumstances. But that’s not unusual. New brooms are designed to sweep clean, and management did make efforts to sign a different QB, and they were already thinking of trading him. I’ll bet he WAS angry. I would be. Wouldn’t you?

That doesn’t translate into being “difficult”, or a “Prima Donna”. If you want to see difficult, look no further than Cutler’s old target Brandon Marshall. That’s being difficult. With Cutler, we’ll probably never know more than half the story behind the trade. And the bottom line still is, it was one hell of a ‘get’. Bravo!

But the grind of training camp goes on, and there’s newspaper columns, and talk radio minutes to fill. Enter the Urlacher/Cutler *yawn* ‘controversy’. Did Brian call Jay the ‘P-word’? We have it on good authority, he did. An ex-Bears player, yakking it up on some sports talk radio show in Minnesota SAID so!

Stop the presses! Let’s dish!

This ‘story’, which dominated Chicago sports media for a week was a sad, Desperate Housewives, E! Channel excuse for news from camp. But it was great, because it was a welcome human-interest change of pace from stories about injured players, rookie competitions, and who-in-the-hell-are-we-using-in-the-secondary stories, right?

No. No. No.

I understand that you need to write something, I do. But all that was just a distraction. Good for writers, meaningless to fans, and really? Unnecessarily bad for a team trying to gel before the regular season.

Ditto the ‘Hester controversy’. Cutler described, in a post-game interview, why he and Hester failed to connect on a long pass attempt. When I read it, I understood the statement to mean, in part, that he (Cutler) was still trying to get a feel for his new receivers.

I guess that wasn’t a sexy enough explanation. The media grabbed hold of this shapeless lump of clay, and created another week’s worth of headlines:”Cutler Blames Hester for Overthrow!” And reams of nonsense, speculating whether Cutler could be a good leader, because he wouldn’t “accept responsibility” for his mistakes.

The only mistake Cutler made, and I hope he learned from it, is that you can’t assume, that a roomful of college-educated, professional sports writers, are going to behave like adults, if you talk to them like adults. 

And the hype and drama of a QB showdown, against the teams that traded them, in the all-important third preseason game? More hype. More space-filling fluff.

This is the NFL, millions of dollars on the line every minute, even in the pre-season. The first-teams will get a bit more playing time, and the playbook gets opened a little deeper. But for all that? It’s still just running drills, a scrimmage that everyone will forget when the regular season mercifully starts in two weeks.

It can’t come soon enough.

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