Just How Bad were Marc Trestman’s Bears? (Pt. I)
Tl;dr: Worse than you remember.
Two men who would have a profound impact on Marc Trestman’s - and his predecessor’s - Bears of the early 2010’s, both by their onfield heroics and their absences.
There isn’t really a storied tradition of Canadian football coaches making the jump south to the National Football League and having success in the game with four downs and no rouges, but there is at least a tradition of it.
Bud Grant, the legendarily iron-willed and tough-as-Nordic-metalwork coach of the Purple People Eaters era Minnesota Vikings, started out his coaching career north of the border by bagging 4 Grey Cups in 5 years as head coach of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers (1958, ’59, ’61, ’62). Fun fact: he played for the Blue Bombers from 1953 to 1956, and became Blue Bombers head coach in 1957! This makes Mr. Grant a worthy claimant for perhaps the most meteoric career rise of all time in professional football. He basically went straight from playing (even more fun fact: he played wide receiver and, somehow, defensive at the same time) to head coaching; not since the days of the Canton Bulldogs and player-coaches like The Legend Jim Thorpe were the lines between coach and athlete blurred so frivolously and so successfully. The strangest part of this absurdly successful career in Canada, though? He only won one CFL Coach of the Year award…in 1965…when Winnipeg finished second in the Western Conference and lost 3-2 in the Grey Cup.
Grant’s two-decade run in the NFL was far less successful – but only by the ridiculously high standards he’d set for himself in the CFL. His teams often dominated the NFC, only occasionally facing stiff challenges from the Fearsome Foursome-era Rams and the periodic one-year-wonder team like John Brodie’s Niners. His teams were tough against the run, tougher against the pass, and utterly impervious to inclement weather, turning the miserable elements characteristic of late-year Minnesota into a weapons-grade homefield advantage (he didn’t even allow heaters on the sideline). He made it to the Super Bowl 4 times and lost all 4. And, in a twist of sadistic irony, he and Don Shula are the only two head coaches in the Super Bowl era to win the NFL Championship but not become world champions the same year. Don Shula, of course, won two Super Bowls in his career – the second, quite cruelly, against Grant’s Vikings.
But Bud Grant is a legendary coach, and his not winning a Super Bowl doesn’t dock him too much when it comes to his ranking amongst the best head coaches in Pro Football history. I mean, please; give me a Bud Grant over a George Seifert or Jon Gruden any day of the week. He and post-Grant Vikings quarterback Warren Moon are the only men on the planet enshrined in the Halls of Fame of Canada and Canton.
We aren’t here today to expatiate about Bud Grant’s career, though. We certainly could, but you’ve gotten the point. No. Today, we’re focusing on a far more horrid example of expatriate CFL coaching in the National Football League: the Chicago Bears of Marc Trestman.
Perhaps you remember Trestman’s band of Windy City warriors. Perhaps you don’t. We wouldn’t blame you either way – they played in some relatively memorable games but were on the whole enormously forgettable squads. At least, in retrospect they were. What we’re about to learn is that to forget Marc Trestman’s refulgent run of defensive incapability in Chicago is to allow to pass into obscurity one of the more inexplicable collapses of a once-mighty defense in NFL history, and to fail to memorialize such feebleness is something we simply will not stand for at the offices of Personal Vowels.
To fully comprehend just how stunning the tumble from elite defense to horrendous pretenders is, though, we need to go back. An entire decade, really. That means taking a long, perhaps agonizing look at the final years of the Bears under Lovie Smith’s guidance. Proceed, and be prepared to confront some of the most unimaginable collapses in human sports memory.
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Part One:
Lovie
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The Three-Year Thaw: From Monsters of the Midway to Mice of the Midwest
The Bears once played in a postseason where 4 different players attempted passes for them. Unsurprisingly, this mutated, makeshift Frankenstein perversion of Tom Landry’s two-quarterback system did not result in a Lombardi Trophy.
There was a time, long ago, when the Bears looked like they were the masters of the universe. Everything was coming up Lovie in January of 2011 – they secured a bye, blew out the owners of the worst record in playoff history in the 7-9 Seahawks, and got to sit back and watch as their hated nemeses the Packers made short work of the #1-seed Atlanta Falcons on the road in the Georgia Dome. That meant all roads led to Chicago in the 2010-11 NFC Playoffs. What happened next caused blood to bubble at ferocious temperatures in the veins of stupefied Bears supporters.
I. Coronation: The Cutler Did It
You could go a hundred years and not see a game where three different quarterbacks take the field for the same team in one playoff game. But Bears fans, the Football Gods decided, had their fun in 1985, and that is all the fun they get to have. If you look at the box score for the Bears in the 2010 NFC Championship and then looked at the box score from one of their preseason games the same season you would have a tough time saying which was which.
Jay Cutler was the starting quarterback for these Bears. In 2010, that sentence had not yet taken on its current intonation, where it sounds like the beginning of a football horror story. To that point, his statistical sums show a young quarterback who threw lots of touchdowns and lots of – but not as many – interceptions. He had the, uh, good? bad? fortune to take snaps as starter for the final few Denver teams of the Mike Shanahan era, whose offensive foundation and glaring lack of a competent defense helped inflate the young quarterback’s stats and, importantly, got him a lot of valuable practice in the Art Of Quarterbacking. He wasn’t gun-shy, throwing 20+ touchdowns and double-digit interceptions in each of his first three years as a full-time starter. But blame the light Colorado air for that – it increases kickers’ distance, so why don’t we give errant QB’s a pass when they take more chances downfield in the same conditions? Probably for obvious reasons, like that they’re trying to hit moving targets, but strange things happen in the thin mountain air. Just ask Ike Taylor and Ryan Mundy.
But things didn’t last for Cutler in Denver. Shanahan successor Josh McDaniels entered the Denver HC office in 2009 and immediately shooed most of the existing offensive personnel out of the building. Despite finishing second in total yards, you see, the Cutler-quarterbacked ’08 Broncos had finished only 16th in scoring (plus, when you’ve got Kyle Orton and can draft Tim Tebow, you’re all set at QB anyway). Shanahan famously said as he was preparing to take his leave from Denver that the next coach of the Broncos would be a fool to change anything about the offense’s makeup. Well, Josh didn’t listen, because the 2009 Broncos were a shell of their 2008 selves, starting 6-0 and beating eventual playoff teams Cincinnati and former McDaniels employer New England before collapsing down the stretch and missing the postseason themselves.
But perhaps we’ll re-examine McDaniels’s Mile High wilderness years in a later edition of “Just How Bad Were ___?” Today we’re focused on the Bears of Lovie Smith and, eventually, Marc Trestman, and we’ve barely even scratched the surface of the exordium to their tale. Cutler was without a country, and the Chicago Bears were a team eternally without a quarterback. Like, eternally eternally without a quarterback; by exceeding the 4,000-yard mark in 2019 Carson Wentz ensured that the Chicago Bears are now the last team in the NFL that has never had a 4,000-yard passing season. As unbelievable as that is it isn’t as unbelievable as the fact that the Chicago Bears might not have a quarterback scouting department. They had proven to be almost incapable of finding even serviceable passers since the departure of Jim McMahon in the late 1980’s – even he, a guy who went 36-5 as a starter from 1984-88, hardly resembles a starting quarterback of our modern era – and have at numerous times since the early 1990’s fielded squads whose quarterback rooms look like Division II NCAA units. Think for a moment of this single putrid stretch in the early years of our current millennium, and consider the quarterbacks who populated the film rooms at Halas Hall:
2003: Rex Grossman, Chris Chandler, Kordell Stewart
2004: Rex Grossman, Chad Hutchinson, Craig Krenzel, Jonathan Quinn
2005: Rex Grossman, Jeff Blake, Kyle Orton, Kurt Kittner
Repulsive, we say. The newsroom at Personal Vowels nearly rose in armed revolt when they were reminded that Kordell Stewart was actually contracted to play quarterback for a team after 2001 (they were subdued when they were notified that he also played for the Ravens from 2004-2005, a stretch so forgettable that it stirred legitimate wonderment in the eyes of our interns). We defy you especially to name a single Craig Krenzel, Jonathan Quinn or Chad Hutchinson Bears highlight – each of them started games in 2004, a fantastic thing to imagine if you don’t want to look up so-called highlights of that season in Chicago.
If you think that 4 different quarterbacks starting a game in one season is a shaky offensive philosophy then imagine how flabbergasted you’d be to see four different players taking snaps at QB over the course of 3 games. That is what befell the Bears in the 2010 postseason. Granted, this was not a playoffs without its glories for the Bears. They were one of those fortunate teams who obtained a first-round bye with an 11-5 record, a rare occurrence in the NFL playoffs. Hell, you could argue the 2010 NFC playoff bracket was the most chaotic of all time: the best team in the league, the Green Bay Packers, had to go on the road to play Michael Vick-led Philadelphia, and the defending champion Saints had to travel cross-continent to play the 7-9 Seahawks. Nothing memorable happened in that game, of course. After the Seahawks beat the Saints and came to Chicago they seemed to lose the entirety of their luster, hitting the fourth quarter down 28-3. Impossible to come back from that deficit, right?
In this case, at least, right. And the best part was that the maestro of this pièce de résistance was none other than The Man. No, not 2013 Colin Kaepernick from those Beats commercials, you knave, we mean Jay Cutler. No one seems to remember this game – or the 2010 Bears, who were a crippling quarterback exit away from playing the Steelers in Dallas in that year’s Super Bowl – and that should be upsetting to any fans of historic postseason football. Jay Cutler was ç’est magnifique in this game, looking nonpareil at the helm of the heritage of George Halas, Red Grange and Mike Ditka. The Bears opened a 21-0 lead and never looked back. But the typifications of Lovie Smith – cutting-edge defense and high-caliber special teams that always granted their offenses good field position – weren’t what had created this severe scoreboard imbalance. No, it was Jay Cutler. The Cutler did it. Seriously, guys; the box score from this game looks like make-believe. Get ready for it: Jay Cutler, the sulking supposed cigarette aficionado himself, threw for two touchdowns and ran for two touchdowns. In a playoff game. Against a Pete Carroll Seahawks defense (we’ll stop short of calling them the Legion Of Boom – I mean, it’s 2010, after all, it took a few years to round into raptor-beaked shape). By doing what he did he joined a list of unforgiving exclusivity: only he, Cam Newton, Colin Kaepernick and the great Otto Graham (he did this twice) rushed and threw for at least two touchdowns in a single playoff game. Excelsior! Cutler etched his name in Pro Football history. His accomplishments were multifarious: he did it par avion, he did it par voie de terre, and he did it early and often enough to deny the Matt Hasselbeck-led Seahawks any chance of returning to competitiveness in the game. It was over swiftly.
Now, you’ll be wondering about that fourth passer if we don’t state it now. The offensive coordinator of this game was Mike Martz, who will probably appear later in Personal Vowels publications as a Mover And Shaker. He liked weird formations, and appears to have taken a liking to the Wildcat offense popularized by the Maimi Dolphins. Matt Forte took a snap and threw the ball in this game. It was intercepted. One might wonder why this happened. Well, primarily it was because a Seahawks defender caught the ball while it was still in middair. Secondarily it was because Matt Forte never played quarterback; his stats from Tulane indicate he was a running back his entire career in college. One might also wonder why he was asked to throw a ball in a completely meaningless sequence of game time when his team was up 25 points. We don’t know.
But it didn’t matter. The Bears won 35-24. Then it was on to the Packers, a team they had split the season series with. There’s audio of the Bears playing the Packers in Week 17 where someone who we believe to be Chris Harris says “We defnitely don’t want these bums in the playoffs.” Well, the Bears lost that game 10-3, and that allowed the upstart Packers into the playoffs. They met in the NFC Championship. Unlike the Seahawks, the Packers had a strong and disciplined defense, finishing fifth in yards allowed, sixth in takeaways and second in points allowed (their eventual Super Bowl opponent, the Steelers, was the only team ahead of them in scoring). The cheeseheads’ swarming Dom Capers defense made life a lot tougher on Cutler than Pete Carroll’s Hawks had. He just couldn’t find Devin Hester, Greg Olsen or Johnny Knox (remember that guy?) in the first half; he threw six incompletions to his three best playmakers and was sacked twice, fumbling once. The second half would have to contain greener pastures if they were going to meet Pittsburgh in the Super Bowl. But then things went seriously sideways. Cutler re-entered the game for the opening third quarter series after a 24 yard Hester return (the biggest impact he’d had on the game to that point), handed the ball off once, threw an incompletion, and did not return. The lasting image of Cutler’s 2010 postseason remains, sadly, his downtrodden wind-whipped countenance as he labored disinterestedly atop a stationary bike on the sideline. No one seems to remember his dual-threat revelations against Pete Carroll’s embryonic Seahawks.
The game would have looked basically over at this point were it not for some serious heart shown by the Bears defense. Brian Urlacher intercepted a zooming would-be dagger from Aaron Rodgers with his back against his own goalline and rumbled to midfield before fleet-footed Rodgers could down him with the meagerest of shoestring tackles. It wasn’t evident at the moment, but that was probably as key a play as the Ben Roethlisberger tackle of Nick Harper in the RCA Dome from five years earlier which prevented a miraculous go-ahead Colts score after a Jerome Bettis fumble. Urlacher probably didn’t know at the time that Cutler wasn’t returning so he had a right to be fired up; the whole defense did. If they could hold fast and beat Green Bay that Urlacher interception would live in Bears history forever.
But they were met with a sorry sight. Instead of regular field commander Jay Cutler, it was Todd Collins who took the field.
Todd Collins.
“Not ideal” does not begin to describe the situation the Bears found themselves in. There’s no need to speak too lengthily about the four incompletions Mr. Collins threw before being relieved by the third-string quarterback, except to say that his gameday apparel made him look like he’d time-travelled straight from 1997 to 2010 to play two ineffective series of playoff football and baffle the Chicago crowd. The sleeves were too long, the helmet looked outdated, the decision-making was slow and puzzling, the footwork was notional and bordering on nonexistent. Two QBs down in Chitown.
Caleb Hanie was the next - well, last - man up. As we touched on, it could be another several centuries before you see three different quarterbacks take the field for the same team in a playoff game. It’s happened only sporadically throughout NFL history – in the body bag game, for instance, and in a wild 1999 opening day Jets-Patriots game – and many coaches would rather only keep two quarterbacks on the roster or, in a few notable cases, juggle back and forth between inept passer and inept passer, as Mike Tomlin was forced to do on a sad December afternoon last season versus the Jets. (Deciding on a QB is tough when the first names of your roster’s quarterbacks are Mason, Duck, and Big.)
Todd Collins, wearing what appears to be a short-sleeve Chicago Bears hockey sweater.
The reason for this was (until 2011 when gameday rosters were expanded) if you put an emergency quarterback in the game before the fourth quarter, neither of the two quarterbacks entrenched ahead of him on the depth chart are eligible to return. If you wait till the fourth quarter, though, no sweat, it’s kosher, you can put whoever you want in the game at any time. But these were harrowing and extenuating circumstances – the Halas Trophy was on the line. So what did Lovie Smith do with time running down in the third quarter? With less than a minute remaining, he put in third-stringer Caleb Hanie – to hand off the ball twice. He could have kept Collins in for two plays then installed Hanie at the start of the fourth to ensure Collins had the possibility of returning if things went catastrophically, but apparently Collins’ performance to that point was so odious that it demanded discontinuation. As Michael Irvin said on the instant reaction highlight reel of the game: “Enough’s enough.”
Hanie played fairly well – better than the other two, at least. He was helped by some terrible angle-taking by Tramon Williams – who could’ve been the Packers’ Finals MVP for the 2010-11 postseason if such an award existed – and a leonine effort in the final moments of the game from Johnny Knox. Forget Cutler-to-Olsen – Hanie-to-Knox will do just fine. Two huge plays by Knox helped put the Bears in respectable reach of catching the Pack on the scoreboard, one a deep out-breaking crosser that put the Bears in scoring territory at the 1 yard line and the other a straight up touchdown. But what happened in between these series was what doomed Chicago: a pick six by B.J. Raji. A nose tackle. This is the sort of thing you’d expect an emergency quarterback to do, I guess. Packers win, 21-14. Bears season over.
II. Interregnum: No Lovie Lost
Name one thing about the 2011 Bears. I would wager you cannot. Type “2011 Chicago B-” into a searchbar and it will almost surely autofill the final word to “Bulls” (this was Derrick Rose’s shimmering MVP season in Chicago). Almost nothing of note happened at Soldier Field in 2011 – few ups, few true downs, and a symmetrically unremarkable 8-8 record to show for it. Perhaps the only thing that was rather notable about these Bears was the astonishingly poor draft they pulled off. They had five selections, four made the team, and the best player they picked was Chris Conte. Remember that guy’s name, by the way.
Something else that’s, like, semi-notable was their record near the midway mark of the season: 7-3. Four games above .500 with 6 games left. Then, over the course of a mere 30 days, they played five games, scored a cumulative 68 points, and lost every time they took the field. In the span of a month they’d plummeted from Wild Card shoe-in to playoff nonentity. They’d followed a five-game win streak that stretched from Week 6 to Week 11 in which they scored 32.2 points a game with a five-game losing streak in Weeks 12-16 where they scored 13.6 points per game. What the Hell happened? We’ll tell you: Jay Cutler broke his thumb and was lost for the season.
Not to fear, though, they still had Caleb Hanie. Yeah, that guy! Mr. NFC Championship. It turns out that he wasn’t really all that good, after all. In his first ever game as a starter, he had a chance to at least attempt a desperation Hail Mary down 5, but after no favorable targets presented themselves he spiked the ball like he was trying to preserve what was left of the clock after taking a deep drop. Since you have to do the clock-the-ball play right at the line of scrimmage to get away with this bending of the rules the refs flagged it and the game ended – ended!!! – with a ten-second runoff that killed the rest of the clock. By trying to preserve time, Hanie had gotten rid of what little there remained of it.
The next week held more misery for the Bears. On their own turf the Bears failed to come away with more than a single field goal, and Hanie’s Hanieous play continued. Eleven completions, zero touchdowns, three interceptions, and seven sacks is no way to go through life, son. Even so, the Bears had the relative advantage of getting to play the Tyler Palko Chiefs, one of the least inspiring teams of this decade. Maybe millennium. But in situations where both quarterbacks contribute next to nothing to their team’s efforts towards victory, the quarterback that can secure a single ridiculously lucky play is probably going to be the winner when the dust settles, and that’s what happened. Palko flourished (you won’t see those words very many other places) in the same situation that Hanie had faltered in a week ago – with seconds left in the half, Palko let a wobbly spheroid fly doubtfully towards the endzone where his receivers awaited. Somehow it was caught by Dexter McCluster, a 5’8” tweener who vacillated between scatback and utility receiver. The stupidest Hail Mary ever came in a game where it was the only touchdown and propelled the road team to a win in the city that spawned the inaugural team of the National Football League.
Hail Marys attempted against the safety duo of Chris Conte and Craig Steltz have a 100% success rate.
All you need to know about the Bears’ next game was that it was a Tebow Game. The Football Gods laughed in the face of the reeling bears and dealt them a loss so appallingly tough to stomach that Marion Barber is still keeled over and shamefaced because of it. Barber was the best offense the Bears had that day, but he was not the straight-ahead steam engine that helped the Cowboys to a 13-3 record in 2007. Instead Barber looked more like a man reenacting 2019 Marshawn Lynch, a running back with long dreadlocks wearing the number 24 and gamboling laboriously but steadily for handfuls of yards per clip. And he also did something that Lynch would never have done, stepping out of bounds on the first play after the two-minute warning when staying in would have consumed a lot of much-needed clock that the Tebow Broncos instead used to help tie the game at 10 before overtime. Look, Tebow was probably a better quarterback than Hanie was - Hanie threw no touchdowns and no interceptions, which is neither helpful nor harmful – but at least Hanie had some ability to drive the ball; Tebow could have been whistled for delay of after the snap the way his sideline passes were creeping glacially towards their targets on the game-tying drive. In overtime, the Bears again had a chance to put the game away if they could just get into field goal range – it wouldn’t have ended the game, per se, but come on, you can only ask so much of Tebow. But a Tebow team down 3 in overtime was not to be seen, as Barber fumbled the ball to the Broncos and sealed his own team’s fate. This felt a lot like Hanie’s errant grounding faux pas a few weeks earlier in that it essentially ended the game, and did so with a finality that only extenuating circumstances can encumber the offending party with. Still, it took a 59-yard Matt Prater field goal to beat the Bears, one of the longest field goals in history. Remember, though, this game was played in Denver, Cutler’s old glory grounds, and it’s easier to make things go far in the weightless Rocky Mountain climate. Or so I’m told.
Something was rotten in the state of Illinois. The Bears had atrophied in dramatic fashion, losing their offensive cornerstone in Matt Forte and passing-game captain Jay Cutler within mere quarters of each other. The defense would have needed to be 1985-level legendary to stay the course and grab the fifth or sixth seed, but this just wasn’t that sort of team. They had top-shelf talent in Brian Urlacher and Charles Tillman, certainly, but they lacked something. Some sort of oomph or zhuzh that could get the neutral vehicle’s engine roaring into glorious blazing life. Those 1985 Bears were the savage scions of Iron Mike Ditka and Buddy Ryan, two potentates of the pigskin. The 2011 Bears had solid leadership, sure, but it came in the form of Lovie Smith and Mike Martz. These aren’t typically fiery guys. Smith had come to the Bears in 2004 from the Rams, where he’d worked with OC Mike Martz, and he’d come to the Rams from Tony Dungy’s Buccaneers, Dungy himself having come from Denny Green’s Vikings. What these four men have in common is a relatively consistent tendency towards non-conflict – towards refraining from Jonathan Edwards-style brimstone oratory. There’s nothing wrong with this approach; after all, three of these four reached the Super Bowl, and he who did not (Green) consistently fielded extremely dangerous teams, one of which set the then-record scoring margin for NFL teams (’98 Vikes, anyone?). Green went 113-94 as a head coach, Dungy went 139-69, Martz went 53-32, and Smith went 89-87. These were winners. But to paraphrase an old documentary about the AFL, “If I had a bad baseball team I’d want Billy Martin to manage them, and if I had a bad football team I’d want Lou Saban to coach them.” At 7-6, the Bears were effectively a bad football team.
You want firebrands to handle your team when the breaks are going against you. When you have to row against the current you want to have someone in your corner who can snarl and scream and sneer and snap at you, to put the Mayflower Fear of God in your veins. It is called American Football, after all, and while Stiff Upper Lip Stoicism has its place and its time, in the midst of a free fall you don’t want to merely persevere, you want to thrash and throw your arms out in defiance of what may seem fatalistic and predestined and ordained and fated. To alter course, you might need someone who can wrest the reins and throw the weight of the ship to the port or the starboard, depending. Lovie Smith, for all his good qualities, was not that man.
Blowouts to the Seahawks and Packers were the next two losses for the Bears. These failures put them at 7-8. A collapse, in every sense of the word. They managed a rather measly 17-13 win over the Adrian Peterson-less Vikings in Week 17 to pull to an even 8-8, but by this point they were so far out of the Wild Card race they may as well have been looking forward to the offseason. They probably were.
III. Regicide: The Course of True Lovie Never Did Run Smooth
“I like our roster in Madden 25, Matt, but I’d definitely switch out me and go with Jerrod Johnson at QB.”
In 2012, the Bears were at a crossroads. They were caught in crosscurrents, it is perhaps more accurate to say. They had ended the 2010 season in cataclysmic fashion, fielding three different quarterbacks and failing to threaten their ancient blood rivals Green Bay in the biggest game of the season. They had had the look of eagles ten games into 2011 only to inadvertently lather their hands in vaseline and let a sure playoff berth slip from their grasp. What 2012 brought might decide the fate of this Chicago regime. It did.
Children with limited NFL exposure, whose only knowledge of the Bears is the current Trubisky-Nagy administration and the ill-fated consortium of John Fox vagabonds before it might be amazed to learn that Chicago was the class of the NFL for a solid four years at the beginning of last decade. 41, 23, 34, 41, 13, 23, 51; these were the totals that the Jay Cutler-Brandon Marshall-Matt Forte-led ursine marauders piled up in the points column in their 7 wins to start the 2012 season. I who have seen the rise and fall of one of the more fascinating teams in recent memory find it startling to even type this now, but at one remarkable juncture that spanned 2012 and 2013, you wanted to play as the Bears on Madden. It seems almost unbelievable to those who never anxiously awaited the releases of Madden 25 and Madden 15, but by God were those formidable offenses. They could hit you hard and early, and they could pillage you with point-scoring. Brandon Marshall belongs to an unhappy class of athletes who strung together several starstruck seasons early in their career and seemed to be on Hall of Fame pace only to slow, either because of diminishing skills, the ravages of time, or the deterioration of talent around them, and fade from Canton-esque lambency. Marshall had played with Cutler in Denver and it was evident that the chemistry they’d forged out West remained sound in their Midwest reunion. In four different wins Marshall caught 9 or more passes; in one single incredible blowout versus Jacksonville he caught 12 for 144 yards. In another stupendous outing, the 51 point annihilation of the Titans, he caught 9 for 122 and three touchdowns. Marshall was a receptions machine throughout his career, setting a Broncos franchise record for catches in a 2008 game versus the Chargers and setting the NFL record for single game catches in a game versus the Colts in 2009. He was the first, second, and third option for Cutler, and he made good use of his talents, racking up 7 touchdowns in the first 8 games of 2012. Midway through the season the Bears sat at 7-1.
There’s a great episode of NFL Top Ten that discusses the ten worst in-season collapses of seemingly playoff-bound teams; the 1993 Miami Dolphins were ranked at number 1, a team who was 9-2 and fiinished 9-7 after a Dan Marino season-ending injury, and missed the postseason. That sure sounds a lot like our good friends the 2011 Bears, doesn’t it? That episode must have been filmed before 2012. You know where this is going. Sorrowful verse could be written in the name of the sag and eventual capsize of the 2012 Bears. At 7-1 they were in secure command of the NFC North crown, but it was not to last. They put up a round 13 points in two losses to Houston and San Francisco to put them at 7-3. Familiar territory for these Bears, as this is the same situation they’d found themselves in exactly one year earlier. Someone should have given them an emotional and heartfelt speech about how they needed to break habits and wrest themselves free from the curse of history, unshackle themselves from the burden of previous squads. Either this didn’t happen or the person who gave this speech did so unconvincingly. After following up these two losses with a win over the Vikings the Bears made mincemeat of the standard for late-season underperformance, losing three straight to three good teams, the Seahawks, Vikings and Packers, before winning their last two.
10-6. This was the the record of the Chicago Bears following their 2012 campaign. A respectable enough record, we think. After all, there was more than enough evidence to convince viewers that this team belonged in the playoffs. But they missed it on account of a pretty much meaningless Vikings-Packers game whose most notable storyline was Adrian Peterson’s attempt to get the NFL rushing record (he finished nine yards short; could the Vikes have called, like, one or two more running plays? Probably. But that’s not for us to judge). And just how unlikely was it for who was at one point (at least numerically speaking) on pace for a 14-2 record to the season without making the playoffs? Since the inception of the NFL only 38 teams have won at least 10 games and failed to make the playoffs. This includes some rather forgettable outfits such as Ryan Fitzpatrick’s 2015 New York Jets and a 2003 Miami Dolphins team that it is a struggle to name a single player from who isn’t Ricky Williams. But this list also includes the likes of the 1991 Philadelphia Eagles, a team who fielded what some believe to be the single greatest defense of all time, and the 1988 Giants, a team that could have easily won the Super Bowl if they’d made it in to the tournament (they’d won it in ’86 and would win it again in 1990, of course). Some of the really interesting teams in this category, though, are the ones from before 1990, the year the NFL added a second Wild Card team. There’s a Detroit team that failed to make the playoffs in 1962 after going 11-3, and the 1985 Denver Broncos (along with the insanely ill-fated 2008 New England Patriots) round out the list of the only teams to win at least 11 regular-season games since 1960 and fail to reach the postseason. Beyond that 1960 frontier there are a couple fascinating old-school outfits that entrance the imagination to think about, such as a 12-2 San Francisco 49ers team from the days of the AAFC that barely missed its league’s tournament on account of the powerhouse Otto Graham Browns and a Lions team that went 10-3 in 1934 but missed out on the championship game because of an undefeated Bears squad (they’d go on to lose in a now-famous “Sneakers” game and would again enter the championship game undefeated in 1942 only to lose to Washington).
Basically, it has been very unlikely for a team to win at least 10 games and not make the playoffs over the course of NFL history. But it has been almost impossible for a team to start 7-1 and lose out on a chance to hoist the Lombardi Trophy. Since 1978, when the NFL switched to a 16-game schedule, it has happened a mere 4 times, with one of those teams being the 1988 New Orleans Saints, who were amazingly one of 7 different NFC teams in 1988 to win at least 10 – and one of the unlucky 2, along with the Giants, to not meet the postseason qualification criteria. Even at 8-3 the chance was still almost nil that the Bears would miss out on the playoffs, but they happened to be playing in an unusually even-across-the-board NFC that year, much as the Giants and Saints did in 1988 – four teams, the Seahawks, 49ers, Falcons and Packers won at least 11 games and three other teams, the Vikings, Redskins and Bears, won at least 10. For reference, only three NFC teams finished with fewer than 7 wins that year. The Redskins were fortunate to be playing in a tightly-contested yet relatively unimposing NFC East that saw its top three teams finish within two wins of each other (Andy Reid’s final Eagles team disintegrated into a 4-12 nightmare season), meaning that the sixth and final spot would go to whoever won out on tiebreakers between division rivals Minnesota and Chicago. Minnesota would triumph in the tiebreakers, which led to the most lopsided quarterback duel in modern playoff memory when Joe Webb had to go up against Aaron Rodgers.
Out of the playoffs with a one-time 7-1 record. It is a remarkable accomplishment. As we’ve shown, it’s almost impossible to be 6 games above .500 at the midpoint of the season and manage to miss out on the tournament, but these Bears managed to do the impossible. It was incredible, it was saddening, and it cost Lovie Smith his job; he was fired on New Years Eve.
The future was uncertain, the course was uncharted, and the helm was unmanned. Someone had to step in to fill the void of captaincy.
In Part Two, we’ll discuss what man stepped in, how his teams fared, and what exactly happened in one of the most exasperating defensive runs in NFL history.