VAUNTED BEATS HAUNTED
Packers’ Rodgers — or Chiefs’ Mahomes — will keep reminding Bears of their failures at quarterback
‘ It was a fun night for us on offense,’’ Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers said after dismantling the Bears 41-25 on Sunday night.
Rodgers had the sly, surgical look of a chess master who just defeated a middle school hopeful while getting his nails done, talking business on a headset, a snifter of cognac in his free hand. You’ve seen the look before. Rodgers is in his 16th NFL season, all of them spent up north beyond the Cheese Line that separates Wisconsin from Illinois. He’s 20-5 against the Bears. He’s 36.
That might seem old, but Rodgers already has adapted to time’s dampening effects, limiting his scrambling, honing his vision.
Last year, at 35, he threw for more than 4,000 yards, with 26 touchdown passes and only four interceptions.
Since replacing Brett Favre in 2008, Rodgers has started 185 of a possible 203 regular-season games and all 18 of the Packers’ playoff games.
In other words, he’s always there.
Which brings us back to the Bears and the embarrassment of their continued failure at quarterback. And we do mean continued. Like decades.
But the immediate failure, the one in our face, the one we saw Sunday night with the return of Mitch Trubisky, can be measured in “Rodgers Years.’’
Or — here’s the transcendent horror — in “Mahomes Years.’’
Rodgers’ career will end someday. I can’t see him playing at 50, though he might stick around just because, as he said, he loves beating the Bears.
But Patrick Mahomes. The young Chiefs quarterback played earlier on Sunday and was spectacular in beating the Buccaneers. How does 462 yards, three touchdown passes, no interceptions and a 124.7 passer rating sound?
We’ve been down this path before. The Bears could’ve drafted Mahomes in 2017 instead of Trubisky.
We have flogged general manager Ryan Pace for this mortal error. Some might say we should stop beating the horse; it’s deader than Freddy Krueger. Or Michael Myers. Or Pennywise. Or — my favorite — Norman Bates from “Psycho,’’ though he’s human and not dead, just resting in a prison for the insane.
But here’s the thing. All these monsters come back. Again and again.
And every time the Bears fail at quarterback — whether it’s with non-leader Jay Cutler or weak Mike Glennon or middling Nick Foles or hapless Trubisky — Rodgers, or his mere image, comes back to haunt us.
And Mahomes, only 23, will do that to us when Rodgers can’t.
It makes the Bears’ offensive failings, which now rival those of the cursed Lions — the teams have not won a Super Bowl or NFL championship game in a combined 98 years — beyond annoying. It makes it gut-wrenching. Just knowing the McCaskeys still own and run the team becomes painful.
Knowing Pace is in charge of player selection is painful.
Knowing coach Matt Nagy and staff have failed is painful.
Knowing the Bears will have to start all over again, start that eternal search for a star quarterback, is flat- out depressing.
Complementary players are important. Of course. Rodgers has wide receiver Davante Adams to
throw to. Mahomes has human blur Tyreek Hill.
But consider this: Rodgers threw touchdown passes Sunday to Marcedes Lewis, Robert Tonyan and Allen Lazard.
Lewis is 36 and caught 18 passes the last two seasons. Tonyan was an undrafted free agent. Lazard was an undrafted free agent.
Don’t blame the pieces. As the saying goes: It’s a poor carpenter who blames his tools.
The Bears might beat the pitiful Lions this week, the 4-7 team that just fired its coach and general manager and is to success as a sloth is to speed. The Bears might even back into the playoffs somehow.
But they’re going nowhere. Yet here they sit. The same old, same old.
One mistake should not define a
franchise or a person. But craftily moving up, dealing draft picks, selecting Trubisky as the quarterback of the future was a mistake so grievous that it cries out for atonement. Or revenge. Or penance. Or something.
It set the Bears back years, with no fix in sight.
Remember in 2014 when Bears chairman George McCaskey said his mom, Bears owner Virginia, was “pissed off’’ with the team’s lousiness?
Virginia, now 97, has denied using those exact words. But whatever.
Because what comes after pissed off, or its equivalent, when things get worse?
I’d say dynamite.
All of it. Light the fuse and clear out.