Just curious... The last few seasons and off seasons has seen a lot of discontent among the Bears fanbase...especially here on this board. I know I for one am as unhappy with this franchise as I have been in my entire life. I go from pissed off to I don't care and back again a lot lately. And the inactivity on this board shows that a lot of people are in the same boat I think. But...we have a young QB that showed some potential and reason for optimism. Maybe. We have a new coach...a young coach with a young mind more in tune with what's trending in the NFL. He retained our brilliant DC. We have a good draft pick. We have money to drop in free agency. Where is your mood, right now, on the Bears? Excited? Optimistic? DGAF? Me....I'm cautiously hopeful. I like Trubisky so far. And I am encouraged by Pace's previous drafts that he can turn in a good one this May. And I do think the Bears will be aggressive in free agency. I remind myself the owners haven't changed and that brings me back down to Earth. But....hopeful.
I am always optimistic when it comes to the Bears. I spent too many years as a cynical fan that it was affecting my life. So I decided to not take the downs so badly and try and concentrate on the positives or possible positives instead. It’s kept me in a better state of mind. As far as this upcoming season I am starting to get excited. I was a little nervous about the quick hire of Nagy. But since he was able to retain Fangio and after seeing the staff he was able to acquire those nerves have calmed. But we still need players. Good players. Difference makers on both sides of the ball. How FA and the draft goes will go a long way in telling me how excited I will be. Either way The growth of Trubisky and the new coaching staff makes this team a lot more interesting than it has been in recent years.
I’m pretty optimistic right now. Nagy is saying/doing the right things IMO. Which is a complete 180 of John Fox. I want to see him do his thing. Doug Pederson, the coach who just won the super bowl has the best line nobody talked about after he won it. Playing conservative gets you to 8-8, playing to win wins you the super bowl. Dude couldn’t be more right, and it’s just annoying because the bears finally took a chance after the conservative constant of Lovie with Trestman; and the guy just couldn’t command the locker room. So what did the bears do? Shell up and go back to the norm, John Fox. I’m still negative when it comes to some aspects of Ryan Pace. Since he started here, the guy just hides, and when he’s shown his face, Fox was his meat shield or he’s inteoducing a new coach, which disarms the media from asking him tough questions he needs to be answering. Every major Chicago beat writer has said for the last 2 years of Fox that Pace needs to be front and center, answering tough questions on his shitty team, and it just seemed so.....fake when he did, when he gave you that whopping 2 minutes. It’s okay to be pissed off about being a shitty team, but own it. And finally he did. A year too late for my tastes. In regards to draft, I’ll redeem Pace. I do trust him there. I want to see Ted Phillips just......never. When he announced the Pace extension, I just remember wishing a 2x4 to fly out of nowhere and smack him in the face. I don’t have confidence in the McKaskeys.
I'll get back to you after this draft, I think he may have learned a thing or two since drafting White, but that remains to be seen.
Partially optimistic, partially DGAF. My optimism stems from the fact that we have a talented young QB and fresh HC who hopefully won't coach like it's 1982. My DGAF stems from the fact that I still have zero faith in Pace (the guy who drafted White, thought Glennon was worth $18 mil) and the ownership to put smart football people in the front office. I confess to not watching the last 4 games of the season. I was out of the country for 2 of them and the other 2 I just didn't care. But seeing the highlights, or lowlights, from those games made me think that Trubs really did regress at the end of the season. That certainly hasn't helped my interest level or optimism.
I think this is a really worthy topic, but I'll have to make my thoughts relatively brief: I'm still on the fence about Trubisky. I wanted Watson, and have never quite been sold on Trubisky. This season didn't change that. I saw a lot of redemptive things, but also some concerning things. I'm hoping that changes with another season, and a real coaching staff. I'm very encouraged about the coaching staff, and the change that portends. Change itself is an exciting prospect given the last few years, but this staff gives faith that this is positive and significant change. As with much else, that's yet to be seen. I don't yet have faith in Pace. He's done some things that lead me to believe he's getting better, and I won't deny he's number of things I've liked. But, he's also done a number of bone-headed things that has made this team worse than the one he inherited, and those that came recently prior. I'm going to start doing my personal scouting here, soon. I'm hoping to start with OT's, because I think that's a key piece missing on this team. All the best, everyone. It's been rough years, sure, but getting to talk football and all else with each of you has made it worth the time. I'm hoping we can start throwing beers back in celebration, rather than misery. Things are looking up for the moment. This is a monumentally important offseason.
I don't like these kind of threads, they force me to face how ultimately hopeless the whole thing is over the long term. The Bears simply don't have an ownership/upper management setup that will ever deliver sustainable success, let alone the hilarious concept of an actual dynasty. Which means we're stuck hoping they get good enough and lucky enough to catch lightening in a bottle. Truthfully, what i really hoped to see over the last few years was revolution. Being a socialist isn't something i get called very often, but a fanbase with balls would've gone to war with the McCaskey's over the way they've run this franchise into the ground. But that doesn't happen. I don't know if that's an NFL thing, a Chicago thing or an American sports thing. Maybe its all of them, my hunch is the latter. Certainly NFL fanbases don't go war no matter what kinda shit they get served or how much they get ripped off. Hell pathetic losers like the Browns thrown a fucking parade! Its a sad thought that people literally lived their entire lives, long lives, and never saw any meaningful success from the Cubs. And that, apparently, was ok. I think the issue may be relegation, or lack of. Its a pretty forgeign concept in american sports. But there's no denying it adds an extra dimension to the life of a sports team and its fans. One built on survival and desperation, with a clock constantly ticking. Powerful motivators. Anyway i digress. Ownership/Ted Phillips is a giant turd that can't be flushed. The GM is largely a clueless idiot who just happened to luck into a period of extreme patience from ownership, otherwise he would at the very least be in a win or fired scenario this season, if not fired already. I really try not to think long term anymore cos its all just fucked. Short term, i liked the Nagy hire. I like the assistants as well. I do think they can take what they already have and make it better. They'll win more than 5 games next season. But to make a playoff team they'll need new talent which is where the GM comes in.... I'll say this..... this is the most im looking forward to a season in at least 4 years. Trestman's last season the writing was on the wall, and from the moment they signed Fox i knew he'd fail and was just waiting. I still believe in Trubisky and think we have some innovative coaches who can make the Offense exciting again. There, i ended on a high note.
LOL while this is pretty spot on, I think living in England shields you from just how dumb a lot of Chicago fans are of their sports teams. They blindly loyal unlike anything I've seen, but they're beyond retarded at the same time, so that's why ownership is allowed to mail it in on half baked, get rich quick schemes because at the end of the day, the McKaskeys still get their money. Half-filled stadiums still help because ownership clearly wants those filled so the deep dish loving dunces can pay 10$ for a crap beer and another $20 for a dog and chips, but that they're getting a huge slice of the billions the NFL shares among owners from the TV deals, they're not hurting enough to do something drastic. The NFL losing viewership has some to do with it, but fans don't want to pay $120 for nosebleed individual seats for a garbage team. HDTV is a thing, and it turns out you can buy your own beer and hot dogs for 1/4 the price of Soldier field. You can even turn off your TV when Mike Glennon was "doing his thing." I did. I don't think I watched a whole bears game start to finish in 2017. I found other hobbies or things to watch. Fans here in the city have balls, they're just retarded. I'm not a betting man by any means, but I love picking on Chicago fans because the homers here are blind and loyal enough to take advantage of. People get confused when I tell them I only bet "sure things." A few years ago when the Bulls were really good with Derrick Rose and the "bench mob;" people thought an MVP where Rose should never have won and a team that does just good enough defensively to be the team that got run over by LeBron James and Miami/Cleveland. The Bulls always tried hard and won game 1 of a 7 game series, which pumps up the fans. Then every year LBJ and whatever team he was on would go on to win 4 in a row because he stopped screwing around and the bulls had no answer for him or legitimate second scorer when James, the best defender took the MVP out of the game. The best part was taking easy money from said retards betting now down 3-1 that the "MVP" will come back to beat the best player of this NBA generation. He didn't, and Lebron James went on to win a few championships and lose to old man Dirk. It made me a couple hundred bucks. When the cubs won the World Series in 2016, I was in a bar in Lincoln Square in the city watching game 7. I wanted to punch every last one of these yuppies in the face. A guy took off his cubs hat and "shirsey" because wearing them "brought bad luck" when the Indians tied it in the 8th inning. I'm a cubs fan who hates other cubs fans. They're every bit as bad as you hear. If you want to see what trailer park trash looks like, enjoy a game on the south side at Sox Park, or the G-Spot or whatever their stadium is called now. They care more about the cubs than their own team. And the bandwagon fans are all abandoning ship because the blackhawks are bad, stuck with old players on bad contracts after they won 3 championships in 5 years from 2010-15, and the NHL is a very hard salary-cap league, where you need 23 guys on a roster with 71 mil in cap space for the whole team, and the better playmakers make upwards of 8-10 mil per year at a time. That's more than 1/10 of your teams' salary cap to one guy, and the blackhawks have 2 guys (Toews and Kane) making that absurd amount of money. I like to reference chicitysports on here, because that's where a lot of the mouthbreathers tend to "share their ideas." If you want to have a splitting headache, read some of those threads. Mongo is active arguing with them. How he has the energy, I don't know--but many meatballs hate him over there. The problem with regulation (and you're not the first person I've heard this proposed by) is that you have to convince 31 billionaire owners and the fan base collective that runs Green Bay to just give up the big money they're making hand over fist from TV, marketing/advertising, concessions, and "the game experience." 32 team owners/reps would have none of that because it affects their almighty dollar/bottom line and their ability to dictate decisions, and it turns out--owners don't like that. Its why Roger Goodell is sticking around, not because he's good for the sport--because he makes teams/ownership absurd amounts of money, even in lower viewership years like 2017. We're a dumb, corrupt country over here in the states. George Carlin was right so many years ago. This country is bought and paid for, and Americans are going to be footing the bill for decades of dumb decisions from politicians bought and paid for by big money spending that owns the major political parties, both democrats and republicans. The best part is they use horseshit media to divert attention, and use whataboutism to convince even the dumbest of slack-jawed yokels here that the people who are really screwing them aren't, and to blame the opposing political party. Donald Trump being investigated for potentially using Russia to win the 2016 election? Sounds treasonous and something that should play out an be investigated, as most normal, level-headed people would say. If he's guilty, the evidence will be there to support it, same with him being innocent. But the media's response? They blame Bill Clinton for getting a blowjob in the 1990s! Which only has nothing to do with the discussion of how another country fucked with our recent elections and how most national security agencies of the US are all saying they did. We've become the "Skip Bayless" nation, where facts don't matter. Whomever talks last and loudest of all does. We've had 18 school shootings in 2018 alone (including a horrible on that just happened in Florida a couple of days ago), with multiple mass shootings incredibly increased from years past. But the NRA pays millions so instead of fixing the problem where crazy people can't get assault rifles, politicians send their "thoughts and prayers" to families of their dead children, unless you're the guy who said Sandy Hook massacre was staged.....nothing gets done because the pockets are lined from special interests that don't give a shit about the American people. And because we're truly dumb and turning into tribal political shills here, its going to get worse until these bought and paid for assholes all get voted out. I'm rooting for them to encounter a grizzly bear in the mood for a substantial lunch, because I hate most politicians in America. Its all about money now, it has been for a while; and until that stops, your proposition of regulation is a pipe dream. Sorry--didn't mean to make it political, but.....you propose an intelligent option that cant happen because over here we're the antithesis of intelligent, and a few generations need to go by so America can weed the dumber among us out, that is if we don't kill each other first.
This is a very interesting thought. And I am not by any means being critical of your thoughts but what do you mean by revolution? American sports are a business. Privately owned and operated. As fans the only weapon we have against ownership is our money and our viewership. And even if as fans we somehow make the team so unprofitable that the owners sell we are powerless as to who buys them.
As Patg suggested, NFL owners have zero incentive to put a good product on the field because TV money and revenue sharing will always be there year after year. In Europe relegation means the loss of massive TV money and exposure, less money to spend on the transfer windows, decreased fan interest which also probably hurts ticket sales. I can't for a million years see why NFL owners would accept revolutionizing the structure of the league when that new structure that could only serve to hurt their pocketbooks. Unfortunately, fans are powerless to make these owners unprofitable at this point. The current TV deals will earn the league a total of $6 billion a year until 2021 ($5 billion from the networks + $1billion from DirectTv). That number does not change even if viewership decreases. Total revenue sharing comes to about $8 billion a year meaning $250 million per team. So TV money accounts for 75% of revenue and that number cannot be affected by declining viewership between now and 2021. To take a dent of the remaining 25% revenue, we can all stop going to games and buy licensed merchandise, but there are still too many idiots who will do these things no matter what, offsetting any efforts we might make. There is also local revenues earned from local sponsorships separate from the $8 billion which could be marginally affected by not watching or attending games, but again it seems like it would be hard to make a significant dent all things considered.
Pat, bravo. That was a great rant, Oscar worthy. And filled with lots of local info which i always like. Some of it i knew already some of it i didn't. Not England, Scotland. Sorry to be so trivial, but some things you can't leave uncorrected heh. But im sure you're right. I am aware of a dumb element in our fanbase, its why i go to chicitysports rarely and avoid the Bears fb page like the plague! But thats just a couple of places online. The scale of it actually living there in the city, i couldn't understand the way you do. And yes it probably wasn't fair to say Chicago fans don't have balls. I don't feel a whole lot better going with retarded though heh. Yeah, i totally agree with you guys. To be clear, i wasn't suggesting introducing relegation to a lower level as a realistic option, i was more just making an observation. As you both say, for the NFL it would be completely undeliverable. Not because it might not be a good thing, but cos the owners/league would NEVER go for it. Its just not something thats part of the american sports psyche and the major sports are now far too well established to introduce it. Maybe the MLS has it? I don't know.
There is another. Lineage, reputation, history. This carries more weight for some teams than others. Obviously the Jags and Panthers are relatively new, their place in the game in the wider sense, matters little. For the Bears, this stuff matters a lot. The McCaskey's sure as shit know this cos they whore out the teams history and lineage every chance they get. They see themselves as custodians of Halas' legacy, or at least, that's the premise behind a lot of how they market their product today. But not just Halas and the Bears. The game, going right back to the start when football wasn't the behemoth it is today, it was small, provincial and rooted in community. The Bears are an old team and ownership is happy to play off those themes of "old times". They're pitch isn't "look what we've(the Bears) achieved lately", not with one SB appearance in over 30 years. Their pitch is "look at what we are". Appearances matter a great deal to the McCaskey's. They want people to associate with the "charter franchise", they don't want them to associate the Bears with being a perennial loser, which is what they are right now. And to bring this all back to the topic at hand, fans protesting before every home game is essentially saying "we're unhappy with the product you are charging us for". It brings the focus away from the history etc and places it on what the team is doing today, which is exactly where the McCaskey's don't want it to be. Well protest basically. To show ownership just what a shitty job they've done and that change needs to happen. Now i did describe this as a hope not an expectation heh. I'm not that naive. Its just an alien concept in the US, but in Europe soccer fans protest about the way their clubs are run all the time. The results are often mixed tbh, but to an optimistic guy like you rob that just means they succeed some of the time! And im not talking being a hooligan, ripping the seats out in the stadium or rampaging the streets smashing in store fronts. Peaceful, but very vocal, protest. Instead of tailgating all morning and acting like a turkey celebrating Christmas, fans gather and protest. Then you watch the game and afterwards you protest again. It may sound silly but trust me it would get in the press. In fact in America it would prob be all over sports news because its so uncommon. And the best part is the McCaskey's would absolutely HATE it. The negative press, the mockery, they'd hate it. It'll never happen, for all the reasons pat just said. And even if it did i still don't know that you'd be able to oust the McBarnacle's. You maybe couldn't even guarantee they'd take a more hands-off approach. But whats the alternative, this? They care so little about us they'd rather "do right" by a failed HC than hold him accountable on behalf of the fans and fire his ass midseason! Hell we can't even get Sweaty Teddy out the building or even away from football operations! And if not protest, how else do you get ownership to change the way it does things? Which i think most of us understand is something that needs to happen.
Virginia McCaskey is 90 years old and the ability of the McCaskey family to maintain controlling ownership after she passes is far from a sure thing. The ownership stakes that are left to her heirs gets very thinned out. It is doubted that anyone in the family will have enough money to buy enough shares from their family members to hold control. Another ownership group owns 20% and could very possibly take control of the team when Virginia leaves us. That being said I think a fire has been lit under George's ass to get this team back into high standing before it is too late. Since 2011 when George took over for his brother there has definitely been a bigger sense of urgency. He is on his 3rd GM and 4th HC if I am not mistaken. I am not sure what hold Teddy has on the family but at least he has taken a back seat as of late. George looked outside the company to find Pace and allowed Pace to hire Nagy. It might not work out but he is trying. Team owners dont need protests to tell them how unhappy their fan bases are. You really cant compare European Soccor to any sport in the US. In America we have 4 major sports with multiple teams in many cities. If football was the only sport going maybe you would be onto something. We protest everything. It gets drowned out. As fans all we can do is hope for change or changer our team.
Just as long as you know you're included in that sentiment, too, young lady. Always good to have you here. As a heads up to all my Chicago natives, I'm hoping to make a trip up there some time later this year. Anyone who's in the area at the time, let's see if we can't grab a drink while I pass through!
