I’m almost free

When you’re a fan of a team, you can’t really identify some threshold or benchmark before you know a coach will be fired. You can say before a season that this record wouldn’t be good enough, but you can never be sure, especially when it comes to the Chicago Bears. After all, all of us Bears fans were subjected to another year of Matt Nagy because the chairman of the team, Jim Gaffigan if he wasn’t funny, smart, or charming (George McCaskey), liked the way the team responded to a six-game losing streak, ignoring that the team lost six in a row in the first place. Think about that for a second. We couldn’t know what numbers would matter.

So you have to go by feeling. Which is never a lock, but when you feel it, you know. That came Sunday. What you’re really looking for is a mountain of evidence that even the biggest giblet couldn’t ignore, which is also a handy description of the McCaskey family. Zero points in the first half coming off a bye. Wildcat formation for a 4th down play. Defense just forgetting to cover someone on the final drive for the second straight game. Wasting timeouts. But hey, at least this week they managed to not line up offside.

The coup de fuck this Sunday was getting beat by the Ravens’ backup QB in his first-ever start, with Baltimore playing without its top receiver, too. More of the same nonsensical playcalling. More of the same mistakes (the false start on the first play after halftime was a personal favorite).

It all became too much for the Soldier Field faithful:

That’s when you know. If there’s one thing the McCaskeys like to hold onto, much to their detriment, is that they’re also fans as well as the owners. They’re almost too big of fans, because it’s pretty clear they’ve never watched any game that didn’t involve the Bears. They don’t know what football is supposed to look like now. It’s why they keep having to turn to Ernie Accorsi and the deflated football on his head to help them search for executives and coaches. But, hearing the fans in open revolt will actually matter to them. It’s clear that the Bears can’t wheel out Matt Nagy in 2022 without poisoning everything. In reality, they can’t even roll him out for their next home game in Week 13. But they will, because as well as being too fanlike they’re also spineless.

But we’re almost there. And though it’ll be this rolled-over clown car still making the decisions on a new coach and slightly possibly a new GM, before the hire there’s always a glimmer of hope that we’ll have an innovative coach that just has receivers running open all the time for Justin Fields to hit. That they could just Forrest Gump their way into a staff that calls plays that pick up yards in chunks instead of a dribble allowed by a kidney stone. Having all one’s timeouts at the end of each half. A team where everyone knows their assignment. We probably won’t get it, but for the next few weeks I can live with the hope that maybe, just maybe.

This is usually the best part, which is sad. But perhaps it’s best to focus on the first part of that sentence rather than the second.