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DEL.ICIO.USBears 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
Comments
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By Najeh Davenpoop
January 31, 2007 09:50 PM | Link to this
There was also no salary cap in 1985. It’s not so easy anymore to keep a team together featuring multiple Hall of Famers.
By Steven
January 31, 2007 11:55 PM | Link to this
Even though the game has changed (salary cap, different rules, etc.) I would agree with both Dent and Moore here that the 85 Bears were a superior team, indeed, one of the best of all time. Regardless of whether the Bears win this weekend or whether Indianapolis wins, I doubt that either will be viewed historically in the same light as the 85 champs, which is not to take away from whoever wins this weekend. Personally I always find Moore’s columns interesting. He has a good historical grasp of the game and he’s reported on it a long time. If he occasionally writes about race in the context of the sporting world, he’s just reporting on the way things are in this country.
By Observer
February 1, 2007 08:38 AM | Link to this
WHO CARES??
The fact is that the 2006 Bears are in the freakin’ Super Bowl, for Pete’s sake. If they win, they won’t give a darn about how they compare to other Super Bowl teams!! Geez, quit always trying to bring folks down…
By Chris Brown
February 1, 2007 10:05 AM | Link to this
I loved those Bears, they were great! Thanks Terence for bringing back some good old memories. That was a fun time in the NFL and those Bears were great. They played the game the way it should…in the trenches. it was more talk about what they did on the field as opposed to off!
Todays Bears are good, but they aren’t GREAT. Keep up the good work Terence…and thanks for the trip down memory lane.
By Jones
February 1, 2007 10:16 AM | Link to this
Dent laughed while pausing to suggest that the answer really was either Urlacher or nobody.
I know Terence Moore is a Harold Pinter scholar, so he can read into what a “pause” means with absolute certainty.
By Jim Davis
February 1, 2007 11:09 AM | Link to this
The Brains of the ‘85 Bears’s “46 Defense” was free safety Gary Fencik (#45).
And the strong safety was Doug Plank (Coach of the Georgia Force). That dude could hit!
Fencik is a Yale undergrad, Northwestern MBA and an investment banker in Chi-town with a VC fund.
By Ryder
February 1, 2007 11:23 AM | Link to this
The Ravens’ defense of 2000 was better than the Bears of ‘85. The only reason anyone even remembers that Chicago team was because of their personalities off the field, not because of what they did on the field.
By Lewis Grizzard
February 1, 2007 11:31 AM | Link to this
There were only two things better about the 1985 Bears, Ditka’s sweater vests and hairdo. The latter of which has stood the test of time..
By Jones
February 1, 2007 11:31 AM | Link to this
The Ravens’ defense of 2000 was killer.
By HarleyDavidson
February 1, 2007 01:11 PM | Link to this
TM, I agree with your article because a lot of the 85 bears players will make the hall of fame, much like the steelers players of 78. However, if the Bears win the championship this year against the Colts, this years Lombardi Trophy will he identically the same as the Lombardi Trophy that the Bears won in ‘85. THERE WILL BE NO DIFFERENCE IN THE TWO TROPHIES IF THIS YEARS BEARS PULL THE UPSET IN SUNDAYS GAME AGAINST THE COLTS. THE 85 BEARS WILL ALWAYS BE TALKED ABOUT AS ONE OF THE BEST SUPERBOWL TEAMS EVER BECAUSE THEY WERE SO DOMINANT AND THEY OVERPOWERED PEOPLE ON DEFENSE. However, they will achieved exactly the same thing as the ‘85 Bears so they should be proud of their accomplishment if they can pull it off.