Yesterday I posted here video of Packers touchdowns against Da Bears, and Jay Cutler interceptions by the Packers.
Those videos are now out of date by, respectively, seven touchdowns and two interceptions in the Packers’ 55-14 rout of Da Bears.
Which, predictably, makes the Chicago media not very happy this morning.
Our tour of truculence starts with the Chicago Tribune’s Dan Wiederer:
If the Bears had hoped to use their time off in Week 9 to sharpen their offensive attack, the first half Sunday night at Lambeau Field instead spoke to a team that had somehow found a way to get sloppier during its time off. Much sloppier.
On seven drives before halftime against the Packers, the Bears went scoreless and they had nearly as many penalties (three) in the first quarter as first downs (four).
A false start by Jermon Bushrod on third-and-11 on the opening series proved costly. Two possessions later, Bushrod was beaten badly for a sack by Clay Matthews, a play that also included an unnecessary-roughness penalty against Jordan Mills that pushed the Bears into a fourth-and-32 situation.
Quarterback Jay Cutler threw a first-quarter interception and also had a delay of game penalty himself.
And after vowing to make a greater commitment to offensive balance in the second half of the season, the Bears instead threw the ball or were sacked on 26 of their 38 plays in the first half.
As if their own offensive ineptitude wasn’t enough, the Packers’ ease in moving the ball only furthered the agony. Green Bay scored touchdowns on six of its first seven drives and at halftime had a 42-0 lead and a 358-162 advantage in total yardage.
That’s just half of it: Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers threw six touchdown passes in the first half alone, the first time in his career he had evenreached four before halftime. Two of those were deep balls to Jordy Nelson, who had TD receptions of 73 and 40 yards on his way to six grabs and 152 yards — in the first half. Nelson also drew a 53-yard pass interference penalty against cornerback Tim Jennings.
Nothing special: The Bears’ obligatory special teams blunder came with 11:49 left in the third quarter when safety Danny McCray slipped in punt protection right after the snap. That left Packers receiver Jarrett Boykin to get to punterPat O’Donnell so quickly that the Bears rookie never even got his drop to his right foot.
In fact, Boykin actually knocked the ball with his right foot first.
What was originally announced as a blocked punt was soon corrected to be an O’Donnell fumble and a Boykin recovery.
Boykin’s getting to the ball before the punter has to be seen to be believed:
Which prompts the Tribune’s Steve Rosenbloom, always a good source during Chicago sports disaster, to ask:
I started writing this at the end of the first quarter, hoping to get it posted by halftime because I wanted the Bears to fire Marc Trestman before the start of the third quarter.
Geez, it was 42-0, Packers, at halftime, so how much worse could it be if the coach had been whacked after two quarters? Trestman’s team has allowed 80 points in the last two first halves combined, so again, how much worse could it be without the guy?
Trestman deserves it. Bears fans deserves to see him whacked. What happened on Sunday night in front of God and NBC was a pathetic excuse for preparation and execution by a coach who has become a disaster at preparing his team to execute.
The Bears organization, however, deserves to see Trestman stay because those wonks are too stupid to know how awful this is. If they cared, they’d have listened to me when I screamed that Trestman should’ve been canned after the Dolphins game. Certainly after the Patriots game.
But no. Nobody at the toxic waste dump that is Halas Hall did a thing about it. Bears wonks have a high tolerance for being a laughingstock, as we all know.
And that’s how you get a 42-0 national TV embarrassment against the Bears’ biggest rival in their biggest game of a death-spiral of a season. Trestman’s Bears came out bad and stupid, and then looked like they quit or wanted to.
In the first quarter alone, Trestman’s offense was flagged for a false start, delay-of-game, and a personal foul.
Oh, and Jay Cutler threw his regularly scheduled interception and the Bears ran Matt Forte just twice in the first eight plays against the worst rushing defense in the league.
That’s some valuable work Trestman and his staff did during the off week, eh?
You know how little the Packers feared the Bears offense? They went for it on fourth-and-goal from the 1 way back when the game was scoreless. They didn’t value the field goal. The Packers knew they’d get the ball back without trouble.
And they did. And they scored TD after TD after TD.
Trestman’s defensive coordinator still can’t teach his players to communicate checks and coverages. This goes back to Chris Conte and last season’s finale against the same Packers. This is an on-going embarrassment and now a national joke.
Bad enough that Mel Tucker and his defense are too stupid to double-cover Jordy Nelson, but they’re also too inept to even single-cover him for more than five yards. Nice coaching, teaching and execution.
That’s some complementary football, Coach Trestman.
But wait. There’s more stupidity. Trestman’s special teams coach continues to tell his guys to bring the ball out of the end zone on kickoff returns when nobody can get to the 20-yard line without Uber.
At 3-6, the Bears are done. They are hopeless. They are leaderless. They appeared heartless at times in the first half Sunday. How much more damning evidence does Emery need?
Emery has to fire Trestman now. He has no other option if he wants to keep his job, and even then, Emery still might get whacked.
Emery’s odd choice of coach has destroyed all hope for the next three years because the Trestman decision was tied to the $54 million the GM guaranteed to Cutler.
Emery could’ve franchise-tagged the erratic quarterback for one year and let him walk if he played as badly as, well, he has played this year. Emery could’ve whacked Trestman, too, and started over.
How good would that option be now? How dreadful will the remainder of Cutler’s contract feel now?
It’s over. Trestman’s career here. Emery’s career here. Maybe Ted Phillips’, too. Maybe they can get a group rate for the national convention of village idiots.
The Chicago Sun-Times’ Rick Morrissey agrees (did they work together on this in the Lambeau Field press box?):
The right thing would have been for general manager Phil Emery to make his way down to the Bears’ locker room at halftime and inform head coach Marc Trestman that his services would no longer be needed for the second half of Sunday’s game and beyond. And then for Emery to fire himself too.
From there, it would have logically followed that the McCaskeys would see the error of their ways and divest themselves of their ownership of the Bears and go into something better suited to their unique talents. Butter churning, perhaps. Or pizza delivery.
But that was never going to happen, even though the Bears were trailing the hated Packers 42-0 at halftime, an embarrassment of such epic proportions that one of the McCaskeys was rumored to have blushed.
My guess is that the Bears will cut a third-string cornerback after Sunday night’s debacle, but I suppose a ritual sacrifice of defensive coordinator Mel Tucker is possible. The obvious result of the inexcusable 55-14 loss to the Packers should be Trestman’s dismissal at the end of the season, but that is not going to happen.
It’s not how the McCaskeys work. They work at the speed of elevator music, and Trestman is only two years into a four-year contract. What happened at Lambeau Field on Sunday is a fire-able offense, but it will not end that way for Trestman because these are the Bears. It’s why they haven’t won a Super Bowl in 28 years and won’t anytime soon.
This game is a complete repudiation of the Trestman Way, whatever that is. After all the hue and cry following a miserable 51-23 loss to the Patriots and after a bye week, this is how the Bears respond? In the fetal position on national television?
“Based on what I saw this week (in practice), I was confounded to see the type of play we had (Sunday night),’’ Trestman said after the game. “Our coaches did a tremendous job preparing our guys this week, and our guys did a tremendous job of preparing. But none of it translated to the game.’’
The fact that the Bears have struggled offensively in the first half in three straight games? Trestman called that “confounding’’ too. A confounded coach — not a good thing.
The Bears have enough talent that a clobbering of this magnitude should not happen. But when your coach talks about “mutual respect’’ and “humility’’ and seems to want to inspire his troops with sonnets rather than sledgehammers, something like Sunday night can happen very easily.
A 3-5 team with its clichéd back against the wall? A season riding on the outcome? I’m sorry, but this falls directly on Trestman. The Bears look unprepared, overmatched and not very much in the mood to play football. And I know is who’s responsible.
“You ask about what’s going on during the week?’’ Trestman said. “Our guys are locked in – as good a team at working, meetings, being compliant, doing the things we’re asking them to do. This is a really good group of men.’’
Oh, brother.
Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers threw six touchdowns in the first half. Six. Two of them were to Jordy Nelson, who was so open on both scores that he kept looking for the “Candid Camera’’ crew.
The Bears are stuck with Trestman and Jay Cutler. It’s why Emery won’t fire Trestman. He’s responsible for the presence of both men. He hired the coach, and he gave the quarterback $54 million in guaranteed money over three years. Admitting he was wrong twice? He might as well tell the world he doesn’t know the first thing about football.
The other reason Trestman isn’t going anywhere isn’t a very good one. But Cutler doesn’t need a new offensive system. He needs continuity. I know: This continuity stinks. But this is where the Bears are. They’re stuck with a quarterback who is very, very average, a coach with all the motivational skills of a goalpost, a general manager who doesn’t see what the problem is and a family of owners that doesn’t have the foggiest idea about anything, including fogs.
Have I left anyone out?
The Tribune’s David Waugh throws gasoline on the fire:
You’re on the clock, Bears Chairman George McCaskey.
Call the family together. Close the doors. Discuss the future. It’s time.
It’s time to re-evaluate everything: your team president, Ted Phillips; your general manager, Phil Emery; your head coach, Marc Trestman; every aspect of the family business; every member of the coaching staff; and every player in the lineup. Everything.
Spare the niceties. Forget protocol. Follow your gut, not some time-honored tradition of management philosophy written in a dated policy handbook. It’s time to restore some pride in an organization in which it’s gone missing, to do something that stamps this trend as unacceptable. This is still the team George Halas founded in 1920. Remind the NFL that heritage still means something, convention be damned.
I know it’s only November and the idea sounds rash to an organization that prefers a more deliberate approach. I know it’s the middle of the season, but this one ended for all intents and purposes Sunday night in Wisconsin. I also know desperate times call for desperate measures and no word better describes the state of the Bears after a third straight loss.
You’re on the clock, George McCaskey, not so much because your football team stinks — and boy, they stunk worse than a block of Muenster in a 55-14 laugher Sunday night at Lambeau Field — but because they failed to compete. They packed it in against the hated Packers, who led 42-0 at halftime. They showed up scared and it only got worse with every awful series.
Bear down, Chicago Bears, like the song says? What rhymes with cower?
You cannot ignore what has happened to your grandfather’s team, George McCaskey, the team so many Chicagoans invest so much time, money and emotion in every Sunday — the team that makes Chicago a Bears town every day of the year. You cannot embrace the status quo after giving up 106 points the last two games. You cannot respond to such an absence of heart on the field without using your head at Halas Hall.
If you believe the Bears possess better talent than their 3-6 record suggests, hold Trestman accountable for failing to put those players in position to succeed. If you believe the Bears roster lacks the playmakers and depth necessary to compete with playoff teams, pin that on Emery. If you believe it is a combination of both, start plotting for a complete overhaul that might be necessary to fix this mess. Those who think the Bears’ problems lie only with Jay Cutler haven’t been paying attention.
Is Phillips the right president to lead the next phase or would the organization be better served led by a football guy? Is Emery, the man who hired Trestman over Bruce Arians, the right football architect to rebuild this team into a playoff contender it obviously isn’t? Is Trestman capable of regaining the respect in the locker room he so clearly never had this season?
Fire defensive coordinator Mel Tucker immediately? Give play-calling duties to offensive coordinator Aaron Kromer? Cut or bench somebody?
At this point, no option should be taken off the table. The table has no legs.
At this point, a correction: I reported the 51-23 loss to the Patriots represented rock bottom for the Bears under Trestman. Obviously, Sunday’s embarrassment made that statement inaccurate. The Tribune regrets the error.
Sports Mockery contributed a bunch of Cutler jokes during the first half:
Jay Cutler’s pass intended for the Packers nearly picked off by Bears
Drinking game, every time @AaronRodgers12 throws a TD or #JayCutler throws a pick, take a drink. PS, you should be drunk by now.
At this rate, Jay Cutler may have his jersey retired by the Packers before Brett Favre.
If a Bears player is open in the woods and no one is around to cover him, does Jay Cutler still throw an interception?
The Sun-Times’ Patrick Finley acts as if someone died:
Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to bury the Chicago Bears.
Lord knows, the Packers did the same to them Sunday night.
The Bears’ 55-14 loss in front of a Lambeau Field record 78,292 fans, dressed in funereal black winter coats, has to be among the most embarrassing in their history.
Jay Cutler threw a pass off his own right guard’s head, which ricocheted to the Packers and turned into an 82-yard interception return. He threw an interception in the first quarter, too, when the game was close, and later fumbled when sacked by Julius Peppers.
He completed 22-for-37 for 272 yards and one touchdown, but never seemed comfortable. And the offense never seemed competent, moving away from their run-first strategy in the first quarter.
“To play like that, it’s embarrassing,” said Cutler, who has beaten the Packers only once.
And that was after a bye week in which the Bears vowed to fix the flaws that had led to a 28-point loss in New England. Cutler said he couldn’t remember if that had ever happened to him.
“Or maybe,” he said. “I just don’t want to remember.”
There’s little reason to think the 3-6 team will improve enough to finish .500 this season. Playoffs?
Aaron Rodgers threw six first-half touchdowns, each more humiliating than the next. The first came on fourth-and-goal from the Bears’ 1, the next — after Micah Hyde’s interception of Cutler — on third-and-1 from the Bears’ 3.
When the Bears blew coverage and let Jordy Nelson to run wide open for a 73-yard touchdown catch, it came immediately after the break between the first and second periods. The Bears had time to prepare, and messed up.
Nelson then caught a 40-yard score, wide open again. And Eddie Lacy took a screen 56 yards for a touchdown.
Up 35-0, former Bears star Julius Peppers sacked Cutler, forcing a fumble and setting up an 18-yard touchdown pass to Randall Cobb with 14 seconds left to play in the half.
The second half wasn’t much better: Bears punter Pat O’Donnell fumbled the drop to his foot, leading to a Packers field goal.
The Arlington Daily Herald’s Bob LeGere:
In the latest in a long line of Bears teams that could not defeat the Packers and quarterback Aaron Rodgers at Lambeau Field, Sunday night’s nationally televised humiliation was the most embarrassing loss of all.
The 55-14 final score doesn’t begin to describe the depths to which the Bears plummeted.
It was 28-0 Packers less than 18 minutes in.
Several thousand Bears fans were among the Lambeau Field-record 78,292 in attendance. Years from now, none of them will admit they paid money to see this fiasco.
While losing 11 of the previous 14 meeting with the Packers, the Bears had been pummeled by double digits five times.
But this one was worse than any of them. Way worse.
“The level of play is not anywhere near where it needs to be, and it starts with me,” coach Marc Trestman said. “The bottom line is we weren’t good enough in all three phases. We broke down in all three phases.”
It was 42-0 at halftime and, if the game was played with Illinois high school schools, it would have been a running clock after halftime. That could only have helped an outclassed and overmatched Bears team that plummeted to 3-6 with its fifth loss in six games.
Never, ever should “Bears” and “playoffs” be mentioned in the same sentence for the remainder of the season.
The Daily Herald’s Mike Spellman adds:
What in the name of Chester Marcol was that all about?
Just call it the …
Lambeau “Bleep.”
Wasted energy:
Yeah, you can rage about that historically hideous, epically ugly joke of a game, but first a question: The Bears sure played like they didn’t care, so why should we?
You know it’s bad when …
You hear, “This is downright embarrassing” from NBC analyst Cris Collinsworth — less than a minute into the second quarter!
Unless you believed the Bears would go 7-1 in the second half and make the playoffs, you knew the season was over three weeks ago.
All that remained was to see if Marc Trestman could use the remaining games to convince his bosses — and his players — that he really is an NFL head coach.
It continued Sunday night to look as though he belongs on a CFL sideline as the Packers hit the Bears early and often in a fight that could have been stopped — in a merciful world — 12 seconds into the second quarter when Green Bay took a 21-0 lead en route to a ferocious rout, a 55-14 shellacking at Lambeau Field.
Yeah, you only thought the New England game was bad, until Sunday when the Bears looked like a high school team playing a Packers squad that marched up and down the field as if they had no opponent.
For all intents and purposes, they didn’t. The Bears had no intention of matching up with Green Bay and their only purpose was to view the monuments in a hallowed hall featuring the ghosts of so many greats.
The Bears looked like they had seen a ghost as Aaron Rodgers shredded the defense for an opponent’s record 6 touchdowns in the first half, while the Bears’ offense under the leadership of Trestman and Jay Cutler looked as hopeless as they’ve been helpless the last three games.
“We’re not a good football team right now,” Trestman accurately assessed in his halftime interview with WBBM 780-AM. “We played 30 minutes of terrible football in all three phases. We have to just start over. That’s all we can do.”
That’s what owner George McCaskey has to do.
But to believe the Bears would make a change at the top after this season is to also believe that the Bears don’t care about the significance of shaking the stability Cutler finally has after so many years of change.
He’s had more than a dozen head coaches, offensive coordinators, QB coaches and offensive systems since he entered the league nine years ago. And while it’s true that the continuity from last year to this has done nothing to improve Cutler’s decision-making, it would be a gamble to change yet again when the Bears have spent so much money to lock up their “franchise” quarterback.
Nevertheless, the Bears are just 3-8 going back to the final two losses of 2013, when a single victory would have put them in the playoffs.
And if anyone’s going to evaluate Trestman, who seems to have no idea what he’s doing, then GM Phil Emery deserves just as thorough an examination.
At the very least, he reached for Trestman when better candidates were available, and his drafting remains bizarre at best and dreadful at worst. Emery — along with Jerry Angelo — is the reason the Bears have had to spend in free agency, trying to fill holes as a result of poor drafting.
The contrast to Green Bay is striking, with the Packers owning the most players in the league that have played only for them, and the Bears have the fewest homegrown players in the NFL.
But the sad reality remains that without a quarterback it doesn’t matter.
Green Bay has the best player in the league in Rodgers, while the Bears have Cutler, who is the same QB he was when he arrived in Chicago, and if the reason for keeping Trestman is Cutler, it’s no reason at all.
ESPN Chicago’s Jon Greenberg wants everyone gone:
If Virginia McCaskey sent me a telegram asking for my advice on how to fix the Chicago Bears, this is what I’d write back to her:
Fire everyone you can. Cut the rest. Sell the team.
Sure, that’s harsh advice for the proud matriarch of Papa Bear’s franchise.
But after another blowout loss for a completely listless squad, it’s an idealistic checklist of what the Bears need to do in the next couple of months to right this sinking ship.
Fire coach Marc Trestman and his staff and general manager Phil Emery. Get the new guys to blow up the roster. Convince the McCaskey family to sell the franchise to someone with a couple of billion dollars and a clue.
Or you know, just keep practicing hard and praying for good results. Whatever works.
I don’t want to overreact in the wake of a nationally televised 55-14 debacle to the Green Bay Packers on Sunday night at Lambeau Field, but what else is there to say about a team that is not just bad, but awful in every phase of the game?
Fans hate watching this team, and it’s the second week of November. …
Two weeks ago, the New England Patriotstook a 38-7 lead into the locker room en route to a 51-23 shellacking. After a blissful bye week for Bears fans, Aaron Rodgers and the Packers led 42-0 after two quarters, which tied the 1983 Packers for the second-biggest halftime edge in NFL history.
No team had given up 50 points in back-to-back games since the 1923 Rochester Jeffersons were walloped by the Chicago Cardinals and Rock Island Independents en route to an 0-4 season. At least Rochester fans had to suffer through only four games before going out to practice their Charleston.
Self-flagellating Bears fans have seven more games to go, three of which will be broadcast across the country. …
The Bears are 3-6, and after watching this game, one wonders how they won three. With playoff-caliber talent, especially on offense, they are arguably one of the worst teams in the NFL. That’s what should be a call for change. The Bears have lost with bad teams before, but losing like this with a decent team is shameful. …
In all seriousness, I’m loath to ever seriously ask for someone to be fired or cut. But I can’t see much of an argument why Emery and Trestman hold the solutions to this team’s many, many problems.
I was all for re-signing Cutler last season, because the team had mortgaged its present to build an offense around him. And thanks to his “elite extension,” Cutler is a Bear for another two years. But he’s looking more and more like a sunk cost. Cutler is essentially a good arm attached to a mediocre quarterback.
All the Bears’ problems boil down to this: The people who run this organization aren’t very good at running a football team.
When you have a former accountant acting as team president and a former ticket executive running the family business, who’s to say they would hire the right people anyway?
One thing is for sure, the status quo at Halas Hall is not working and the ritualistic sacrifice of coordinators and assistant coaches might not be the answer this time.
The Score’s Dan Bernstein:
It turns out that not playing football is indeed the best thing for the Bears, because any lukewarm attempt to do so is a convincing argument for regime change. Swiftly.
To say the Bears quit in a 55-14 loss to the Packers on Sunday night that dropped them to 3-6 would be unfair, because it would assume that anything was ever even begun at Lambeau Field. This is what the Long Quit looks like – the culmination of weeks of steady, noticeable erosion of a team’s belief in its coach and, in turn, itself.
The seeds for this game were planted in training camp and sown by a weak, permissive culture devoid of authority and accountability. Trestman’s spinelessness and circle-talking prattle, general manager Phil Emery’s manufactured arguments in support of bad players who he thinks are good, Jay Cutler’s inherent blithe indifference and Brandon Marshall’s over-romanticized pathological narcissism have conspired to bring them here.
And here is beyond bad.
There’s nothing for Trestman to say, now. Any previous buy-in from any hopeful player in that locker room has been sold short, cashed out at a loss. Not one word from him can stop that at this point, nor can one from any other Bear trying to take the lead by posing in front of reporters. What was the word Marshall used that time, again?
“Unacceptable.” That’s it. There are others applicable, too.
“Downright embarrassing,” analyst Cris Collinsworth declared on NBC. “This is a proud franchise that’s being humiliated here tonight.”
And that was early in the second quarter, before it got historic.
“This much talent and nothing to show for it,” is what Collinsworth concluded, just ahead of the 82-yard interception return for touchdown that made it 55-7, Packers. Afterward, Collinsworth could only offer a quiet, “This will not sit well.”
Professional football teams aren’t allowed to perform so unsatisfactorily without some kind of response beyond the plaintive wails and acid invective of insulted fans. No teams are, but particularly one that had just completed its midseason break for introspection and recalibration.
Trestman’s vaunted “toolbox of concepts” is empty. Even in the mythical Pandora’s Box, after the release of all its similarly hideous contents upon the world, the Spirit of Hope remained at the bottom. Not so in this case. There’s no reasonable cause for anything like that. Not anymore, and not one bit.
The Bears were built to win now, don’t forget. This very time is the dead center of the championship window, for which a quarterback was locked in, an aging receiver rewarded and at least one over-scouted veteran defensive lineman signed.
This was supposed to be really good. Not just meh, not bad and certainly not whatever this has become. The contemplation of longer-term ramification of such abject failure is so much more than sobering, especially when any look at the Bears’ current reality demands first the consumption of some strong stuff.
If anything is to be salvaged from the wreck – and it’s possible that nothing can – it starts with a cold look at who is under contract and what voices may need to be heard to get the best out of some sunk commitments. You have heard that before, I understand, and all too recently.
But these coaches, at least and in this moment, have been reduced to useless ciphers. This group won’t be here when and if the Bears ever pull out of their unconscionable tailspin and contend for anything important.
If this isn’t enough, what does enough look like?
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 