I am a lifelong Bears fan. I was 9 when we destroyed the Patriots in the Superbowl. I have fond memories of that team.
With that said I think the whole story of the 85 Bears has been played out and it’s tiring having them continually mentioned by any Bears fan when discussions about how the team sucks come up. It’s been 25 years guys. You haven’t done shit since then. Let’s drop all the tributes and retrospectives etc.
Everyone is tired of hearing about the 72 Dolphins undefeates season and I feel like people are over hearing about the 85 Bears dominant defense every week the team plays.
It’s the 25th anniversary. They are commemorating it. They commemorated it at 10 and 20 years too. Get over it. Every team that’s won a Super Bowl does the same thing, and anytime there’s a anniversary of a major record they do it too. There was a big to-do on the anniversary of Payton breaking the rushing record too. Once again, every team does this, you can believe that in 25 years the Saints will be bringing back Darren Sharper, Drew Brees and Pierre Thomas to where ever they are playing and having a party.
The Dolphins have their little champagne ceremony every year which is obnoxious. The Bears don’t bring up the '85 team every damn season. And you’re hanging out with a bunch of retards if you think fans dwell on this still today, I can’t remember the last time anyone hedged on their hatred of Lovie because of '85 or made excuses for Tommie Harris and Jay Cutler because of McMichael and McMahon.
Did someone piss in your Cheerios this morning or do you always start this many bitchy threads?
Cubsfan eh? Chi town Boy? You’re just pissed the Dolphins beat the 86 Bears and stopped the equaling task I bet. But you are trying to hide it behind fake hate on the Bears to really hate on the Dolphins.
I think they’re a bunch of old no class bastards. With 2 exceptions, I’ve never seen a former athlete be upset that his record(s) was broken. Well, at least not publicly.
Absolutely correct. And what makes it even more contemptible is, nobody can ever SURPASS the Dolphins. At best, another team can EQUAL them! A perfect season is a perfect season, after all.
With every other record, we expect the guy being surpassed to show some good sportsmanship, to be on hand to say, “Nice going” to the player who breaks his records. Why the Dolphins can’t do the same is beyond me.
Glad I decided to finish reading the thread before posting that link. That’s gotta be in my top-five “non-existent things that everyone knows about” file of things that piss me off.
The '72 Dolphins season was a truly historic achievement, still unreplicated (high five, David Tyree). The '85 Bears were just a team with a really good defense (and a really good rushing offense). They also got to play in a division where no other team was better than .500, nearly lost to the 2-14 Buccaneers twice, and did lose to the Dolphins.
That Snopes article is a bit misleading. Plenty of Dolphins players actually do it, notably Mercury Morris, who is conspicuous by his absence from the article. It’s certainly not true that the whole squad gets together to crack open some bottles, though.
I hesitate to speak for Cubsfan, since I’m a Soxfan, but I think what he means is exactly the opposite. People are always bitching that the current Bears pale in comparison to the '85 team–they haven’t had a real quarterback since McMahon, Singletary could kick Urlacher’s ass, why can’t Lovie be like Ditka, etc. etc. barf.
I remember near the end of the Patriots big season, Ditka on NFL countdown saying that 85 Bears could not have covered that NE Offense… Too many weapons were his words…
as for the '72 Dolphins…
An enduring controversyis that the 1972 Dolphins played a soft schedule not possible under the current scheduling formula. Prior to the implementation of position scheduling in 1978, opponents were set by the NFL on a rotating basis. Statistically, the Dolphin’s 1972 schedule was one of the weakest played by any team in many years. Their regular-season opponents had an aggregate winning percentage of .396 and only two opponents had winning records that year (both were 8-6).
I don’t think this is true. I don’t remember the Giants commemorating the 10 year anniversary of the 1990 Superbowl during their 2000 Superbowl season, and I can verify that they’re not commemorating the 20 year anniversary this year. I also don’t recall them commemorating the 20 year anniversary of the 86 Superbowl in 2006. Maybe they’ll commemorate the 25th anniversary of the 86 Superbowl next year, but I kind of doubt it.
David Tyree’s helmet catch wasn’t particularly critical to winning that game. His touchdown catch to take the lead early in the fourth quarter was much more critical, but no more so than Burress’s game-winning TD.
The helmet catch was a 1st down conversion on 3rd and 5. That drive saw Jacobs barely convert a 4th and 1, and Steve Smith make a critical sideline crawl to convert a 3rd and 12, both more critical than Tyree’s catch. That final drive, and indeed the entire 4th quarter while the DL was sucking wind on the sideline, was all Eli.
Actually the 1948 Cleveland Browns were 14-0 and won the AAFC title game to also go have a perfect season so the Dolphins are not unique. The Browns also challenged the NFL champions to a playoff game but were rebuffed as they were each of their four years. When they were admitted to the NFL. They had an undefeated streak of 29 games surrounding the 1948 season though it included 2 ties since there was no overtime in those days. They won 18 straight over that time, the same as the Dolphins did who lost the second game of the next season.
In any case, I’d say that if a current team went 16-0 and then went on to win the Super Bowl, they had “surpassed” the Dolphins. The Dolphins did all they could at 17-0 (just like the 15-0 Browns did), but 19-0 would be a surpassing it.
For one beautiful, magical, miraculous, transcendent, heavenly season, the Chicago Bears owned the NFL. Everything since has ranged from heartbreaking disappointment to soul-rending misery. If they want to give a little tribute to their best of the best, I say let them. It’s only human to reminisce about the good times, and the young fans need a reminder that their boys really were a powerhouse, if only for a fleeting moment.
And heck, it’s not like we have to hear about it on ESPN every goddam season.
I have never even been to Florida, and I lived in Chicago for three years, so there is definitely a bias at work here, but I have NEVER heard a Dolphins fan go on about the 72 Dolphins, and I have heard Bears fans blather on about the 1985 Bears approximately eighteen trillion times. It is SO FUCKING BORING.
I loved living in Chicago, but any time the conversation turned to sports, things were bound to go downhill rapidly. Cubs fans all have some kind of mental illness brought on by excessive amounts of losing, and Bears fans seem to think that someone, somewhere, besides themselves, might actually give a shit that their team won a Super Bowl when I was six years old. I’m a 49ers fan, they’ve won the Super Bowl several times in the interim, and yet I manage to go around without droning on about how amazing Joe Montana was all the fucking time.
I know that I’ve read, more than once, that a number of analysts consider that the '73 Dolphin team (which also won the Super Bowl, though their record was 12-2) was a better team than the '72 Fins.
Nice football trivia there; I agree with your second paragraph, too.
I’ve read that a mathematician once estimated the odds of an NFL squad racking up a perfect season in any given year (okay, that’s ambiguous: are we assessing the odds of any given squad doing it this season, or this season seeing a perfect season by any team out of the 32? He meant he latter) as being something like 200 million to one (with the regular season being 16 games, that is). I’m probably misremembering the math; it sounds like impossibly long odds, doesn’t it? Yet the record withstands every challenge, and parity asserted itself ridiculously early this season with only two undefeateds after a mere three weeks or so…
Well, I’ve posted about the '72 'Fins a time or two here (I grew up in Miami in the 70’s and 80’s), and I’ve visited an online shrine – er, website – dedicated to the '72 Dolphins, too. Chicago doesn’t have a monopoly on obnoxious nostalgia and mystification.
As for the '72ers enjoying their Schadenfreude, I remember seeing a clip of one of those celebrations on the local TV evening news in the NY market some years ago… it was probably ‘98, when the Broncos faltered. One of the celebrants was definitely “Zonk” – Larry Csonka, a NFL Hall of Famer and my childhood sports hero nonpareil – but lest anyone call the great Zonk a no-class bastard or whiner or whatever, consider these three things: 1) Csonka & his teammates were paid the merest sliver for their work compared to what today’s football players make, and as a demographic cohort are paying for their sports glory in the form of chronic medical and mental conditions in their dotage; 2) Csonka bravely broke away from the NFL in the late ‘70’s in an ultimately failed attempt to build a pro-football league to compete with the NFL (his intent being, to drive up players’ salaries) – and more broadly, it was the agitation for income parity between the team owners and the players’ union that paved the way for the high salaries of today; and 3) in the early or early-to-mid 80’s, Csonka enjoyed a bit of notoriety (in South Florida, at least) following the disclosure of his self-administered “Black & Decker” treatment. Those of you who are squeamish about medical stuff or who just don’t give a damn about this, skip the spoiler: Csonka, suffering from a badly abscessed big toe but loath to see a doctor for it, self-treated it by punching a hole through the affected toenail with his Black & Decker drill. The way he laconically put it (and I’m going by memory here), there was blood and pus everywhere, but it relieved the problem immediately and the toe healed right up afterwards. And then at some point (not necessarily in the immediate timeframe of the actual incident) this episode in he-man medical DIY adventurism became public knowledge; it was covered by the local sports guys on the Miami evening TV news and was written up in The Miami Herald. It’s my humble contention that it’s the B&D drill bit, even more than his years as a great Dolphin player (including on the '72 squad), his activism on the player-compensation issue, and his induction into the NFL Hall of Fame, that qualifies Csonka as a unique (if indubitably insane) badass. There’s lots of great football players out there and every year some team has to win the Super Bowl, but there remains to this day only one nutjob retired player who took a drillbit to his own toenail, AFAIK…
I’m guessing you’re referring to when Csonka (and fellow Dolphins Jim Kiick and Paul Warfield, among others) jumped to the World Football League, which was a bit earlier than the late '70s. Csonka, Kiick, and Warfield all signed with the Memphis Southmen of the WFL in early '74 (the WFL’s first season), though none of them were able to leave the Dolphins until after the 1974 season. They all played with Memphis in 1975, but the WFL folded partway through the '75 season.
