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Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Bears can’t match legend of 1985 team
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Miami — As the unofficial spokesperson for the 1985 Chicago Bears and their slew of worshippers, Richard Dent isn’t impressed. Not with the defense for the latest Monsters of the Midway compared to the defense for the previous one.
It isn’t as if this new bunch has a personality or something.
That other bunch had a Fridge. It had Coach Ditka. It had the explosion always waiting to happen named Buddy Ryan at defensive coordinator. It had the Super Bowl Shuffle. It had Steve McMichael flinging chairs into walls. “When you think about it,” said Dent, the Atlanta native and sacks leader for those other Bears, pausing over the phone from Chicago, “we were sort of the first reality show. Most teams are going to resemble their coaches. With Mike Ditka and Buddy Ryan, they were wild and crazy, so we were wild and crazy.”
Current Bears coach Lovie Smith is quiet and boring. Defensive coordinator Ron Rivera raises his voice, but not to the constant roar of Ditka or Ryan.
Not only that, the growling that symbolized the Bears from Bill George to Dick Butkus to Mike Singletary has vanished with the decades. While Dent’s bunch scared folks along the way to the easiest of world championships with brutality and the jumbo eyes of Singletary at middle linebacker, this new bunch will go into its Super Bowl on Sunday against the Indianapolis Colts in search of victory with speed and quickness.
This new bunch hasn’t much choice in this NFL era where the combination of brutality and jumbo eyes will get you penalized, fined, banned or all of the above. So we have these dancing Bears as opposed to those pounding Bears.
Whatever works. Despite their ugly swoon during the last six games of the regular season, these dancing Bears finished fifth overall in defense in the NFL. They also continued Smith’s obsession with forcing turnovers with a league-high 44. “Everything we do is about stripping the ball,” defensive end Adewale Ogunleye said. “If the equipment guy is walking and he fumbles the ball, [Smith] probably wants somebody to run over there and pick it up and run it into the end zone.”
It goes back to Smith’s single-gap approach. He brought it to the Bears three seasons ago after his three seasons as defensive coordinator with the St. Louis Rams. “We don’t ask guys to do too much, just to take this gap or that one,” Smith said. “Then you just get set and play fast until the whistle blows.”
Dent’s Bears did a lot of that through the complexities of their unique “46” defense, but they also did a lot more.
They bruised people.
“We kind of took on the world, with records and videos and attitude and swagger, and with the philosophy of ‘It’s not whether we’re going to win. It’s a matter of how much we’ll win by,’?” Dent said. During one three-game stretch of those Bears’ 18-1 season, they hammered Detroit, Dallas and Atlanta by a combined score of 104-3. Just last week, the legendary running back Jim Brown told Dent that those Bears (also known as Da Bears) had the greatest defense ever.
Brian Urlacher, the successor to George, Butkus and Singletary, nodded with a shrug when told as much on Wednesday during a media session at the team hotel. For one, he has been with the Bears for seven seasons, which means he has heard somebody mention the 1985 Bears’ defense nearly every day for seven seasons.
For another, Urlacher gets it. “We don’t compare to them. They’ve already won a Super Bowl, and just look at their numbers,” he said. “They did everything. They took it away. They sacked the quarterback. They intercepted passes. There have been games when we’ve been dominant, but they were dominant the whole season. Didn’t they give up something like 16 points during three playoff games?”
Ten, with two shutouts.
How many of today’s Bears would start for the 1985 Bears? Dent thought and thought, before saying, “Maybe two.”
Which two? Dent laughed while pausing to suggest that the answer really was either Urlacher or nobody.
Permalink | Comments (10) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Terence Moore
Hewitt must lift his game to stop slide
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Cognitive dissonance: I believe Paul Hewitt is a good coach, but I believe good coaches shouldn’t have lousy seasons.
Cognitive dissonance: I believe Hewitt is a better tactician than Bobby Cremins ever was, but Hewitt is 45-59 in ACC regular-season games (13-40 on the road). Cremins was 52-52 in his first 104 league games (18-34 on the road despite needing nearly three full seasons to post his second away victory). And Hewitt, it must be said, inherited Alvin Jones and Tony Akins and some measure of tradition. Cremins had to start from the sub-basement in a conference that was even stronger back then.
March Madness in Atlanta:
Paul Hewitt is a smart and decent man who’s a splendid ambassador for the Institute. I know no Tech fan who doesn’t want him to stay and succeed. (I know several who wish Chan Gailey would leave.) But Gailey, for all his critics, is 24-16 in ACC regular-season play and just won the Coastal Division. Hewitt’s teams are 6-18 in the league these past two seasons, and events of the past fortnight have been utterly sobering.
Tech lost at North Carolina, which was no great sin, but lost four days later at Maryland and was (troubling sign) less competitive than in Chapel Hill. Then the Jackets lost to Virginia Tech at home, allowing the clever opposition to make 59.5 percent of its shots. Then they went to Wake Forest, where surely even they couldn’t contrive to lose.
Tech got ahead early, which was news, but fell into the usual halftime hole. Still, the difference in resources was so conspicuous that there seemed no way the Jackets wouldn’t win at the end. This, however, was the final: Wake 85, Tech 75. This was the shooting percentage — 54.3 — amassed by the Demon Deacons, who’d already lost seven ACC games and who lost to Air Force by 36 points. If Wake is woeful (and it is), what does that make Tech?
Talent can be overrated, but it says something when NBAdraft.net has two Jackets slotted as lottery picks: Thaddeus Young this year, Javaris Crittenton next. It says something when a team is gifted enough to beat Memphis and Georgia and Duke but so unsound it has lost its past four games by an aggregate 49 points. It says the coach is underperforming, and that, I’m sorry to report, wouldn’t be the first time. The 2002-2003 Jackets had essentially the same guys who would play for the NCAA title in 2004 plus Chris Bosh, now an NBA All-Star, yet they missed the Big Dance. The 2004-2005 Jackets returned six of the top eight from their Final Four squad but lost 12 games and were routed by Louisville in Round 2. Last season was always going to be a transitional time, but a big-time program shouldn’t fall to 11-17 unless it’s on probation. Now this: 2-6 in the ACC.
I once thought I had a clear understanding of Hewitt and his methods, but I have no idea what these Jackets are trying to do. They don’t press much anymore because they can’t find anybody other than Mario West willing to defend, and their halfcourt offense, a precision instrument in the December dismissal of Georgia, goes through dawdling stretches where even patrons at Alexander Memorial Coliseum can be heard to yell, “Move, Jackets!”
I used to believe Hewitt was the game’s Next Great Coach, the ideal choice to hoist Tech upward after the Cremins regime ran out of ideas. Now I wonder if the successor has anything left to show us. I wonder if losing assistants Dean Keener and Cliff Warren has damaged Hewitt as much as the departures of George Felton and Perry Clark hurt Cremins. Mostly I wonder why I expect so much more when the cold truth is that, since its famous Final Four run, Georgia Tech is a chilling 44-37.
Permalink | Comments (46) | Categories: Mark Bradley, Tech / ACC
Atlanta’s unfit for Super Bowls
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Miami - Now this is the way it ought to be for a Super Bowl.
No snow (as in Detroit and Minnesota), and no ice (as in Atlanta or other places that don’t have an ocean or a gulf nearby).
It’s been a little chilly this week by South Florida standards. I even tried to turn on the heat in my hotel room the other day, but there was a problem: Most hotels in this city don’t have heat.
“Just flip off the air conditioning,” said the hotel desk clerk, giving her best way for guests to survive unseasonably low temperatures that were 50ish during the night and 60ish during the day.
That said, Miami is slated to have a high of 72 degrees today and near 80 degrees by Super Bowl Sunday.
I’m sure you already know that those numbers are blistering by, say, Georgia and Michigan standards. Atlanta’s predicted high this Wednesday is 44, with an expected low of a degree below freezing.
As for Detroit, don’t ask. Imagine sitting in the middle of an icicle. Imagine if the Super Bowl was in Detroit again this year.
Imagine the screams from fans who come to Super Bowls as a vacation.
Permalink | Comments (82) | Categories: Quick Hit, Terence Moore
Can Manning be The Man?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Terence Moore
Miami — No victories in four tries against those hated Gators. Despite gifted Tennessee teams, zero national championships. Two failures against Tom Brady and his Patriots before last week’s AFC thriller to reach the Super Bowl. There is a game on Sunday that Peyton Manning has to win, and he will.
He hasn’t a choice.
That’s why Manning is obsessed with getting it right this time. In fact, here’s the most impressive thing about his attempt to use his perfectionist ways to win the Big One for a change: After he spent barely a minute scooting the Colts 80 yards through New England’s defense and into the Super Bowl, he began to hear from elite quarterbacks from the past and present. He called some, but many called him.
The subject: How to make Manning end his first Super Bowl Sunday looking more like Joe Montana and Tom Brady than Fran Tarkenton and Jim Kelly.
Were Montana, Brady, Tarkenton and Kelly among those on the phone with you during the last few days? “I’d rather not disclose the names,” said Manning on Tuesday from his podium during the Colts’ portion of Media Day. He was surrounded by nearly everybody carrying a notebook and a camera in South Florida, which means the following was directed to the considerable masses: “Maybe y’all can go do a little research and a project for the week and try to find the names.”
Then Manning eased into a devilish grin before adding, “I can tell you who it wasn’t, I guess. It wasn’t [Vince] Ferragamo or [Craig] Morton. [Len] Dawson or [Bart] Starr. It wasn’t [Earl] Morrall, but you probably can figure it out. I was just trying to have a pretty good idea of sort of what I was getting into during the week, and getting some good advice.”
The advice likely was to remember that Tarkenton scrambled his teams into Super Bowl losses and Kelly operated as the antithesis of a Hall of Fame quarterback during the NFL’s ultimate game. Manning also likely was told to remember that a heavy dose of poise gave Montana four Super Bowl rings and Brady three.
Neither Montana nor Brady lost this game, and that means Manning has to win this game on Sunday to have a chance to become Montana or Brady.
And to have a chance to become free of his past failures in the Big One.
“Don’t they always show that commercial with Steve Young after he wins the Super Bowl that involves taking the monkey off his back?” said Colts backup quarterback Jim Sorgi, nodding in Manning’s direction. “This would be kind of the same thing. It was huge for us to win that game against New England to get here. But to shed all doubters and to get everybody off of his back, he has to get a Super Bowl win. It would relieve a lot of pressure and stress on him.”
Pressure and stress that neither Manning nor his best friend say exist.
Well, that’s what they say.
There was Manning, speaking of his father, Archie Manning, the former NFL quarterback who gave a younger Peyton Manning a quotation from Chuck Noll, leader of Pittsburgh’s dynastic teams. The older Peyton Manning now rattles off the words with ease, saying, “Pressure is something that you feel only if you don’t know what you’re doing. I really abide by that when it comes to preparation, and [offensive coordinator] Tom Moore and [head coach] Tony Dungy have exactly that same philosophy. They both worked for Chuck Noll.”
Brandon Stokley didn’t. Even so, the Colts wide receiver knows about the Noll Doctrine as the teammate closest to Manning through the years. Stokley contended that the combination of the big, bad Chicago Bears and the overwhelming lights of the Super Bowl won’t cause Manning to go from prolific to pitiful after the opening kickoff.
“He’s always the same person,” Stokley said. “What I admire most is that, after we beat New England, I probably would have stood up on the victory podium and given a few people [an obscene gesture]. You know, like ‘Look at me now.’ But he doesn’t do those things. He’s a humble guy. He goes about his business and works hard.”
Sounds good. It will sound better after Manning ends the week with his fingerprints on the Lombardi trophy.
Permalink | Comments (24) | Categories: Falcons / NFL, Terence Moore
