Meh. He’s overrated.
You still have to replace him. It is a problem.
It will be awfully difficult to find anyone quite so spectacularly ugly, I’ll give you that.
The Bears confirm Urlacher is done for the year. He might be the new Ray Lewis, but this is only going to hurt a potentially demoralized Bears team.
As little as $30 if you want to go on the deck.
Agreed. I was always on the “Chris Collinsworth sucks” bandwagon, but he was really good last night. He picked up a lot of things I missed and turned the stupid way down.
Ha!
This is why, as a Packer fan, I was thrilled with the Cutler trade. I’m sure Cutler will be just fine in the long run, but the Bears could really use those draft picks right now.
That said, it still sucks when a great player goes down like that (even though this has become almost an annual tradition for 'Lacher.)
Perhaps not, but one thing is certain. The Steelers are 1-0 and the Bengals are 0-1. You can temporize all you want to, but numbers don’t lie.
“But for that one lucky play the (name your team) would have beaten (name another team)” is a scenario that happens a lot during the season. Everybody uses that excuse. I’m certain I will sometime this year once or twice. But it’s not a good sign when you have to use it in Week 1.
As for your stud linebackers, I think you’ll find that when the Bengals play a better team than the Broncos you’ll find out how studly they are. Week 3 might suffice to demonstrate the fallacy of your thinking. Yeah, I think that’ll do quite nicely. Then you’ll get to see some real stud linebackers.
This is one of the few occasions when “except for that ridiculous play we’d have won” is justified. You can’t argue about that.
You can certainly argue that losing to the Broncos in any manner doesn’t bode well for your season.
I’m a strong believer in not leaving yourself in a position that one fluke play can beat you. I know that in the 90’s there were several years where the Steelers offense really sucked, but our defense kept us in games. It seemed to happen frequently when we were playing the Bengals that we’d be up by one touchdown and be defensively dominating them all day, but they’d hit some huge crazy rainbow of a pass and win the game. We had nobody to blame but ourselves on those days.
If you go most of the game scoring zero points, you’ve really got nobody to blame but yourself if you end up losing, no matter what the circumstances.
Unless we have any Raiders fans here that I’ve overlooked, I’m about the only one who gives a shit about tonight’s west-coast game, but I’ll talk into a vacuum if I must. 
The way things look right now, the Chargers are set to waltz into the playoffs without much struggle, not that I’m complaining. Preseason looked good; about the only thing that worries me is that LT still didn’t quite seem like LT, but I think Adrian Peterson getting declared “the best there is” lit a fire under his ass…I’m predicting he’ll be out for blood against Oakland. At any rate, Sproles is definitely still Sproles, and the passing threat (Rivers to…Floyd? Gates? Naanee? LT?) is as real as they come.
Defensively, I just hope the pass rush has been beefed up from last year; it seemed like a double block on Phillips was sufficient to buy the QB all damn day if he wanted it. That said, having Merriman back in action ought to take care of that.
Before I get cocky, though, I’m going to see how they do tonight. While I fully expect business as usual (ie, rolling the Raiders), the football gods can be spiteful in such matters if you don’t watch your tongue…and besides, post-game gloating is more fun than pre-game trash talk any day.
Well, if they lose to Oakland, it won’t matter, will it? Season’s over, and the players will all have to commit ritual suicide.
Hell, the Buccaneers fired their head coach, general manager, senior VP of player personnel, leading rusher, leading tackler, leading pass defender (by the numbers) and top three quarterbacks just for losing to Oakland last year.
The Bears are supposedly in contact with Derrick Brooks. I like the idea, I think a guy like him could be good for the locker room and he’s always been very productive. He’s familiar with the system and he’s smart enough to lead the team. However considering how he’s unemployed right now I have to wonder what he has left in the tank.
Kevin Malast was awesome in the preseason but I’m not sure he’s ready to be a regular player and our other backups are more suited to the outside linebacker roles. It’s a pretty brutal loss that’s for sure.
Well sure, RNATB, but I don’t think you’re a Chargers fan, and I’m pretty sure you’re not me, so you can safely say that. Every time I say something like that, I end up retroactively committing myself to seppuku, and the wakizashi’s-at-the-cleaners excuse only works so many times.
Brooks has nothing left, but I would love to see him get a shot with the Bears (or with the Bucs, for that matter) and I would love to see him prove me wrong. He’s played too well, too long and too hard to go out on somebody else’s terms.
It’s a pretty sad situation, made worse by the fact that Peter King did an SI feature article last year which was basically all about kissing Brooks’ ass and talking about what a workout warrior he was.
Truth is, workout warrior or not, he lost more than a step over the last three seasons. His instincts were good enough that he was still a very good tackler, but he couldn’t turn and run in coverage the way he used to (once saw him shade T.O. for an entire half and not give up a catch!) and his margin for error had gotten razor-thin.
ETA: Are you talking about giving him a look as a mic 'backer? That’s never going to work. Even in his prime he just wasn’t big enough to play in the middle, at least not in conjunction with undersized Tampa-2 linemen.
Mostly they are going to need bodies, Pisa Tinoisamoa the Sam is out with a sprained PCL too. Briggs might get moved or one of the backups like Hunter Hillenmeyer, Jamar Wlliams or Nick Roach could be called into duty making us thin on the outside. Brooks probably won’t be lining up in the middle but allowing someone else to do so. There’ just isn’t a single guy out there that can do 50% of the things Urlacher does.
Another important question: Why are blitzes almost always “dialed up”? Why is nothing else? I mean, you never hear that a defensive coordinator loves to dial up the dime, or that a team dialed up a screen pass.
You overlooked me! But I haven’t been posting to these threads as much this year as I did last year, so I forgive you.
That said, as a Raiders fan I more or less expect the same thing you do. I am interested to see how the team works this year now that the season is on for real, but I am not expecting to win tonight.
There are 15 more games to play. Our offense simply has too many weapons to reproduce such a sucky outing on the first game of the year. They were a bit out of sync for reasons I anticipated and already iterated above. Our defense is looking better than it’s ever been since 1988, however. And I think the Steelers and the rest of the NFL are going to find out just how studly our USC boys Rivers and Maulauga really are in the weeks to come.
I agree with your “looking for an excuse” as to “why we lost”. We should have scored more points, plain and simple. But this isn’t like some normal flukey play…you’ll probably never see another one like it in years.
On to Lambeau to destroy the Packers!