Week 12 of the NFL season is in the books. Matt Drufke has questions. Fancy Boys Football expert Jack Baker has the answers. Let’s mailbag.
It doesn’t seem that long ago that the Chicago Bears were 5-1, and we were saying that with their defense, it seemed possible that they could make a little splash in the playoffs so long as their offense could generate anything. Well, their offense has generated something- six straight losses, including yesterday’s embarrassing collapse to the Lions. At this point, it doesn’t seem like the Bears could beat some decent high school teams, but their schedule does end promisingly enough, with games against Houston (4-8), Minnesota (6-6) and Jacksonville (1-11) before ending the season against the Packers. Ok, prediction time: what will Chicago’s record be at the end of the season?
Hopefully 5-11. The Bears are stuck in football hell. They’re capped out. Don’t have a ton of draft capital–thanks Nick Foles!–and aren’t very good. When Ryan Pace is inevitably fired, whoever takes over is going to have a difficult time building a Super Bowl contender out of the mess that is this roster. The Bears losing out will go a long way to helping with that.
But because they are the Bears, I expect them to beat Houston, win the Mike Glennon revenge game, and beat a Packers team resting everyone in week 17 to finish 8-8 dooming them for years to come.
Let’s stay in Chicago, because Bears Twitter was a lot of fun last night. Much like the amazing Shakira song “Try Everything”, angry Bears fans want the team to, well, try everything. If everything I read is accurate, people want the Bears to fire GM, all coaches, most of the players and maybe for the owners to turn the team over to some sort of public trust. Who is responsible for these six consecutive losses? Could different coaches have brought a different result? And just how great is that Shakira song?
Everyone is responsible for the losses. The players aren’t very good. Every position group, with the exception of kicker, has gotten worse since 2018. There’s been no development anywhere. That points to bad coaching. The Bears consistently get outschemed by other teams. Remember when the Rams threw motion at them and the defense acted like it had never seen that before? And the players just also aren’t very good. That’s on Ryan Pace. The reason Bears fans are so upset because everything is bad.
That Shakira song is fine.
Let’s say that over the next four weeks, the winless Jets played every team in your favorite division, the NFC East. Could they win any of those games? If so, which? And, if not, then why are they still a fucking team?
Probably? They should have beaten the Raiders who beat the reigning Super Bowl Champion Chiefs earlier in the year, but also lost by 40 to the Falcons, who got beat by the Dallas Cowboys. So I guess what I’m saying is the NFL is weird and on any given Sunday, any team can win, unless that team is quarterbacked by Mitch Trubisky.
Five players were ejected in Sunday’s Bengals-Dolphins game. I get the whole, “Hey, man. It’s a tough physical sport and fighting is just going to be part of it,” nonsense. But… does it really? And how much do you enjoy a good football fight?
Football fights are the worst out of the major sports. With the exception of Myles Garret’s helmet swinging brawl last year, football fights are just a bunch of guys punching each other in the helmet like a bunch of dumb-dumbs.
The definitive ranking of sports fights is:
4. Football Fights
3. Baseball Benches Clearing Brawl
2. Basketball Benches Clearing Brawl
1A. Hockey Fights
1. Hockey Goalie Fights
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