Chicago sports fans don’t mind a loser; that much we already know. What we can’t tolerate is a boring team, one that whether seriously awful or merely mediocre has no personality. One quarter of the way through the National Football League season, it seems the Bears are just such a team. We’re not ready to write Dave Wannstedt off as a coach; he appears to be an upright, churchgoing man, and he still knows his football. It’s not as if he had to have a lobotomy to leave the Dallas Cowboys organization and come work for Mike McCaskey (although, come to think of it, that would explain a lot of what has gone on).
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Zorich is all the Bears’ difficulties in miniature–pun purely intended. New NFL rules have threatened to make him almost instantly obsolete, and the Bears at large have been no better at adapting to the new regulations. Baseball juices the ball and tinkers with the strike zone from time to time to influence scoring, but otherwise keeps the rules consistent from year to year and generation to generation. It wouldn’t do football any good to put a rabbit in its ball, so what the NFL does instead is monkey with the rules, favoring the offense here, the defense there, but generally trying to drive up scoring because it feels–rightly or wrongly –that high-scoring games are what put fans in the seats. This year, the biggest change, from the standpoint of Zorich and the Bears, is the decision to let offensive linemen line up farther behind the line of scrimmage. It’s typical of the NFL to come up with an idea that sounds pretty innocent and then have everyone adopt it without really thinking out the ultimate effects.
Now, Zorich has been a favorite of ours going back to his days at Notre Dame, and it’s not unusual to come across people who remember his play in high school at Chicago Vocational (Butkus’s alma mater, ’nuff said). Here was a little guy from a broken home with a strong and loving mother who was picked on in school and, as a result, made himself into a hell of a football player. The Bears’ media guide lists him at 6 feet 1 inch–that’s almost certainly in his longest cleats, the ones reserved for quagmires–and 284 pounds, but he’s always been cat quick. I remember one play in college when Zorich burst past the center at the snap and got to the running back at the same instant he was receiving the handoff. Upon graduation he expressed an interest in playing for the Bears–said it was his dream, in fact–and Ditka took him in the second round of the 1991 draft, even though most scouts agreed he was too short to make it in the NFL. Lo and behold, Zorich turned himself into a decent starting tackle, and even something of a star last season.
The most boring and routine turbulence a football team can suffer from goes by the name of “quarterback controversy,” and that’s precisely what the Bears have this week. Walsh may or may not be a better quarterback than Kramer, but he certainly seems a better fit for the Bears’ state of mind. Walsh came out of college a golden boy from Miami, the number one pick in the 1990 draft. But he could never unseat Troy Aikman as the Dallas Cowboys’ starting quarterback, and he didn’t fare much better at New Orleans with the Saints. Still, it is commonly said that it takes about five years to learn how to quarterback in the NFL, and that would put Walsh just about at the age of maturity. He has learned what the mistakes are and how to avoid them. He has learned how uncertain natural ability can be. And now he’s ready to play a cautious, error-free, don’t-beat-yourself brand of football.
