Vigilante Sports

So let’s recap: Rex Grossman saved his job, Devin Hester might have wrapped up the Rookie of the Year award, the Bears defense showed that it’s not impenetrable. Next. No, let’s dig a little deeper here after the knocked off the Rams 42-27 on Monday Night Football.

Rex Grossman came out and showed that he is, in fact, a capable quarterback. He didn’t light the Rams up. Truth be told, he didn’t need to. He did however make some really nice plays. Whether pulling the ball down and running for a first down, or putting the perfect touch on the a beautifully thrown ball to Muhsin Muhammad, Rex Grossman had a fine evening. He threw for 200 yards and 2 scores, but most importantly no interceptions. Ron Turner and the Bears coaching staff gave him a game plan that he could both work with and trust. I think that was the key for Grossman tonight. And Joe Theisman (who I can’t stand) said about a million times, he didn’t have to think about the game. He just took it as it came. I have to admit, I was a little worried when the ball was stripped from his hand, but ruled an incomplete pass. We’ve seen that before. It’s a sign of bad things coming. But the Bears and Rex kept their composure and continued to play well.

The offense didn’t light the field on fire. But as we’ve seen, it doesn’t have to. But they played a really solid game. Thomas Jones and Cedric Benson carried the ball well against a terrible Rams rush defense. Adrian Petersen came in as a change of pace back, and broke a couple really nice plays. One thing that I really like to see is that Rex completed a pass to 7 different receivers. I feel like that means he was able to get into the flow of the game and take what was given to him by the defense.

The defense on the other hand looked very shakey. I know that they’re a little banged up with Nathan Vasher and Tommie Harris out, but they didn’t look good. They got beat long, and short by the Rams passing attack and Stephen Jackson was tearing off big chunks of yards. What does this all mean? Probably nothing. The Bears were ahead the entire second half. But it does worry me that they seemed to lose interest. That’s not the way championship teams do it. Champions close it out. The Bears need to resist the temptation of coasting the rest of the regular season. They did that last year and got burned by Carolina. That cannot happen again.

So I’ll try and close this. The Bears wrapped up a first round bye in the playoffs. That’s good. The offense got on track. That’s really good.
The defense looked wobbly. That’s not so good, but I hope they’ll be able to stay focused and finish the season strong.

All-in-all a good game by the Bears. I look for 3 more of these to finish the regular season against the weak Buccaneers, Lions, and Packers.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 12th, 2006 at 1:16 am and is filed under Chicago Bears, Football, NFL. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.