As I begin to write this, the Bears lead the Lions by two touchdowns midway through the fourth quarter. A win, at home, against a 3-4-1 Lions team playing its backup quarterback, would push the Bears into third in the NFC North, with a 4-5 overall record. The fans are getting optimistic, and with good reason. Mitch Trubisky, according to my Twitter timeline, made at least one good play. The defense is still good. The final seven games on the schedule definitely don’t include five against likely playoff teams, three of which are on the road. “The Bears are back!” they cry. And they ought to cry. Because the Bears’ plan is working to perfection.
Following the 2012 season, the Bears fired Lovie Smith. They’d gone 10-6 and finished third in the division, missing the playoffs for the fifth time in the six years since their magical run to a Super Bowl loss. The team wasn’t making progress. The stagnation was grating. A change had to be made. The obvious decision was decided. Smith took a year off, popped up in Tampa Bay, didn’t win much there, and wound up in some hopeless college football backwater, watering his growing gray beard with the frustrations of recruiting football players to somewhere they’d lose badly to top-tier competition in front of a large amount of concrete.
Meanwhile, back in Chicago, one of the NFL’s most legendary tankings was just beginning. When the Bears bid Lovie adieu, they brought in the anti-Lovie, a nerdy-looking white guy from Minnesota who’d succeeded in the CFL and had a reputation as just the offensive guru Jay Cutler needed to turn him into a hall of famer (as if he wasn’t already). Yes, Marc Trestman was the new man in Chicago, and the Bears were a new team, quickly falling from that ten-win 2012 to eight in 2013 and just five in 2014. Phase one of the tank was complete. The Bears were bad. But they weren’t done yet.
No, the Trestman era was not the entirety of the tank. The tank was nowhere near completion. For a downward spiral to happen, forces must converge moving in opposing directions (this isn’t technically true, but work with me here). The Bears had thrown themselves off course with Trestman, but to really turn this operation into a whirlpool of doom, the anti-Trestman was needed.
Enter John Fox.
This human shell filled with concrete had taken the Broncos to an historic Super Bowl blowout in 2013. He’d won the AFC West four straight years, routinely taking care of a team that was about to leave San Diego, a team waiting for the quarterback Andy Reid needed to make his offense zoom, and the massive heap of dust colloquially known as the Oakland Raiders. He was just what was needed for the Bears to do their favorite thing:
Give their fans a lot of unfounded hope.
Hope was had. This was a football guy. A man’s man. This was no weenie Trestman. John Fox was born to be either a football coach or a Chevrolet dealership, and Bears fans saw no Chevy’s.
It was disastrous.
Six wins in 2015.
Three wins in 2016.
At one point in that first year, the Bears punted on all ten of their possessions.
Clearly, the problem was Jay Cutler, who somehow got hurt after being sacked 17 times in only five games (this put Cutler on pace to break his personal record for times being sacked in a Bears season, which was 52, back in 2010, but again, he got hurt). The Bears had only gone 1-4 in his starts. Brian Hoyer and Matt Barkley couldn’t carry this franchise. The Bears needed a quarterback, and the 2017 draft class had a few of them, two of which, now in 2019, have already gripped the NFL by storm as part of a thrilling young crop of QB’s. Thankfully, now four years into the tank, Chicago had grabbed the third draft slot. With the Browns selecting a defensive lineman first overall, both future star quarterbacks were available. Even if the 49ers took one, the Bears would grab the other.
But there was a problem.
The Bears weren’t ready to stop tanking. They were hardly halfway done. Taking whichever QB the 49ers didn’t take could throw the moving tank into park. You never want to put a moving vehicle in park. It sounds terrible.
The Bears acted fast, trading four draft picks to move up one slot in the draft. Did they have their eye on one of those two great passers?
Well, no.
But they did have their eye on someone.
Four draft picks are a small price to pay to keep your tank on the road. In fact, they’re a great price because trading away four draft picks is basically fuel for the tank. Especially when the one draft pick you get in return is one you use on Mitch Trubisky, who, rumor has it, would have been available even if the Bears hadn’t made the trade with the Niners, meaning what the Bears did was akin to going to the supermarket, finding a man in the cereal aisle, and offering him $100 to not buy the carton of eggs in the corner of the refrigerator four aisles down that had its corner slightly dented and what looked like a little yolk seeping out. The man was not shopping for eggs. But he sure would like $100 (by the way, the Niners are 8-0 entering today).
Resume tank. The Bears won five games in 2017. John Fox was fired at season’s end. All was on schedule, now five years into the tank. The Bears were terrible. They needed something new. Something fresh.
Here is where it gets cruel. Here is where Bears fans and the local media, which coexist in whatever the opposite of a symbiotic relationship is in which both encourage the other to ride a yo-yo between unwarranted confidence and utter devastation, are about to turn that yo-yo into a cat riding a pinballing stick of dynamite. Here is the 2018 offseason.
In the 2018 offseason, the Bears flipped the script: they did everything right. They hired Matt Nagy, an offensive guru from the Andy Reid school. Nagy was the perfect hire. He had a blue-collar aura but a 21st-century mindset when it came to encouraging individuality and fun. He was an offensive mind, but he understood the importance of defense, and respected its historic significance in the Bears organization as the unit that won them Super Bowl XX and kept them competitive a number of other times. He said the right things. He did the right things.
But hiring Nagy wasn’t the last of it. The Bears, late in the preseason, made a blockbuster trade with the Raiders, sending their 2019 and 2020 first round draft picks in exchange for the dominant Khalil Mack, a 27-year-old defensive force who’d continue to be a force for a couple of years before morphing into a moderately overpriced solid defensive asset. Everything was going right, and even after Aaron Rodgers ripped their hearts out in the season opener, Bears fans were fired up. The season that followed justified that fire, the Bears winning twelve games against the easiest schedule in the NFL (as measured by opponent win percentage) and advancing to the divisional round, where a blocked field goal that also hit the upright and the crossbar enabled that cat-on-a-pinballing-stick-of-dynamite to proclaim the only thing the Bears needed was a kicker right after their offense had managed only 15 points in a home playoff game.
Can a tank include a 12-win season?
In this case, yes.
Because here’s what happened next:
The Bears restructured Khalil Mack’s contract, taking a hit to cap space in 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 in exchange for more space in 2019. They made a bunch of fine little moves in Free Agency. They didn’t have many draft picks, but they did add a good running back in David Montgomery to replace Jordan Howard, who they’d flipped for one of those coveted conditional sixth-round picks, and they entered the 2019 season optimistic it would be a breakthrough third year for Trubisky.
Or did they?
Because what proceeded to happen was the Bears’ impotent offense continuing to be impotent, the defense failing to be the best-in-the-league it needed to be, and Matt Nagy developing a tendency to let the cat-on-a-pinballing-stick-of-dynamite’s criticisms of his play-calling become something he addresses directly with lines like, “I know we need to run the ball more. I’m not an idiot.”
It’s year seven, and the Bears have the pedal to the floor on the tank, which never really ended. It’s unlikely it’ll end this offseason, either, and with no first-round pick in the 2020 NFL Draft, the most likely destination would seem to be Bears fans looking at a team in which nothing has changed following a 7-9 or 6-10 season and say things like, “This is the year Mitch takes the leap,” while Matt Nagy updates his résumé as he observes an aging defense and an offense devoid of weapons and realizes he’s expected to make the playoffs with both.
But it could end sooner.
It could end this offseason.
Why?
Well, remember that Lovie Smith guy, who we left down in some Napoleon’s Saint Helena of a college football town, gaining weight and growing a beard?
Lovie Smith built a solid football team in that town. A team that can make bowl games. A team that just qualified for a bowl game. A team that had, entering today (the Bears have finished off the hapless Lions as I write this), won twice as many games as their upstate neighbors.
Lovie Smith’s back in the minds of Illinoisans from Cairo to South Beloit. And wouldn’t the Bears love to have his era back?
You see, the point of this tank was not to get good again. That would never be a reasonable goal for the Bears. The fan base and local media are too conditioned to the pinballing-stick-of-dynamite way of life. Actually winning might destroy them.
No, the point of this tank was to condition Bears fans to accept Lovie Smith as their king, for as long as all parties should live. The point was to convince Bears fans that ten wins actually was, in fact, enough back in 2012, and that like a homebody traveling the world trying all it has to offer, Chicago would really be happier back home, with Lovie Smith deftly steering the franchise through near-misses of playoff berths.
Again, it’s hard to say whether the tank will work. It’s possible Smith will grow too happy in Champaign-Urbana to leave. It’s possible some Pac-12 school will offer him way too much money to turn their program into a seven-win outfit. It’s possible the Bears won’t be ready to move on from Nagy, and that Nagy won’t figure out how to escape in time.
But at the moment, seven years in, the tank has a chance of succeeding. And that’s pretty darn impressive.
