… and over here on my parents’ wedding day in 1961:
The number one single today in 1977:
Today in 2003, the Beatles Book Monthly closed after 40 years. The publisher said there was nothing more to say about the Beatles.
One non-music anniversary: Wisconsin’s earliest tornado in 2008. (One does not expect to get a tornado warning email on Jan. 7.)
Birthdays begin with Eldee Young, who played bass for Young Holt Unlimited:
Paul Revere of the Raiders, not of the midnight ride:
Andy Brown played drums for the Fortunes:
Kenny Loggins:
Kathy Valentine of the Go-Gos:
One death of note, today in 2004: Drummer John Guerin, who worked with Joni Mitchell, Frank Zappa, Linda Ronstadt, Gram Parsons and Todd Rundgren, and who played the drums for this TV theme:
The inspiration for this post came from Curbside Classics‘ “The Short and Odd Life of the Two-Door Station Wagon,” which begins by asking:
Whose idea was that? Along with the business coupe and the Ranchero/El Camino utility pickups, large two door station wagon ranks right up there in the Pantheon of American car oddities. One can even make a pretty good argument that it towers above them, given its questionable heritage and utility. The business coupe’s origins go back to the earliest coupes, like the Model T, when roadsters and two-passenger coupes were common. And the utilities were just an update on those same coupes and roadsters with little beds grafted onto them, the pickup’s precursor. But for about a dozen years or so, Detroit graced Americans with something they had no idea they needed: the two door wagon.
Well, Detroit has a deserved reputation for producing answers in search of questions. (Two words: Pontiac Aztek.) Station wagon aficionados recall GM’s ’70s alternatives to everyone else’s tailgate that swung down or to the right. The Chevrolet Vega and Pontiac Astre wagons had hatchbacks. So did the midsize Chevy Malibu, Pontiac LeMans, Oldsmobile Cutlass and Buick Century wagons. (Until their 1978 downsizing, when they went to tailgate glass that swung upward and tailgates that swung downward.) The Chevy Impala/Caprice, Pontiac Catalina/Bonneville/Grand Ville, Olds Custom Cruiser and Buick Estate Wagon took Rube Goldbergian complexity a step farther with tailgates whose window glass swung upward into the roof while the rest of the tailgate swung into the floor. (The latter worked better than the former, from what a former owner tells me.)
1939 Plymouth Business Coupe
The business coupe was originally designed for, as you’d think from the title, businessmen, specifically on-the-road salesmen who needed trunk space more than they needed passenger space. You can see from the photo that the ’30s business coupes were designed this way; the coupes with back seats and the sedans were more square:
I don’t know if my grandfather the salesman ever had a business coupe; by the time I knew him, he had a succession of station wagons with everything behind the front seats stuffed with farm implement literature. Even by the standards of the day, business coupes were stripper cars, because apparently their customers weren’t interested in creature comforts going from sales call to sales call.
The next step, I suppose, from business coupes were what are called “coupe utilities” by some, but are more often known by their model names — essentially a car from the B-pillar forward, but with a pickup box behind the B-pillar, all usually mounted on station wagon chassis. They’re called “utes” in their country of origin, Australia, where a farm wife asked Ford to build “a vehicle to go to church in on a Sunday and which can carry our pigs to market on Mondays.”
The first U.S. coupe utility was the 1937–39 Studebaker Coupe Express:
Since the Big Three carmakers built one size of car in the 1950s — large (except for specialty projects like the Corvette) — the first coupe utilities were that one size, the 1957 Ford Ranchero …
… and the 1959 Chevrolet El Camino:
These were popular because pickup trucks had no creature comforts at all, not even power steering or brakes. My grandmother owned a second-hand store next door to my grandparents’ house, and they bought a ’59 El Camino for the store. After they closed their store, my stepgrandfather drove it to work until his retirement a year before his death in 1984.
Ford and Chevy then diverged before meeting again. Ford switched the Ranchero to its compact Falcon chassis in 1960 …
… then to its midsized Fairlane chassis in 1966 …
… before canceling the Ranchero in 1979 …
… while Chevy terminated the El Camino in 1960, but brought it back onto its midsized Chevelle chassis in 1964 …
… where it stayed until its last model year in 1987:
One of the more famous El Camino owners was Bill Clinton, who once told GM workers in Shreveport, La.: “When I was a younger man and had a life, I owned an El Camino pickup in the ’70s. It was a real sort of Southern deal. I had Astroturf in the back. You don’t want to know why, but I did.” Clinton obviously covered the box with Astroturf to protect it from the elements. Or to practice putting.
Since the mid-’60s and later El Caminos and Rancheros were based on Chevy’s and Ford’s mid-size cars, when muscle cars — mid-sized cars with engines out of full-size cars — were created, their coupe utility brethren could be equipped with most of the same go-fast parts as the Malibu and Fairlane two-doors. The zenith probably was the 1970 El Camino SS, which could be ordered with a 450-horsepower V-8.
Chrysler Corp. was late to the coupe utility game in the U.S., turning its Plymouth Horizon and Dodge Omni into the Plymouth Scamp and Dodge Rampage in the early ’80s:
AMC never built one, although it did build a prototype, the Cowboy, from its Hornet:
The U.S. death of the coupe utility was from several causes. (GM’s Holden and Fordstill sell utes in Australia.) Full-size pickups started to become better equipped. GM and Ford introduced the Chevy S-10 and Ford Ranger compact pickups around the time they redesigned their mid-sized cars, and neither apparently felt El Camino and Ranchero sales warranted adding them to their new mid-sized lines.
Being a Subaru owner, I do have to point out Subaru’s two coupe utilities, the BRAT (which stood for Bi-drive Recreational Auto Transport, and yes, those are seats in the box), imported from 1978 to 1987 in time for, of all people, Ronald Reagan to own one …
… and the 2003–06 Baja:
The original inspiration of this post was the two-door station wagon, known as a “shooting brake” in Europe. Curbside Classics notes that station wagons were generally commercial vehicles until World War II. Two-door wagons started as the wagon equivalent of business coupes at least in use, including the rear-window-delete panel deliveries.
But then came the 1955 Chevy Nomad, which was an expansion of a Corvette station wagon concept car.
The Nomad and the Bel Air convertible led the Chevy line in 1955, with Chevy’s new V-8 engine. Even though the two-door Nomad lasted just three years, it’s an iconic ’50s car, combining the coolness factor of coupes with the utility of wagons. Because imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the Nomad was followed quickly by the Pontiac Safari …
… the Ford Parklane …
… and the Mercury Commuter hardtop (note the lack of B-pillar), which included the option of, believe it or don’t, two or four headlights:
It should be obvious by now that two-door wagons were the brief triumph of style over utility. People didn’t buy two-door wagons because they couldn’t afford the extra $100 for the extra two doors. I can see fathers agreeing to buy the two-door wagon because at least it was a wagon, but not quite a station wagon. (Similar to the animus today against minivans.) And the driver could always tell objecting passengers that the alternative to going over the front seat into the back seat was to walk.
The last two-door wagon bigger than a Chevy Vega was the 1964–65 Chevelle:
Proving that American ingenuity knows few bounds, the end of Detroit production of two-door wagons does not mean the end of the two-door wagon. As you know from last week, I’m a fan of big Cadillacs, in addition to land yachts and station wagons. Put them together, and you have a 1974 Cadillac Eldorado wagon conversion.
Someone created a Buick two-door station wagon that includes the Vista Roof also found on the Olds Vista Cruiser:
What’s that? You prefer Ford products? How about a 1978 Lincoln Continental Mark V wagon conversion?
Most, if not all, of these cars demonstrate the biggest reality of carmaking today — cars are more capable than ever before, but less interesting than they used to be. I read in Automobile Magazine back in the 1990s a comment about the Big Three carmakers’ standardizing their chassis and drivetrains, with the added suggestion that maybe the Big Three could therefore offer more variety in body styles. That unfortunately has not happened — for the most part, you can have a sedan and, to a much smaller extent, a coupe or wagon.
As long as we’re talking about automotive nonsequiturs …
… this also belongs in the oddball category — the original Pontiac Grand Am, a midsized car sold from 1973 to 1975. According to How Stuff Works:
The 1973 Pontiac Grand Am started out in the development stages as a GTO. But the muscle era was drawing to a close and, very much aware of that, Pontiac decided to change the car’s character. Instead of continuing to make the GTO a stoplight drag star, the next iteration was to be more European — more along the lines of a luxury sport sedan. With that in mind, Pontiac designers and engineers examined Mercedes, BMW, Audi, and Volvo as likely targets. …
Pontiac’s product planners, under assistant chief engineer William T. (Bill) Collins, got behind the ’73 Grand Am because they knew something different was needed to replace the GTO. By 1973, the GTO was breathing its last breath; dying by cubic inches, it had been done in by low compression and GM’s need to meet fuel and smog mandates. Any politically correct car could no longer run around delivering eight miles per gallon between stoplights. And yet Pontiac had no intention of giving up its “excitement” image.
So the Grand Am offered a new opportunity. This was a car that Pontiac saw as the division’s entree into the European sport-luxury-sedan field. Pontiac chassis engineers, under John Seaton, would de-emphasize straight-line performance in favor of crisp handling and overall responsiveness. Seaton based the Grand Am’s readability on the division’s trade-marked Radial Tuned Suspension, which in turn was based on new GM-spec steel-belted radial tires. Ten-inch front disc brakes gave the car wonderful stopability, and Saginaw Division set up the power steering with a quicker ratio and plenty of positive feedback. …
Inside, the Grand Am driver and the front passenger settled into supportive bucket seats equipped with recliners and lumbar adjustments. All doors had pull straps, not molded-in plastic grab handles, while the fully instrumented gauge panel and console presented touches of real African crossfire mahogany laminated onto a plastic substrate. …
Unfortunately, Pontiac launched the Grand Am at exactly the wrong time. The first energy crisis shook the world in October 1973, and Americans bailed out of large Detroit cars into smaller imports, especially Japanese models. Even intermediates like GM’s A-cars languished on dealer lots. By 1975, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, a Grand Am with the 400 V-8 could return only 11 mpg in the city and 18 mpg on the highway. (The 455 was the same.) Prices went the other way, thanks to a new round of inflation, and at just a smidge under $5000 to start, the ’75 Grand Am was not exactly cheap.
So while Pontiac did well to move 43,136 Grand Ams for 1973, sales slipped to 17,083 for ’74, then to a disappointing 10,679 for ’75. With that, the Grand Am became expendable and would not be continued. Another reason was that rectangular headlights were coming in, which would have meant retooling the model’s unique hood and front fascia. With sales low and not likely to recover, Pontiac felt it wasn’t worth the expense.
A friend of mine and the brother of a friend of mine had two of those 70,898 Grand Ams. I’ve never driven one, but it was certainly a cool-looking car. (A wagon version was proposed, but not built.) And it was cool looking even before you ask yourself how a car bigger than almost every European car with a much larger engine than almost every European car could be considered European-like. It should also make you shake your head to think that GM’s idea of innovation in the early 1970s was radial tires, which had been used on French cars since the late 1940s.
Do a photo search on your favorite search engine and you’ll find that many of these misfit cars are still owned and driven today, some in their original form, others (particularly business coupes) modified for more modern touches such as wider radial tires. Maybe the business coupe, the coupe utility and the two-door wagon were answers in search of questions, but I have a hard time imagining that the 2042 Iola Old Car Show will feature lovingly maintained or modified Toyota Camrys.
Ladies and gentlemen, direct from Pasadena, the University of Wisconsin Marching Band:
And for those who wonder what marching at the Rose Bowl (which involves much more than the football game), read this excellent Los Angeles Times story. The grueling schedule in the story was what those of us in the band in the ’80s, dreamed about doing.
At the end of the annual UW Varsity Band Concert, director Michael Leckrone always said, “We never say goodbye, we’ll see you real soon,” including a reference to maybe Pasadena someday. Leckrone has been the UW Band director since 1969. In his first 24 years as band director (which included five years of me), the Badgers went to three bowl games, none of them Rose Bowls. Since the 1993 season, however, Leckrone and the band have gone to five Rose Bowls, and have gone to a bowl game every year since the 2001 season. To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, a rising football tide lifts all boats.
Two items passed on by the Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web Today might give you pause about the second-place showing of former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum (R–Pennsylvania) in Tuesday’s Iowa Caucuses.
In a general election, where the focus is almost certainly going to be on economic issues, it is questionable whether Santorum’s relentless focus on social issues will play well with independent voters, especially in the crucial suburbs. It was the loss of those suburbs, where voters tend to be socially moderate but economically conservative, in states such as Indiana, North Carolina, and Virginia, that gave those states to Obama in 2008. …
After all, the Tea Party and 2010 elections were largely about economic issues and the desire to limit the size, cost, and intrusiveness of government. And those issues are not Santorum’s strong suit.
There is no doubt that Santorum is deeply conservative on social issues. He is ardently anti-abortion, even in cases of rape and incest, and no one takes a stronger stand against gay rights. In fact, with his comparison of gay sex to “man on dog” relationships, Santorum seldom even makes a pretense of tolerance. While that sort of rhetoric may play well in Iowa pulpits, it will be far less well received elsewhere in the nation. …
When Hillary Clinton was justly excoriated by conservatives for her book It Takes A Village, which advocated greater government involvement in our lives, Rick Santorum countered with his book, It Takes a Family: Conservatism and the Common Good, which advocated greater government involvement in our lives. Among the many government programs he supported: national service, publicly financed trust funds for children, community-investment incentives, and economic-literacy programs in “every school in America” (italics in original).
Santorum’s voting record shows that he embraced George Bush–style “big-government conservatism.” For example, he supported the Medicare prescription-drug benefit and No Child Left Behind.
He never met an earmark that he didn’t like. In fact, it wasn’t just earmarks for his own state that he favored, which might be forgiven as pure electoral pragmatism, but earmarks for everyone, including the notorious “Bridge to Nowhere.” The quintessential Washington insider, he worked closely with Tom DeLay to set up the “K Street Project,” linking lobbyists with the GOP leadership.
He voted against NAFTA and has long opposed free trade. He backed higher tariffs on everything from steel to honey. He still supports an industrial policy with the government tilting the playing field toward manufacturing industries and picking winners and losers.
In fact, Santorum might be viewed as the mirror image of Ron Paul. If Ron Paul’s campaign has been based on the concept of simply having government leave us alone, Santorum rejects that entire concept. True liberty, he writes, is not “the freedom to be left alone,” but “the freedom to attend to one’s duties to God, to family, and to neighbors.” And he seems fully prepared to use the power of government to support his interpretation of those duties.
The Cato Institute’s David Boaz reports that Santorum told National Public Radio during his 2006 reelection campaign (which he lost):
One of the criticisms I make is to what I refer to as more of a libertarianish right. You know, the left has gone so far left and the right in some respects has gone so far right that they touch each other. They come around in the circle. This whole idea of personal autonomy, well I don’t think most conservatives hold that point of view. Some do. They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues. You know, people should do whatever they want. Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world and I think most conservatives understand that individuals can’t go it alone. That there is no such society that I am aware of, where we’ve had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture.
In his book he comments, seemingly with a shrug, “Some will reject what I have to say as a kind of ‘Big Government’ conservatism.”
They sure will. A list of the government interventions that Santorum endorses includes national service, promotion of prison ministries, “individual development accounts,” publicly financed trust funds for children, community-investment incentives, strengthened obscenity enforcement, covenant marriage, assorted tax breaks, economic literacy programs in “every school in America” (his italics), and more. Lots more. …
With It Takes a Family, Rick Santorum has served notice. The bold new challenge to the Goldwater-Reagan tradition in American politics comes not from the Left, but from the Right.
Boaz adds:
He declared himself against individualism, against libertarianism, against “this whole idea of personal autonomy, … this idea that people should be left alone.” And in this 2005 TV interview, you can hear these classic hits: “This is the mantra of the left: I have a right to do what I want to do” and “We have a whole culture that is focused on immediate gratification and the pursuit of happiness . . . and it is harming America.” …
At least Santorum is right about one thing: sometimes the left and the right meet in the center. In this case the big-spending, intrusive, mommy-AND-daddy-state center. But he’s wrong that we’ve never had a firmly individualist society where people are “left alone, able to do whatever they want to do.”
It’s called America.
I think I’ll pass on Santorum. If overreaching government from the left is wrong, it’s wrong from the right too.
Experian–Simmons apparently “measures the consumer preference of various political ideologies,” including their TV watching, according to Entertainment Weekly.
EW reports that “sarcastic media-savvy comedies and morally murky antiheroes tend to draw Dems. While serious work-centered shows (both reality shows and stylized scripted procedurals), along with reality competitions, tend to draw conservatives.”
First, the shows those who identify most strongly as being a “Liberal Democrat” watch (with EW’s comments in italics):
– The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report (Comedy Central): As you might expect.
– 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation (NBC): Literate media-savvy comedies score high among Dems in general, notes Experian-Simmons senior marketing manager John Fetto. “Sarcastic humor is always a hook for them,” he adds.
– The View (ABC): Shows that skew female tend to do better among Dems, while male-friendly shows tend to do perform higher among Republicans.
– Glee (Fox)
– Modern Family (ABC): Last year, the progressive Glee and Modern Family scored surprisingly strong among both political leanings. Among conservatives this year, the shows still do fairly well, but have dropped out of their top ranks.
– It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (FX)
– Treme (HBO): GOP Kryptonite. Not only a Dem favorite, but so unpopular among Republicans that the report scores the show with a “*” because not enough conservatives in the study group had actually watched it.
– Cougar Town (ABC)
– The Late Show With David Letterman and The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson (CBS): Dems favor late-night programming, with one big exception that we’ll see below.
Also in the mix: The Soup (E!), Aqua Teen Hunger Force (Adult Swim), Raising Hope (Fox), Saturday Night Live (NBC), The Office (NBC), Project Runway (Lifetime), Shameless (Showtime), Parenthood (NBC), Conan (TBS).
Nothing on this list is particularly surprising. I don’t watch “30 Rock” because every time I see Alec Baldwin, I want to punch him out. There was a hilarious tweet about “The View” last month that I can’t really repeat here (it involved male genitals and cinder blocks). We can’t watch “Glee” because its subject matter makes it unwatchable for young families, even though Fox puts it on at 7 p.m. Letterman’s increasingly one-sided political observations have turned me off, but then again he was funnier on NBC.
Now the “conservative Republican” list:
– Swamp Loggers (Discovery) and Top Shot (History): Gritty documentary-style work-related reality shows on cable index really strongly with conservative Republicans. Swamp Loggers is particularly polarizing.
– The Bachelor (ABC): They also tend to gravitate toward broadcast reality competition shows.
– Castle (ABC): Ranks fairly high among Dems, too.
– Mythbusters (Discovery)
– Only in America With Larry the Cable Guy, American Pickers, Pawn Stars, Swamp People (History): If you’re a Republican candidate looking to raise money, put ads on History.
– The Middle (ABC): Does well among libs, too.
– The Tonight Show With Jay Leno (NBC): “Did you hear about this? Yeah, this is true: Jay Leno is the late-night choice among conservatives… “
– The Biggest Loser (NBC)
– Hawaii Five-O, NCIS, The Mentalist (CBS): Popular crime dramas — except the left-wing Law & Order franchise — tend to draw a conservative crowd.
Also: Dancing With the Stars results show (ABC), Man vs. Wild (Discovery), Auction Kings (Discovery), Wheel of Fortune (syndi), Top Gear (BBC America).
One irony of this list is that “Castle” plays opposite “Hawaii Five-0,” which I guess demonstrates how many homes now have DVRs. One shouldn’t be surprised that cop shows are popular with Republicans. In fact, National Review recently commented on “Castle”:
You might think some on the Right might flinch at a show that begins just about every episode with a grisly murder, and the investigation often has the protagonists taking a short tour though some strange subcultures — S&M aficionados, people who like to pretend they’re vampires, soap-opera fans, rival New York pizzerias. On the other hand, the show depicts police detectives as honorable and dedicated. Criminals are rarely misunderstood victims of society but almost always greedy or unstable and undoubtedly belong behind bars. In short, the good guys are the good guys, and the bad guys are the bad guys. The cops rarely if ever enter dark anti-hero territory or bend the law (though occasionally they’ll ignore procedure) and almost every episode is self-contained: A criminal commits a murder with seemingly ingenious methods to escape detection, and the hard-charging detectives and their novelist sidekick pick through all of the evidence and chase down every lead until they get their man. Thankfully, the criminals aren’t always the predictable “the rich old white Republican did it” cliché that marked so many Law & Order episodes (sorry, Senator Thompson) though Castle has conformed to the ironclad Hollywood rule that if Ray Wise is in a television or film and a murder occurs, he did it.
I am rather surprised that reality shows are popular with Republicans because the term “reality show” is an oxymoron.
Now for the opposite lists — which shows would Democrats and Republicans not be caught dead watching? First, Democrats:
– Swamp Loggers (Discovery): What are they doing on this show, feeding Nancy Pelosi to alligators? [If they did, maybe I’d watch.]
– Dog the Bounty Hunter (A&E) and COPS (syndication): “Question authority.”
– The Ultimate Fighter (Spike TV): Conservatives can make their own “cut and run” jokes…
– The Price Is Right (CBS): Annnnd a budget-crisis joke.
– CSI: Miami (CBS)
– Kitchen Nightmares (Fox): Odd. Who doesn’t like a clean kitchen?
– Secret Life of the American Teenager (ABC Family): Not popular among stalwart Republicans either.
– Ghost Hunters (Syfy), Ghost Adventures (Travel Channel) and The Haunted (Animal Planet): Libs don’t believe in an afterlife? Or just don’t believe in shaky night-vision reality shows that claim to prove an afterlife?
Also: Operation Repo (TruTV), Swamp People (History), Hardcore Pawn (TruTV), River Monsters (Animal Planet), Deadliest Catch (Discovery), Only in America With Larry the Cable Guy (History), Storm Chasers (Discovery), Billy the Exterminator (A&E), Deal or No Deal (GSN), Forensic Files (TruTV), Dirty Jobs (Discovery).
Now, Republicans:
– Weeds (Showtime): Female-centered drama, lots of drug use and a morally murky antiherohelp make this show the lowest-ranked series among righties.
– The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report (Comedy Central): But not disliked equally. Republicans prefer Colbert between the two (maybe some pretend he’s being serious).
– South Park (Comedy Central): Aww, South Park is an equal opportunity offender! But, again, media-darling sarcastic comedies tend to be a turn-off.
– TMZ (syndication)
– General Hospital (ABC)
– Family Guy (Fox)
– Dexter (Showtime): Again, that antihero thing…
– Jersey Shore (MTV)
– The Walking Dead (AMC): Really? But it’s about the Apocalypse!
Also: Divorce Court (syndi), The Big C (Showtime), Let’s Make a Deal (CBS), Bridezillas (WE), My Fair Wedding With David Tutera (WE), Don’t Forget the Lyrics (VH1).
A few no-shows on the Republican list surprise me. “South Park” is actually quite libertarian, and the biggest targets seem to me to be PC liberals. “TMZ” is all about pop culture, but by showing celebrities in their unguarded states, it should make viewers think twice when Baldwin makes another airheaded political statement. “Dexter,” for those who haven’t seen it, is about a serial killer who murders criminals. Remembering that the show is fiction, how can conservatives be against such savings of taxpayer dollars?
As for “Jersey Shore,” the first and until now only person I have de-Friended on Facebook is a huge fan of “Jersey Shore,” which tells you everything you need to know about my ex-Friend. And I would rather stick forks in my eyeballs than watch “Bridezillas.” In fact, given the artifice of all reality TV (including my wife’s and kids’ favorite, “The Amazing Race”), it can be said that the popularity of reality TV is a sign of the Apocalypse.
Packer fans know from past experience that the first couple days after a playoff-free season are not always healthy for the employment of a playoff-free coach.
In 2000, while on the way to a New Year’s/Rose Bowl party, the radio broke the news that coach Ray Rhodes was going to be fired after just one season. The Badgers won, the Packers won their season finale the next day, and Rhodes was fired. Nine years earlier, coach Lindy Infante was also fired by the same general manager, Ron Wolf, despite winning the Packers’ season finale, probably because that improved the Packers’ record all the way to 4–12.
The Bears did not fire their coach, Lovie Smith, Tuesday. They fired Smith’s boss, general manager Jerry Angelo.
The Chicago Tribune’s Steve Rosenbloom makes you wonder why (or perhaps be happy that) the Bears didn’t fire Angelo before now:
Talent wins, and the Bears are sadly and obviously bereft of it.
If you could suffer through most of the weapons-grade stupidity offered by Lovie Smith at his 2011 post-mortem Monday, you get to the part where Smith indicated injuries were a killer of a 7-3 season.
It was one injury: Jay Cutler’s. It exposed how badly Angelo executed the draft, which is his first and most important job. …
Cutler deodorized a lot of bad things, but even Cutler was pounded by a pathetic offensive line cobbled together by Angelo as if he was dropping acid. I mean, get a load of this:
A guard is playing center, a center is playing guard, a guard is playing right tackle, a right tackle is playing left tackle, and the last guy is a backup for a left guard who’s paid like a left tackle and can’t last a full season anywhere because he’s always getting hurt because he came here hurt.
(I’ll pause here while you absorb that last sentence.)
The purpose of a general manager is to get players. Angelo got fired because, well …
Angelo foisted Devin Hester on everybody as a No. 1 receiver, but the truth is, neither Hester nor any member of the Bears wide receiving corps could make Green Bay’s top five. …
Years of ridiculous picks hurt the Bears when they could least afford it. Angelo brought in players who were either bad or pre-injured. He failed miserably in the most important part of his job: scouting the physical and mental talents of currency of the realm: players.
It took him 10 years to get one of his offensive draft choices to the Pro Bowl. He wasted draft picks along the offensive line. He never could figure out the quarterback position, finally trading first-round picks for Cutler, but when Angelo finally had to show what he knew about the most important position on the field, Caleb Hanie sabotaged the end of the last two seasons.
A comment contrasts the Bears’ approach, such as it is, with their rivals to the north on U.S. 41, calling out Bears president Ted Phillips:
Phillips is the key. He must go and get someone who will make EVERY decision based on only one criterion: what choice will most likely give the team the best chance of winning. Phillips has not done that over the years. … The Packers make EVERY decision based on what will help their team win. Over the years, that approach pays off. They are going for their 5th Superball championship. The Bears have a pathetic single championship in modern times, and are looking at a long climb to become competitive for another. GET a real football man in to replace PHILLIPS the bean counter.
(Is the “Superball” an event during Super Bowl Week?)
The comment contrasted the Bears’ and Packers’ stadium situations. The Packers renovated Lambeau Field while still playing there during the 2001–03 seasons. The Bears moved to the University of Illinois for one season, instead of picking one of three Chicago-area stadiums (Wrigley Field, Comiskey Park or Northwestern University’s Ryan Field) that would have worked for a season, and then replaced Soldier Field with an architectural disaster.
There are two ways to look at Smith, who said before the season that the 2011 Bears were the best team he’d ever had. The first, as Rosenbloom argues, is that the Bears’ next general manager won’t have the ability to hire his own coach. (The accusation is that the Bears are too cheap to fire Smith and eat the $10 million remaining on his contract.) The other, the Wolf/Ted Thompson model, would be that the new GM decides after watching Smith for a season whether to keep him or not.
Martz’s departure as the Bears’ offensive coordinator is ironic. Smith touted the Bears’ rushing for 2,000 yards this season, even though Martz’s “Greatest Show on Turf” offense is not known for rushing. Moreover, nine teams hit the 2,000-rushing-yard mark, but only four (Denver, Houston, New Orleans and San Francisco) made the playoffs. Ten teams hit the 4,000-passing-yard mark, and only three (San Diego, Dallas and Philadelphia) did not make the playoffs. And in the most important statistic, scoring offense, four of the 2,000-yard rushing teams finished in the top 10 in scoring, but only New Orleans and Houston made the playoffs; the Texans were the only team to throw for less than 4,000 yards, finish in the top 10 in scoring and make the playoffs. This is the long way of saying that rushing is not nearly as important as passing in the 21st century NFL. (And the Bears’ run game was good enough to get them to 30th in offensive yardage.
The Bears have been known for years for running the football and their defense. The 2011 Bears were 17th in yardage and 19th in scoring on defense. The two worst defenses in terms of yardage, Green Bay and New England, are the number one seeds in their conferences. (According to Tuesday Morning Quarterback, the Packers are the first team to finish last in defense and first in their conference.) Despite their basement position in yardage, the Packers and the Patriots were 14th and 18th, respectively, in scoring defense.
This suggests that the Bears’ approach is faulty in more than one way. They made the correct move in finding a capable (if buttheaded) quarterback, Cutler, but failed to build an offense around him. Nor do they have an offense designed to compete in the 21st century NFL. Of the Bears’ receivers, only Hester would even get a Packer practice squad spot, and only on the roster as a kick returner. Anyone who has watched a couple seasons of football knows that the most important position group is the offensive line, and the Bears’ offensive line’s only contribution to the passing game is trying to get its quarterbacks killed. The aforementioned 2,000 rushing yards didn’t get the Bears into the playoffs, did it?
Cutler’s injury torpedoed the Bears’ season. That’s the fault of the Bears for not finding an adequate replacement. In contrast, Packer backup quarterback Matt Flynn has played well in his two career starts and his relief appearance in the Packers’ loss to Detroit last season. There is no question that if something happened to Aaron Rodgers, the Packers’ coaches would have Flynn ready to go. The NFL’s quarterback factory is in Green Bay given the number of quarterbacks who came through Green Bay who ended up playing elsewhere, including Kurt Warner, Doug Pedersen, Ty Detmer, Mark Brunell, Aaron Brooks and Matt Hasselbeck.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 