By Jim Coffman

Even the best teams watch big leads leak away.
No one in the NFL has perfected sitting on advantages. I’ve watched for years as my wife’s team, the Patriots, has gone in front by two, three, even four touchdowns and then struggled to hang on. If a team with a big lead runs too much, it becomes predictable and easily defended. If it passes too much, it is predictable and easily defended and it keeps stopping the clock with incompletions. A delightful mixture is of course preferable, but far easier said than done.
The Bears tried both last night and it wasn’t pretty for a while. Fortunately, some big offensive plays late and yet another defensive touchdown prevented extreme discomfort on the way to a 40-23 win and a lovely 3-0 record.

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Posted on September 23, 2013

By Mike Luce

The NCAA will not be paying college football players any time soon. That said, NCAA president Mark Emmert is open to the idea of players bypassing college football altogether on their way to the pros. “If you are a ballerina, or a ballet dancer, you don’t go to college,” Emmert says. “You go straight to a ballet troupe. But you don’t have to make this artificial juncture. Go dance.”
Emmert seems to believe that the size of the college football stage renders the pay-for-play concept unnecessary. “The reality is, they are playing in front of 100,000 people. And so it would seem the exploitation is they have a big audience watching them. So I suppose if they played in front of just 5,000 people they wouldn’t be exploited.”
So the solution seems to be two-fold: college football players should take up ballet or play in smaller stadiums.

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Posted on September 20, 2013

By Carl Mohrbacher

The Bears somehow managed to leave the door open for a Viking upset, despite limiting Adrian Peterson’s effectiveness and watching Christian Ponder’s level of play inspire little boys everywhere to become long snappers.
And yes, if giving up three runs in six innings is a “Quality Start” in baseball, then giving up 100 yards and no touchdowns to AP is “limiting” him.
I assume those dastardly bartenders at Buffalo Wild Wings were behind the tight finish to Sunday’s game. The only explanation for that throw on 1st and goal was that Jay Cutler’s eyes were getting blasted by delicious condiments as he released the ball.

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Posted on September 19, 2013

By Dan O’Shea

One of the biggest stories of the young season has been the return of Philip Rivers to fantasy football relevancy.
In first two weeks, Rivers has delivered 614 passing yards and seven TDs against one INT.
He’s among the stat leaders at QB, which ain’t bad for a guy I didn’t even rank in my top 20 at the position (essentially tagging him as a third-string fantasy QB barely fit for bye-week duty).
Rivers will no doubt be getting the starting nod in Week 3 by fantasy owners, many of whom probably didn’t draft him.

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Posted on September 18, 2013

By Steve Rhodes

The announcers on Sunday were a little bemused and baffled by Bears defensive tackle Stephen Paea’s warm-up act, but those of us who have seen the rugby movie Forever Strong, starring Gary Cole and Sean Astin, know he was performing a haka, an ancestral war cry originated with the Maori of New Zealand.
“It is a posture dance performed by a group, with vigorous movements and stamping of the feet with rhythmically shouted accompaniment,” Wikipedia notes. “The New Zealand rugby team’s practice of performing a haka before their matches has made the dance more widely known around the world.”
And guess what? Paea was born in Auckland, New Zealand, where he played rugby as a boy.
First, Paea’s haka.

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Posted on September 17, 2013

By Jim Coffman

Football thrills.
The Bears won Sunday’s contest and have started the season with a pair of victories. There is plenty to say about an exciting team with a compelling cast of characters.
But yesterday the game was the thing.
A fan couldn’t help but feel drained. His Bears had scored four times and rode waves of momentum to and fro as they fell behind immediately, rallied to take the lead, faltered again on a huge defensive touchdown then re-took the lead the same way. Finally the Vikings zipped down the field and scored a late touchdown to tie it again, only to have the Bears drive once more and finish with three failed passes into the end zone before kicking a field goal for the lead.
Exhaustion was setting in. And it was halftime.

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Posted on September 16, 2013

By Roger Wallenstein

Hardly anyone noticed last week as Paul Konerko caught and then passed Babe Ruth.
For starters, people stopped watching the White Sox long ago. Loyalty has its limits. So when Detroit reliever Jose Veras struck out Konerko in the bottom of the eighth inning last Wednesday in the Tigers’ 1-0 victory at the Cell, the game wasn’t stopped to commemorate Konerko’s 1,330th career strikeout, the same number as George Herman Ruth.
Paulie broke the tie with the Babe on Saturday, taking a called third strike from Cleveland’s Ubaldo Jimenez to lead off the ninth inning in yet another 8-1 embarrassment for our staggering bunch of so-called professionals.

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Posted on September 16, 2013

By Steve Rhodes

“Theo is full of crap,” Cub Factor founder Marty Gangler writes in this week. “Every small-market team in the history of baseball has thrown out the ‘rebuilding the core’ motto to get better through young players. You can find guys that will help you win right now. I still believe the tanking of the last two years was all for the stadium deal. So maybe that was his plan all along – and it worked, so he’s doing what he has to do.”
Agreed. But wait, there’s more:

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Posted on September 15, 2013

By Mike Luce

For several seasons running, Week Three has featured a clash between two Top 10 teams.
This Saturday is no different – defending national champion Alabama (#1) faces Texas A&M (#6) in a critical, yet not historically unusual, early-season confrontation.
As if we needed any more reason to tune in, the revenge factor has heightened anticipation – Johnny “Football” Manziel’s Aggies dealt Alabama their only defeat (29-24) in 2013.
The excitement surrounding the game has driven ticket prices from resellers to near-record highs.
We can’t understand paying $800 for a regular-season game, but then we wouldn’t consider making a piñata of Johnny Football either.

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Posted on September 13, 2013

By Carl Mohrbacher

How do you make a 280-pound man disappear?
Apparently by matching him up against a backup left tackle.
It’s early in the season so instead of rushing to judgement, let’s draw the only reasonable conclusion as to why the Bears all-world defensive end was completely invisible against the Bengals.
Like Bran Stark*, Julius Peppers is a Warg, and last Sunday Marc Trestman tasked him with the theft of the Minnesota Vikings playbook. Using his mind projection powers, Peppers traversed the wilds of Wisconsin as a crafty, elusive badger and briefly inhabited the body of FSN sideline reporter Ann Carroll in order to gain access to the Twin City facilities.

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Posted on September 12, 2013