We are through Week 3 of the NFL season and Week 4 of the college football season.
When we get to this point in these seasons, we have enough of a sample size to make some decisions about teams and players and see trends in both—good and bad.
And more than just evaluating players and teams, we’re tasked with comparing those evaluations with preseason expectations.
If you follow my ramblings on this page, you know I talk about expectations often. Mostly, I complain a lot about them.
The thing I dislike about expectations most is that the process by which we arrive at them is flawed.
Expectations, most generally, are a combination of how you finished last season, the players you lost, the players you gained, and then the “X” factor of the general feeling surrounding the team.
For example, fans of the Bears had sky high expectations.
Their defense played really well in the last six games of last season, they didn’t really lose anyone to free agency, and they drafted the quarterback that everyone was salivating over since he won the Heisman Trophy two years ago and a wide receiver with the ninth overall pick.
All of that is true and all of that had Bears fans excited, and understandably so.
But this is where things go sour.
Fans can be told that the rookie quarterback will have some growing to do on the fly, that the Bears did very little to improve a sub-standard offensive line, but they don’t have to listen.
And Bears fans didn’t listen.
They were like the congregation of a church who only listens the parts of the sermon that they liked
What happens? The Bears are 1-2, and the game they won was one where they didn’t score an offensive touchdown and were gifted the game winning touchdown on the poorest of decisions by the Titans young quarterback.
And without that generous donation, they’d be 0-3.
They went to Indy last weekend and played a Colts team that had given up massive amounts of rushing yards in their first two games. We all looked at it as a ‘get right game’ for the Bears offense. This was going to be the game where the Bears worked out the bugs in their running game, which would open up their passing game, and the merry-go-round would get cranked up.
They attempted 28 running plays which added up to 63 yards.
They attempted 52 passes. 52!
Remember what happened in the first two games of the season? The Bears prize possession was running for his life. That’s the way it was Sunday, too.
Why?
You can draft and go get all the skilled players you want, but if you don’t have five guys in front of them clearing a path and protecting your quarterback, you have NOTHING!
This is the story of the king who had no clothes. Someone had to tell him.
Someone has to tell the Bears.
And this line was like this most of the summer. It’s not like we didn’t see this coming. But we chose to listen to the part of the sermon about the joy of Heaven and snored through the part about the pain on earth until we get there.
Then we are surprised with how our lives play out.
Our expectations should have been “I hope we are a 9-8 football team at the end of the season”, because that’s all the Bears were ever going to be.
Now, those same visionaries who thought the Bears would steamroll everyone and put themselves in a category with the Niners, Eagles and Lions are panicked and ready to fire the head coach and the play caller and start all over again.
I offer you the concept that, while the Bears head coach is probably not worthy of being a head coach and the play caller does some things that defies any logic stream, that the heart of the problem is not either of them.
It’s not the five individuals that make up the offensive line.
It’s not the GM or his assistant or the team president.
No, friends, the problem is us!
We have been waiting for so long for our quarterback messiah to come along and lead us against our oppressors.
We make it impossible for the Bears to succeed because our expectations are wrong—WAY wrong.
Now, those people who were thinking “playoffs” are in full crisis mode, and it’s not helping.
I am not in that group.
To quote Emperor Palpatine in Star Wars, “It is as I have foreseen it.”