C'mon people. I understand that the third game is the game that typically shows what you have so far. But it's still preseason. All I see and hear on various fourms and radio stations is people bitching and complaining... Chill.
Remember in 2008 when the Lions were 0-16? Well guess what, they were 4-0 in the preseason.
I know there are some concerns on this team, and I agree. But for what it's worth right now, it's just preseason. We need to chill.
I hate hearing... "Wtf is Cutler doing. He threw 2 ints, he had 7 months to work on this!!!!! blah blah blah"
"This defense blows. we suck, blah, blah, blah"
This is definitely an issue I want to get to tomorrow night on the show, especially as applied to the Bears.
Never once have I heard anyone decry the Bears' lack of wins so far this season. Not a single time have I heard that from anyone. The point of watching and critiquing pre-season play is not to predict how many interceptions Jay Cutler will throw, how many TD's the defense will give up or even how many losses the Bears will have. Likewise, you can't take too much from INT's in the pre-season, lack of a running game, receiving yards, missed field goals, special teams TD's, whatever, almost all of the things we judge a team by during the regular season, none of them matter or are predictive of any future success or failure (I don't know if this is statistically true, but it's a safe assumption, I would guess).
That being said, what you
can critique and value are the individual microcosms of on-field play, all of which combine to give you those regular season valuations (TD's, INT's, points, Wins, Losses, etc.). For instance, it doesn't matter that Jay Cutler has been sacked a bunch and on the run for most of the pre-season; as much as I like to make fun of it, it really doesn't matter. What
does matter, though (at least more so than the culminating sack), is that Chris Williams has been easily beaten by athletic ends to the outside, and what matters even
more is that Williams still struggled to maintain his blocks and keep his man off of Cutler in a game where the preparation was much like a regular season game. Again, the specifics of what happened
because Williams got destroyed are inconsequential, but the specifics of
how and
why Williams was getting beat does not bode well for the regular season.
Furthermore, the fact that the Bears D was soft underneath and unable to get to the quarterback promptly against both the Raiders and Cardinals is at least somewhat dubious in meaning when applied to forecasting the regular season. However, what we
can reasonably take from those happenings is that the D is questionable as far as depth goes, as we saw Hunter Hillenmeyer unable to bring down the ball-carrier multiple times and Chris Harris take bad angles to the ball and miss assignments.
Now is not the time to be looking at total yards and points and other macro-level results, but looking at the lower-level happenings that
play into those results is certainly justified.
Again, this is a topic I'm hoping to cover tomorrow night, and we want to hear from all of you fans, because this is definitely a chance for some lively debate.
