For Omniscient and any associated Bears fans…tee hee…
Thats what I thought,he got some height on it fer sure.
I’m going to quote myself from another (Bengals) board WRT Cedric Benson:
*People keep pointing to his Chicago years like he was some kind of bust. That guy was one of the best RB’s coming out of college EVER. Top five EVER.
Now, collegiate production does not a Bengals back make (Kijana), but this guy is for real and always had been. Between the locker room division over him, his holdout, bad oline, sharing carries, his arrests, etc it was just a bad scene for him in Chicago.
It’s so gratifying to see us with his services right now. We made the right call (and got ridiculed for it) in resigning him. He’s a fucking beast. Also: I am getting tired of the Rudi/Benson comparisons by broadcasters. Rudi could never break it to the outside like Benson can.
Rudi Johnson memory: signs with Lions “Good luck Bengals, you’re going to need it”.
Yeah. Later. *
He’s playing well, no question about it. As happy as you have to be to at the top of the division finally these late wins must make you nervous though. That’s nitpicking though, first place is first place however you get there but I’m sure they’d like to seal the deal a bit earlier than they have been. A few thoughts I had when they played the Steelers: There’s no real threat at tight end. The receivers are solid but Palmer didn’t have much in the way of check down options or underneath routes when the D was in deep zones. The other thing that caught my eye was the LBs. Did I imagine that or was Maluaga on the weak side and Dhani Jones in the middle? That seems weird to me. Jone looks made for the weak side and Maluaga looks like he belongs in the middle.
Well, we lost our two starting TE’s (Reggie Kelly, Ben Utecht) to injuries in training camp (Kelly has a ruptured achilles, out for the year, Utecht had a bad concussion, out for the year) so we were left with Dan Coats (who played FB for us last year because we lost FB Jeremi Johnson to a torn knee ligament for the year last season) and our third round pick Chase Coffman.
Chase is an awesome receiver, but he was a TE in college in name only. He never was asked to block, and he is super green in that area, so much so that he isn’t dressing for games. JP Foschi is our only other tight end, and he’s a retread.
Coats is a decent blocker, but he dropped two certain TD’s against the Ravens, and he fumbles a lot too.
As for the LB’s, yeah, Rey is playing weak side and Jones is the MLB. Maluaga will be our starting MLB soon. He’s awesome.
I buy that somebody is holding on every play, and I totally agree that the average fan has no idea when someone is being held. It’s weird, because it’s really not that hard to figure out. What can be hard to figure out is exactly how long a player’s hands can go outside before the officials will throw a flag.
I don’t care what their record is. Brown is unquestionably one of the two most valuable players in the league right now. Will he win the MVP award or even POTY? Not a chance- but he should.
I would like to point out a little prediction I made on September 11:
Seems, if anything, I might have sold them short. There are only 3 1/2 games left on the schedule where I wouldn’t pick them to win (Ravens, at Steelers, at Minnesota, and a coin flip in Week 17 when they’re at the Jets).
First and foremost, Rosenbloom is hands down the worst working journalist in Chicago. I’m at a loss to understand how he still has a job, let alone a daily feature in the Trib. It’s possible he’s the worst in all of the country, but I don’t read enough stuff from the rest of the country to verify. The guy is a blithering idiot who’s never made a cohesive argument.
Second and more to the point, he’s 100% correct. I’ve been bashing Angelo and Lovie for years now and have made no secret of it here. The best news I’ve seen was that Lovie was taking over the defense so that the failures could no longer be blamed on others. Hopefully Orton and Benson’s success (not to mention Bobby Wade, Bernard Berrian, Justin Gage, Marc Columbo, Tank Williams, Thomas Jones and others) will undo Angelo as well. The Bears trademark more than anything over his tenure is massive under achievement. They scout poorly, their medical staff is poor, their teaching and player development is poor, their efforts in free agency is poor.
These guy have got to go, but between the missed FGs and absolutely elite Special Teams put together by Dave Toub and the late game heroics of Jay Cutler they might just survive for another couple seasons. Right now 9-7 is likely (8-8 practically certain) and I just don’t see them getting canned for anything better than 6-10. This organization is conservative to a fault and place too much value on stability and mediocrity.
ETA: One last thing, Cedric Benson still sucks. He’s playing much better than he did at any point in Chicago and is running with speed and aggression, two things he lacked utterly here, but he’ll disappoint yo. He’ll be a constant injury concern and when the going gets tough he’ll revert to his 2 yards and a tumble rushing style. Much of his success now is on the backs of a very good set of fullbacks and good blocking up front, he’ll never create plays by himself. He’s not special and he’ll be hurt frequently, and he won’t play through pain.
He was the first back to run for 100 yards against the Ravens in nearly three full seasons, and he did it injured. I agree he was a total waste of space in Chicago, but this is not your (mother’s) Cedric Benson.
Remember, he failed in Chicago with the same blockers Thomas Jones ran for 1,300 yards behind.
So, uh… no one has really talked about it, so let me get the ball rolling:
Josh McDaniels. What the fuck?
How does a wet-behind-the-ears guy we all thought was a Belicheck system guy and who managed to royally piss off his two best players before the season go 5-0, you mean?
Something like that.
Does he have a magic QB touch? Orton is posting like a 100 rating and not because he gets to throw a few easy passes behind a dominating running game - he’s been winning games in the 4th quarter.
And a bottom 3 defense last year becomes a top 5 unit this year?
Maybe they’re winning in spite of him rather than because. He seems to have a lot of experience on staff. He may be the George W. Bush of coaches.
Or maybe the press paid too much attention to the locker room stuff during the offseason.
I was pretty convinced that Shanahan was mailing it in for the last couple of years, and it’s not like the defense was totally bereft of talent; remember, they were ranked #1 in the league in 2006 with pretty much the same personnel. Shanahan fired Jim Bates after six games because they weren’t winning and it couldn’t possibly be the offense’s fault.
Orton has always been a winner. The only knock on him is his noodle arm, and if you’ve got a guy like Marshall who can outmuscle a corner for the ball, and a guy like Royal who runs perfect short crossing routes so you don’t have to jam the ball into a tiny space, your arm strength doesn’t matter that much.
I would hardly liken W’s presidency to a 5-0 start…
With Nolan as the defensive co-ordinator I think they would be 5-0 with Shanahan/Cutler too. I think they would scare more teams right now as well.
Point conceded.
Not so sure about that. Cutler might have won some of the games by 14 instead of 3, but I bet he’d have lost one or two of them with turnovers.
That 100 yard game was a fluke. Could have happened to anyone, the Raven’s D isn’t what it once was and I suspect several players will be posting similar numbers over the balance of this season.
There’s zero question that he’s a completely different player than he was in Chicago. Maybe all the off the field stuff finally convinced him to grow up and being released and searching for a job taught him that he needs to work to be any good. Maybe he’s gotten off the sauce and into the gym, he’s not the first player to mature after getting spanked.
However, his skills are mediocre. He can be a steady contributor but he can’t be special, he can’t be a game changer. He’ll disappear for weeks at a time, just watch.
And no, he wasn’t playing with the same line that Jones was. Same players, but not the same line. That group of players has steadily and dramatically collapsed since the Super Bowl season. Kreutz has gone from one of the best in the game to a liability. We’ve had a revolving door at RT, perhaps the key position for a running game, and ask SenorBeef how the guy we had last season was. The performances of Thomas Jones and Matt Forte on either end of the Benson era simply highlight how much better they were than Benson and of the two Jones had the luxury of a much better line which Benson also had and couldn’t exploit.
Benson’s running hard and decisively, that player is a huge asset that sadly the Bears could use right now. Still, keep in mind that the number of games in which Benson has run hard and finished is dwarfed by those in which he tripped over stripes of paint on the grass. These last 8 games or so still fall into potential fluke range and the old guy is still lurking in there, notice he was barely adequate in half of those last 8 games (less than 4 YPC and ~75 yards). Let’s not start sucking each other’s Popsicles just yet.
You’ll have to clarify.
What the fuck, how are you so good?
What the fuck, why’d you celebrate like a little girl?
What the fuck, how do you keep getting so lucky?
What the fuck, do you really plan on throwing the ball 50 times a game with Orton?
What the fuck, are you serious with this Wild Horses crap?
What the fuck, how do you keep getting credit for what Mike Nolan has accomplished?
What the fuck, why did you make it a mission to fuck with my fantasy team and wait to unleash Eddie Royal until after I’d given up on him?
This probably doesn’t need to be said at this point, but Dick Jauron should be hanged by his toes.