(670 The Score) They can't win for losing or they can't lose for winning. Whatever it is, it all just sucks.
Nobody should care that the Bears beat the Vikings, 12-10, on Monday. Fans of whichever team with either general aesthetic sense or any awareness of what decent football looks like are rightfully dismayed by a primetime performance that had respected broadcasters literally laughing at them in real time.
Neither team is closer to winning a Super Bowl after that, and we just had three otherwise potentially valuable hours shaved off our respective lives. Our collective time would've been better served slamming our heads on the desk, doomscrolling news headlines or considering anything involving the Bulls.
Why are we bothering with this?
Don't answer that. I know. Trust me.
We have to set the bar higher than winning that game, is the entire point. We tolerate so much awful that we default to even celebrating the mediocre, which I'm not even sure that was.
It's not OK to be this bad except when we decide so. And I think we have.
At this point in this postgame bit, I usually go through the individual and team stats, trying to potentially divine some objective truths with hard numbers. I have no desire to do that, however, because we all know this is not — as the kids say — it.
Justin Fields is great until he's not good enough. Luke Getsy is maddeningly strange, choosing to throw laterally instead of vertically as if those yards count the same, and Matt Eberflus is a really good defensive coordinator who only gets to do that job because he had to force out the presumed miscreant he originally hired to do it, and he's an overwhelmed head coach of a team that can't seem to wait to get in its own way with penalties.
Congrats to these endlessly hilarious Chicago Bears, who always do just enough to keep themselves alive at their latest endeavor toward nowhere.
Extol the defense if you want, but that makes my point about our embarrassingly low standards for what we think is good. Josh Dobbs is horrible at football no matter what a great story he may be (and we who follow the Bears should know everything there is to know about that kind of thing this year), and making him evince that should be the bare minimum.
The response from the rest of the country Monday night was refreshing, clowning Getsy's play-calling, Fields' fumbles, Dobbs' apparent desire to throw the game away at every turn and the fact that this was even nominally NFL football. Those of us too used to it are the equivalent of the weird cat lady who has gone frighteningly nose-blind to what her house and car smell like to normal folks.
Our house and car smell like Bears football.
Dan Bernstein is the co-host of the Bernstein & Holmes Show on middays from 10 a.m. until 2 p.m. on 670 The Score. You can follow him on Twitter @Dan_Bernstein.
