What's it gonna take?
Only one thing could get The Flus fired in-season and he might have done it
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The Bears are, if nothing else, a franchise paralyzed by tradition. I guess it makes sense since they have nothing else to cling to. They’ve won one championship in the last 60 years. In the 48 years since they won their only Super Bowl they are 4-12 in playoff games. They have retired so many numbers that they have to beg the NFL to let them do it now.
One tradition they seem to really honor is the one where they never fire a head coach during a season. In the 104 seasons before this one they have never had an interim head coach. It doesn’t hurt those odds when the owner coached the team in 40 of those seasons, but still the guys who coached those other 64 haven’t all been Mike Ditka.
All last week Bears’ fans bleated non-stop about the humiliating Hail Mary loss to the Commanders and like Air Boss Johnson in Top Gun they wanted some butts.
And it was all just a waste of time and blood pressure points, because if embarrassing losses were enough to get a Bears’ coach fired during a season they’d have a history of more interim coaches than permanent ones.
This week was all about the Bears putting that embarrassment behind them. They had a winnable game, on the road against their old city rivals, the Arizona Cardinals. The greater Phoenix area has far more Bears and Cowboys fans than Cardinals fans, so this game would be road game in name only. Plus, the stadium operators decided to really make the Bears feel at home by leaving the roof open so that it could rain and hail on the field during the second quarter and turn the footing to shit, just like the Bears like it.
Instead, the Bears’ offense sputtered along for an entire game after doing it for three quarters last week. Is it bad when you have a bye week and then in 87.5 percent of the quarters after that bye your offense can’t manage a single touchdown drive?
