Just How Bad were Marc Trestman’s Bears? (Pt. II)

A longform exploration of a crucial period.

Exordium

Come in. Have a cigar. Fix yourself a drink, and rest a spell, if you please. It’s been a while.

In the early months of 2020, I wrote an article titled “Just How Bad were Marc Trestman’s Bears?”, adding with an eye towards my surely glorious future as a longform sportswriter the untactfully ambitious subheading “Pt. I.” In the article, I closed my writing with some smug valediction about what I would be covering in the surely soon-to-be-written-and-released “Pt. II,” which would necessarily be the foreshortened domanial mismanagement of the Bears, and specifically the Bears defense, by transplant CFL coach (though a United States national by birth from the timberline of Minnesota) Marc Trestman. I say “necessarily” because, even though I had assigned the title “Just How Bad were Marc Trestman’s Bears” to this article, not a syllable of sportswriting was spent in scrutiny of either the 2013 or 2014 Chicago Bears seasons – the two years during which Marc Trestman was Bears HC.

This caused a paradox. True, I *did* intend to actually explain Just How Bad Marc Trestman’s Bears Were, in Pt. II – but Pt. II never appeared. Thus the first piece, “Pt. I,” well-intentioned though its title was, was misleading in the extreme. The piece did drive at the coming diluvial ineptitude authored by these Bears, so it wasn’t an unabsolvable falsity of terms, but it wasn’t exactly, well, accurate to what was promised in the headlining. But Pt. II never came about, its central question never investigated, its upshot never gotten around to. It was a half-composed concerto, a semi-devised disquisition, an opusculum in want of becoming an opus unto itself. And at times, I felt the haunting call of the incompleteness of this work nipping intermittently at me, jabbing me in times of idle reflection with the thought of a promise broken – even if the promise was primarily one made to myself and not an imaginary panoply of eager readers, which, as far as my site’s traffic indicates, has yet to manifest itself. Every so often I’d be reminded of that man, Marc Trestman, the guy who cut such a different figure compared to other rock-ribbed, square-jawed, manifestly meatheaded NFL head coaches’ physiques and physiognomies. The notion of the man would pop up now and again, both in my mind and in the news. He was briefly the head coach of the XFL’s Tampa Bay Vipers, a league and a team so ill-fatedly timed in their resurrection as to be almost comical on the world football stage; he features as a bit-part player in the 1985-focused episode of the amazing NFL Films series Caught In The Draft, uploaded to YouTube in 2021, during which he in his capacity as Minnesota Vikings RB coach desperately attempts an abortive recruiting endeavor of Miami’s Bernie Kosar, who he had been QB coach for in 1983 and ’84, which is an interesting-enough story to warrant its own, independent telling; he became increasingly invoked as the palpably maladroit spiritual predecessor to Matt Nagy, whose incapacity as an offensive mastermind eerily mirrored those of Trestman, though the latter differentiated his own personal blend of offensive shortcoming with perhaps more invidious conflictions between himself and the media; and just last offseason, he returned somewhat quietly to the NFL, joining on with Jim Harbaugh’s Los Angeles Chargers in the role of Senior Offensive Assistant, a move, though in no doubt not inconsequential, that probably was not intended as the sort of publicity stunt meant to quiet Harbaugh’s detractors who thought he might not be the right guy to maximize Justin Herbert.

I thought little of Marc Trestman otherwise. One does not do well to dwell on the obscure underachievements of a decade-old coaching stint which, though interesting to some, is forgotten by almost everyone who watches football casually, and is not memorialized very sharply by even the keenest football historians. Nor was it all that possible; even if I had gotten around to penning the second, climactic, finality-sodden chapter of the Just How Bad piece later in 2020, there could not have been much more excogitation on the topic besides. I mean, there’s only 32 games worth of stuff here to analyze – how much can someone possibly ponder Marc Trestman, especially when there are other things far worthier of the courtesy of one’s contemplation? The answer is, clearly, not very much, notwithstanding one’s attempts. 

But the reason Marc Trestman’s Bears were not accorded their sworn examination is due in small, almost negligible part to the subject matter’s self-evident insignificance comparative to the world at large or even to other NFL contemporary affairs. Rather, it is due almost wholly to my inability to continue down the path of the scribbling sportswrite at the same time that my life was changing from adolescence to adulthood. Sure, I was technically already a man by the time I published that first piece in 2020 (I was 23, a recent college graduate and not living at home), but I was not a fully-fledged professional worker bee, not an “employee” in any substantive sense. To be clear: I didn’t have a job. Well, sort of – I had something going, fairly cushy, while I was looking for a long-term job – but that didn’t really count. I didn’t have the weighty, cumbersome strain of responsibilities that would come with being a salaried 9-to-5 type guy who gets the pleasure of worrying, fretting, stressing, fearing, and despairing over the obligations of a job. In short, I had not collected and assembled all the clockwork of what the “expectation” of an American in the workforce called for. I was not living in financial freedom and I was without a clear path forward. In a way, the recognition of this liminal state allowed for my diversion in sportswriting to first blossom; it is amazing how productive you can be at something other than applying for jobs when your number one, most solemn and gravest priority is applying for jobs, and in my turn I channeled a surplus volume of motivation that could maybe have been better spent on careerist exploration into instead delving into the microscopy and minutiae of an NFL team whose defense had been my first and most indelible teachers of what fantasy football trauma is all about.

After COVID-19 began to spread across the world I moved back home. This allowed me time to focus even more than before on football writing, but still the drive, interest, and desire to finish the semi-engaging story of Marc Trestman and his sorry team eluded me. I reflect now a bit on what made me so interested in this story, and I find that I can pinpoint a single, crystallized, cynosural moment that captured my intrigue about this weird, backwards, defensively discommodious outfit. Take a whirl with me even further into the past.

Borrowed from the German TV show Dark, which is a fitting name to affix to any discussion of recent Bears history.

Ent’racte

When we think of bad defenses, our minds tend to wander towards the most well-known and notorious of the lot. There’s last year’s Panthers, who surrendered the most points ever in a season (over 17 games, the most any team’s ever played in a regular season, of course); there’s the 1981 Baltimore Colts, whose record those Panthers broke, who surrendered 533 in 16, the worst mark ever for a 16-game season, and a team we could describe as “deeply unserious” in 2020s argot; there’s the 2008 Detroit Lions, losers of all 16 games they played; and there’s the 1966 New York Giants, a team that played (on the losing end, of course) in the highest-scoring game in NFL history, and who also surrendered 47 or more points five times in a single season. In 1966.

These are the teams that are bad in absolute terms. They were godawful start to finish, no qualifications or caveats required to explain their heinousness. But their protective film of feebleness shields other, perhaps more subtly sickening defenses from the blazing scrutiny of football heads. And once we move past the simulacra of the most notably grotesque defensive units from the terra cotta army of defenses past, we can examine with more nuance the badness so artfully concealed by the infamy of better-known botch jobs. One such team is Marc Trestman’s Bears.

__________

Part Two:

Marc

__________

The Two-Year Torment, Year 1: From Mice of the Midwest to Microorganisms of Michigan Avenue

The 2012 Bears got rid of their coach of nine years on New Year’s Eve, shortly before the 20-teens launched upon the world. Lovie Smith, you’re fired. We’ve gone over the events leading to the ouster of the only man not named Ditka that was able to bring the Bears to the Super Bowl - late collapses in two successive seasons that saw them tumble unceremoniously from almost certain playoff participation and into the dustbin of What Could Have Been-level teams, notable only to neurotic football historians and aggrieved Illinoisan remembrancers. This team had an issue finishing, it seemed. And they had unmistakable deficiencies on offense - they averaged 14 points in their final 6 games in 2011 and 17 in their final eight in 2012. Change agent, inquire within.

IV. Regime Change: Tresting the Crown

The Bears, not as accustomed to head coaching searches as more volatility-besmitten teams, scoured the class of offensive prospects for head coach. They had elected to either actively or organically fall into the calming momentum of the pendulum-swing of head coach hirings – that is to say, searching for an offensive-minded head coach after spending a spell with a defensive-minded one. Lovie was as defensive-minded as they came, and though his mid-2000’s teams had been piratical, plundering, at times peerless turnover merchants who could regularly score on defense (scoring 7 defensive or special teams touchdowns in 2004, 5 in 2005, then an incredible 8 in 2006, 7 in 2007, and 5 in 2008), those days were long gone by the time he was a heated-seat coach who’d blown back-to-back late season sequences where he’d won at least 70% of his games by the time crunch time rolled around. The defense, which had suffered a hiccup in 2011, was still strong in 2010 (4th in scoring) and 2012 (3rd), but had gone from giving up 15 PPG in the first 8 games of 2012, where the Bears went 7-1, to 20 PPG in the second 8, where they’d gone 3-5. Meanwhile, the offense, which had averaged 30 PPG in the 2012 season’s first half, cratered to just 20 PPG in the second half. As a result, you would have expected the team, which was both scoring and allowing about 20 PPG over the final 8 games, to go 4-4, which would propel them to 11-5 and a certain playoff appearance (as it happened, back-to-back dreadful losses to Seattle and Minnesota in weeks 12 and 13 proved at season’s end to be above the LD50 of permissible losses, as those two teams stole the available Wild Card spots; wins in those games, both one-score heartbreakers, would have altered the fate of the 2012 Chicago Bears from playoff nonparticipants to division champions). 

The Bears’ ownership and front office were simply not interested in a defensive-minded head coach, and they insinuated their immense displeasure at the way the preceding seasons had gone by compiling a gigantic list of “candidates” spanning the offensive coordinator, special teams coordinator, and CFL head coach ranks (that’s our boy Marc alone in the third category). And by “gigantic,” I do mean gigantic by NFL standards. They targeted an initial list of 13 names, including their own incumbent special teams coordinator, Dave Toub – which, I mean, c’mon, when has a team ever hired someone from the previous head coach’s staff after they fired the guy and had it work out? The other twelve were Mike McCoy (Broncos OC), Rick Dennison (Texans OC), Mike Sullivan (Buccaneers OC), Peter Carmichael (Saints OC – they probably weren’t interested in the 2012 Saints’ DC), Tom Clements (Packers OC), Darrell Bevell (Seahawks OC, of some notoriety years later), Bruce Arians (Colts OC), Keith Armstrong (Falcons special team coordinator), Joe DeCamillis (Cowboys STC), Mike Priefer (Vikings STC), and finally Marc Trestman, who had coached the Montreal Alouettes since 2008 and won back-to-back Grey Cups in 2009 and 2010. As unorthodox as it would be to hire a coach from the CFL to coach an NFL team, hey – they could do worse. This bloated list of candidates, and the absence of any acting DCs on said list, seems to send quite a message: The Bears were sick of the defensive focus Lovie had preached during his tenure. Offense and scoring would be the focus.

As an aside – would you be amazed to know that, of all the OCs listed above, the one that led the worst scoring offense the previous year was Bruce Arians? With the benefit of hindsight, it seems clear that he would have been very obviously the best choice for the Bears to hire, but the course of NFL history may have been very different – and probably lamer – had he packed his Indianapolis bags and traveled north to the banks of Lake Michigan. Let’s be glad his career as HC flourished the way it did in Arizona and Tampa. It turns out that the Bears missed badly on the Bruce Arians train – but that wasn’t even close to the best possible candidate available in the early months of 2013. The Bears, though they would have been direly pressed for time, declined to speak with Andy Reid. You know, Andy Reid. The guy with the rings. Big Red could have been...Big Blue? The Giants sort of own that title already, so maybe Big Navy? Oversized Orange? It doesn’t matter, it didn’t happen. But it was there for the taking.

Surmising that head coaching experience of any kind trumped whatever offensive or special teams specialists could bring to the dance, the Bears decided to hire Marc Trestman on January 16, 2013, beating out the Cleveland Browns for his services. The Browns and the Bears were the only two teams who interviewed Trestman. The Cleveland Browns of 2012 had also fired their previous head coach, Pat Shurmur, on New Year’s Eve, axing him at the exact same moment in time that Lovie Smith was having his mortal ursine coil shuffled off by the McCaskeys and GM Phil Emery. The Browns took a different tack, hiring Cam Newton’s previous offensive coordinator, Rob Chudzinski, to call plays for...Brandon Weeden?

Relationship with the quarterback would be crucial for Trestman, as Jay Cutler was in the final year of a five-year contract and coming off a deeply disappointing season during which he only threw for 3,033 yards and committed 15 turnovers (with seven other fumbles that his team managed to recover). The Bears needed clarity at the QB position by 2014, and it was hoped that Trestman – who, you’ll remember, so tenaciously and resolutely recruited his quarterback Bernie Kosar ahead of the 1985 Supplemental Draft, as a real guy’s guy – could figure out how to enkindle the flashes of fantastic play that Cutler had shown at points in Denver and on Lovie Smith’s Bears into full-blown inferno.

Unfortunately for Cutler, Trestman, and the Bears, Cutler’s 2013 was cut short by injury, resulting in his starting only 11 games. Despite this, he equaled his touchdown-pass production (19) from the year before by the end of the season despite starting four fewer games. He dramatically reduced the amount of sacks taken, too, halving the times he got dropped in the backfield from 38 in 2012 to 19 in 2013. And it must be said that Cutler began the season as well as any year of his career to that point, setting the Bears franchise record for passing yards through six games.

All you really need to know about the first six games of the Bears’ 2013 season is that they happened and they weren’t particularly notable except for Cutler’s progression as a QB. The biggest immediate improvement for the Bears came in the form of Cutler’s heightened ability to avoid sacks, and the offensive line’s ability to hold up for him better to find a trio of supremely desirable playmakers in Brandon Marshall, Alshon Jeffrey and Martellus Bennett - potentially the best WR1 —> WR2 —> TE combination in the entire NFL in 2013. Yes, really. Having Earl Bennett as a WR3/slot option and the ever-objectionably underrated Matt Forte as a checkdown option made Cutler a very lucky man indeed. They were 3-0 after three games despite surrendering over 20 points in each but then dropped a weird one on the road to Detroit, 40-32, when the Lions scored 27 points in one quarter (the second quarter). Thirteen points in the other three were enough for the Lions to best the Bears, making their quest for an undefeated season a short one. Flukey. Then the Saints traveled to Soldier Field, and in a strange Saints season that saw the Fleur-de-Lis-helmeted defense finish 4th in scoring after finishing 31st in 2012 and dropping back down to 28th in 2014, New Orleans bested Chicago 26-18. 3-2, the Bears were. They got the cupcake Giants next, and even though Eli Manning was well on his way to authoring an abominably munificent season in the realm of turnovers, the Bears were able to merely squeak by the Giants instead of blow them unmercifully out, 27-21. This brought them to a date with RGIII’s Washington Redskins. But let’s hold for a moment.

4-2 going to Washington. Cutler had been more than good enough - no ifs ands or buts about it. He’d passed for 1,630 yards through these six games, an average of 272 per. He’d thrown 12 touchdowns to go along with all these nice yards. If healthy, he’d certainly approach his career mark of 4,526 yards, and would almost surely exceed his touchdown PR of 27. He had thrown 6 interceptions, true, but 3 had come in desperate, comeback-seeking pursuit of Detroit, whose wild performance in Week 4 ensured a haphazard afternoon passing for the Bears QB. It was his first year with a new coordinator, after all, and 4-2 was a great place to be. The defense had clearly not been great - but we’ll come back to them.

As one can see, Cutler was solid. But it was the other Bears QB who was absolutely magnificent. Enter one Josh McCown. 

Josh McCown had a fascinating NFL career, and though at the time of this writing he is employed as an NFL coach on the Minnesota Vikings (strange, in fact, that he has not received his “flowers” to anywhere near an equitable level with the Vikes’ head coach, Kevin O’Connell, for the incredible work he performed with The Darnold in 2024), this held true even in 2013. By that time he was a 10-year NFL vet whose most notable action came late in his second year on the Arizona Cardinals, who were mired firmly in their “ocular abomination”-uniform phase where they wore allover-red-printed jerseys with generic white block numerals on them. If you aren’t familiar with these, look below, but be sure to wear some sort of eye protection before gazing upon them:

An old Emmitt Smith, in the very worst finery of his career, receiving a handoff from a young Josh McCown.

His most impressive moment from that 2003 season was easily the ridiculous Hail Mary-esque touchdown he threw to NFL nonentity Nate Pool on the final play of the year, which knocked the Minnesota Vikings out of the playoffs and birthed one of the most threnodial radio calls of all time from play-by-play man par excellence Paul Allen. But McCown was eminently forgettable, bordering on benchable, his remaining years in the desert, throwing 20 touchdowns to 21 interceptions over the following two seasons. He then spent a year on the Detroit Lions in 2006, where he was asked to play wide receiver in a game against the Patriots which also featured Mike Furrey, who himself was a two-way player who occasionally played free safety. Dan Campbell was also on that team. This, after the Lions had drafted wide receivers in the first round in three consecutive drafts between 2003 and 2005. What the hell was going on in Detroit in 2006?

After this McCown signed with the Raiders, where he floundered on an awful Oakland team alongside old nemesis Daunte Culpepper, the guy he’d bounced from the postseason in 2003, before they both gave way to JaMarcus Russell. By 2008-2009, he was backing up Jake Delhomme on the Carolina Panthers, and spent the 2010 season in the United Football League. His career looked over. But he got a second chance (or fifth chance, depending on how you see it) in the NFL with Lovie’s Bears in 2011, where he again threw more interceptions than touchdowns. He saw no action in 2012.

If you’re thinking that it’s unlikely the sixth time would be the charm for a longtime NFL journeyman who had once been asked to switch to wide receiver and had only once, ten years prior in 2004, thrown more touchdowns (11) than interceptions (10), then you’re not alone. McCown threw exactly one pass before halftime after replacing the injured Cutler against Washington in Week 7, assisted by a zero-play offensive scoring drive that saw Devin Hester take a Washington punt to the house and an ultra-long Redskins drive eat up the rest of the half. Despite this, Josh McCown and Matt Forte (mostly Matt Forte, who ran for three touchdowns) led the Bears to 24 second-half points, tying their season-high (they’d already scored 24 points in a half three times before this, somehow) but still ended up falling to a red-hot Washington team, who racked up 45 total points. With 41 points scored, the Bears still lost. That’s only happened 34 times in 105 seasons of NFL play. That’s Marc Trestman’s defense for you. We’ll get back to that side of the ball.

If at this point McCown had been sat down in favor of QB3 Jordan Palmer, it would be one of his best seasons. It would have been only the second time in 12 seasons that he threw more touchdowns (1) than interceptions (0). Going off the sample size, Trestman may have been justified in doing just that. But he stuck with McCown, which proved more fruitful than anyone aside from maybe Josh McCown’s wife could have imagined. The next week, McCown started against Chicago’s hated enemy the Green Bay Packers, where he outgunned overmatched stand-in Seneca Wallace at Lambeau Field, piling up 291 total yards, two passing touchdowns and zero picks for a 90.7 passer rating – only the 13th game of his career he’d eclipsed the 90.0 passer rating mark. Seneca Wallace had a woeful day, throwing for only 114 yards and taking four sacks. Seneca Wallace is no Josh McCown. This game was best remembered, though, for Packers QB Aaron Rodgers lasting even less time in this game than Cutler had the week before, with Rodgers eating a brutal Shea McClellin takedown on the first third down of the game which broke the signal caller’s collarbone. The Bears were better prepared for their QB1 going down than the Packers were.

By the midpoint of the season the Bears were 5-3 and caught in a chaotic triskelion atop the NFC North, with their victory over the Bears and a certifiably wild Lions win in Dallas on the preceding day (McCown’s first start had come on MNF) fixing the Lions, Bears and Packers with identical 5-3 records. Poor Minnesota was in the sewer one year after Adrian Peterson’s godlike return from an ACL injury, anguishing in a 1-7 dungeon. The next four games would be torturous for the Bears, though, despite the unexpected and now fully blossoming renaissance of their heroic QB2. They faced those exceptionally fun 2013 Lions the next week back home at Soldier Field, where Cutler made a surprise return to the lineup after a foreshortened recovery from his Washington injury. He played moderately well through three and a half quarters before a Stephen Tulloch hit that wounded the QB’s groin sidelined him yet again, leading to a punt and a potentially game-icing drive from Matthew Stafford that moved the Lions’ lead from 14-13 to 21-13. It was a surprise special episode of The Josh McCown Show for the second time in three games. With 2:28 left, McCown led a Caleb Hanie-like drive off the bench, going 6-for-9 and firing a broken-pocket touchdown strike to Brandon Marshall with seconds left in regulation. Now down 21-19, they needed to go for two. The first attempt, a rollout to the right with Dante Rosario and Matt Forte as the only viable options in an appallingly uninspired playcall, resulted in McCown being gangrushed by the Lions front seven and tossing an incompletion out of the endzone. Willie Young, Lions DL #79, was called for roughing the passer, though, and the Bears got a second crack at it from the 1-yard line. This playcall was even more grandly disastrous than the first, though, as an ill-fated sweep from Matt Forte was stymied instantaneously in the backfield. Onside kick failed, and there went the ol’ ballgame. 

McCown was really being let down by his coach and his defense. In back-to-back, badass, exhilaratingly extemporaneous outings, he’d forced his team to the very brink of triumph before soggy-cardboard pass D or cerebrally vacuous playcalling had doomed his and his teammates’ chances at glory. And given what he’d shown through one start and two emergency relief appearances, there’s little to suggest that had McCown gotten to start the two games he’d appeared in without starting the game the Bears wouldn’t have won both. At any rate, this intradivisional stumble would cost the Bears dearly. 

It certainly didn’t help that the Bears’ next opponent was the defending Super Bowl Champion Baltimore Ravens, but the Bears had a few advantages in this one that the birds didn’t. For one, the 2013 offseason and free agency had wreaked havoc on the Ravens’ starting lineup, with both starting ILBs (the other being Dannell Ellerbe) and both starting safeties (HOFer Ed Reed and Patriot Killer Bernard Pollard) departing along with pass rusher Paul Kruger, center Matt Birk, and perhaps most damaging of all, wide receiver Anquan Boldin. The 2013 Baltimore Ravens were as different a team a year removed from a Lombardi as almost any, especially considering the sharp drop in production suffered by newly minted highest-paid player in the NFL Joe Flacco. One thing they did manage to do was supplement their FB room, which had consisted of only Vonta Leach, with FB of the future Kyle Juszczyk, but other than that, the Ravens offense was worse in every way in 2013. The other advantage the Bears had, other than roster continuity (outside of head coach) was that, with five minutes left in the first quarter and following two Ravens scoring drives, inclement weather forced a nearly two-hour game stoppage while tornado conditions swirled around Chicago. This obviously led to the players getting “cold,” as they say – and no one is better coming onto the field cold than Josh McCown. The Ravens had, of course, had recent experience with overlong pauses in gameplay, as a power outage in the Superdome had forced a halt in action during their Super Bowl victory months nine months earlier, but it should be noted that the purple birds were outscored 25-6 by their foes the 49ers after this lull in action.

The run-blocker beside the field of fog.

After a long intermission, during which I like to imagine Josh McCown provided a reminder to his team that for them to lose during windy conditions at home in the Windy City would be tantamount to an existential crisis, the two teams took the field again. McCown didn’t start out supernovally, but he did get them to the goalline for a field goal and finally got some defensive help from DE David Bass, who did his best J.J. Watt impression by leaping high on the edge to intercept a Joe Flacco flat pass which he returned for a touchdown. 10-10. This was officially a Joe-Josh Joust. Flacco bounced back from the pick and led a scoring drive capped by a Torrey Smith touchdown, and after a punt from the Bears Flacco threw another interception, this one to Jon Bostic, which allowed McCown to drive the Bears into field goal range before the half. 17-13 at the halfway point.

The Ravens got the ball to start the second half, their drive stalling around the Chicago 30-yard line. With pitiless kicking conditions making the likelihood of a long field goal negligible, the offense went for it on 4th and 8. An interesting down and distance. But Flacco was sacked by the backside rush from Cheta Ozougwu, and the Bears took over. They could do nothing with the football, and punted. Baltimore could do nothing with the football themselves on the next drive, so they punted. As the fourth quarter dawned, Trestman began to entrust McCown to toss the ball around again. After hammering the Ravens with Forte and Michael Bush, McCown shot a go-ahead touchdown pass to Forte to go up 20-17 with 10:42 left. The two teams exchanged punts, and after running a bit of time off the clock, the Ravens got the ball back with 4:55 to go.

A late lead and 5 minutes left? This was defensive meltdown time. Baltimore proceeded to mount a ponderous, plodding drive that devoured what remained of regulation before the Bears D finally stiffened, if just enough to forestall an all-time heartbreaking loss, at their own 3-yard line. Justin Tucker then sent the game to overtime.

This game, which had already lasted an eternity, was approaching record-breaking status as overtime broke. Despite winning the toss and getting the ball at their own 36 (!!!), Baltimore could only move the ball 18 yards, and on 4th and 5, in Bears territory, they punted the ball back to the Bears. Were it not for this abject expression of surrender, the Marc Trestman era may have had yet another loss in its unattractive annals for the balladeers to belittle. As it was, the Bears were for once bailed out by another team’s disgraceful deportment, and after a punt of 26 net yards, McCown piloted the Bears straight down the field, using a 43-yard Martellus Bennett catch to set up Robbie Gould’s game-winner from 38 yards out.

Looking back on this game, I had forgotten about the midfield cowardice displayed by John Harbaugh in OT – this wasn’t a terribly memorable game for a non-Bears fan when you discount the weather delay and the utter interminableness of the contest. But being reminded of the overtime punt, I simply had to know how lily-livered this was, so I plugged the numbers into Jon Bois’s proprietary Surrender Index to gauge the pusillanimity. At a soul-rending value of 35.39, Harbaugh’s horrid prostration sits in the 98th percentile of cowardly punts since 1999. Great job, John. Given how long the game had already gone on for, the fact that they were punting to Devin Hester, and the fact that they gained a grand total of 26 net yards for their troubles, it boggles the mind at just how complicit and compliant the Ravens were in tying their own football noose in this game.

Through his four games, McCown had thrown for 5 touchdowns, no interceptions, and 754 yards, good for a pristine 100.0 rating. And he was not even close to his best yet. But despite his out-of-the-blue feats of football dash his defense was sagging. And they plummeted pungently to Earth the following week against St. Louis, who though in the midst of a patented Jeff Fisher 7-9 season were embarking on a strange two-game interlude where they smashed the Colts and Bears back-to-back by 30 and 21 points, respectively. As a Colts fan, I distinctly remember this sequence being spiked by the outrageous explosion of Tavon Austin onto the NFL scene – in these two games he accounted for 443 total yards and 4 touchdowns. There was nothing McCown could do to get his team a W in this one. Even though he had one of the best days of his career – 36-of-47 for 352 yards, two touchdowns and one very permissible interception when the game was out of reach in the last two minutes – the Bears defense stabbed him traitorously in the back yet again. McCown had pulled the Bears to within 6 in the 4th quarter, but the Rams simply plowed through the Bears defense on the next drive to make it 35-21 with three minutes left. Benny Cunningham and Kellen Clemens – yes, really – authored 3 straight plays of double-digit yardage before a nine-yard Cunningham touchdown run cemented it. The defense buckled, and then to join their confederates in disesteem, the special teams did too, with Devin Hester fumbling the ensuing kickoff, recovering the ball at his own 10-yard line. McCown played valiantly on the final meaningful drive, completing four straight passes to reach near midfield, before the ever-underrated Robert Quinn beat Jermon Bushrod immediately off the snap, forcing a McCown fumble that Quinn then returned for the punctuating touchdown – the late-game icing-on-the-victory-cake that Chris Berman would have called the ”Oh by the way…” score. 

It got even worse the next week in Minnesota. The Vikings, who were having a dreadful season, made microscopic mincemeat of the Bears on the ground and through the air when they were on offense. The combination of Matt Cassel and Christian Ponder, no great shakes, combined for 283 passing yards between them, while Adrian Peterson and Cordarrelle Patterson added a whopping 246 yards on the ground (211 came from Peterson). Still, McCown, with the help of a 120-yard rushing day from Matt Forte, gave the Vikings everything they could handle, throwing for 355 yards and a pair of scores, with 249 of those yards coming from Alshon Jeffrey’s magnificent receiving day. This game was only the fourth, and to date most recent, game in NFL history featuring multiple players surpassing 200 yards from scrimmage. This should have been a no-doubt-about-it win even despite the massive days from the Cassel-Ponder-Peterson trio, though. McCown piloted the Bears to two third-quarter touchdown drives, both of the scoring plays beautiful and merciless catches from Alshon Jeffrey against a totally overwhelmed Vikings secondary. McCown took the field again in the fourth quarter nursing a three-point lead, but a broken pocket play where he tried to flip the ball forward Brett Favre-style to Forte bounced off a kneepad, ended up in tackle Kyle Long’s hands, and was quickly fumbled away to Minnesota. The defense had a rare moment of greatness on the next series, though, with Danny Trevathan intercepting a bobbled pass and otherwise certain touchdown. But Matt Cassel’s best play on the day came on this same snap, because he channeled his inner Ben Roethlisberger and managed to redirect Trevathan enough to allow another Viking to catch up and start to gang tackle the linebacker. Forte, continuing to hurt the Bears down the stretch, gained almost nothing on the next three snaps, all runs, forcing a punt back to the Vikings. Pinned against their own goalline with under two minutes left and only two timeouts, the Vikings fell to the brink of defeat and faced a 4th and 11, but Jerome Simpson – yeah, the front-flip guy – caught a 20-yard pass to keep the drive moving. Splash plays from John Carlson, Jairus Wright, and another from Simpson got the Vikes into field goal range, which Blair Walsh knocked in. The ensuing drive from Chicago did feature a massive 57-yard return from Devin Hester, but with time enough for only a few plays, Robbie Gould was forced to attempt a 66-yard field goal, which Cordarrelle Patterson returned after it fell short for a few yards. In overtime, McCown continued to play incredibly on his first drive, gaining two first downs in two passes before a drop by Brandon Marshall and a poorly-blocked screen brought up a 3rd-and-11. Here McCown faltered, waiting too long and trusting Jermon Bushrod too much, whose unenviable task it was to block Jared Allen. Allen sacked McCown, who fumbled, but the Bears retained the ball and punted. Spooked by this, after a wild Minnesota drive that saw Walsh miss a 57-yard field goal after his previous attempt had been good but neutralized by an utterly inexcusable facemask penalty on the kick attempt which forced the unspeakable “post-fireworks field goal attempt,” Trestman called five straight Matt Forte runs on the following Bears drive, which brought up a 2nd-and-7 at the Vikings’ 29. Why do I bring up this surely interstitial down? Because it wasn’t interstitial. With more than 4 minutes left in overtime, and a timeout, and with TWO MORE DOWNS to work with on this chain-length’s worth of plays, Marc Trestman actually decided, unbelievably, to settle for a 47-yard field goal attempt. Believably, Gould missed, and the football gods, probably wishing both to stop-up the cascading flood of Weird Football that had burst with diluvial furor upon the Minnesotan field and to spare the Vikings a second tie in two weeks (they’d fought Green Bay to a standstill the week prior), permitted in their infinite mercy the Vikings to drive right down the field and end the afternoon with a blissfully accurate Blair Walsh game-winning field goal. 

I could barely believe my eyes when I looked at the box score play log, and then the actual game broadcast, which indicated the game management malpractice committed by Marc Trestman in overtime. It positively boggles the mind. And to borrow a phrase so often unfairly utilized, in this particular instance, I really don’t think there is any explanation for not trying to get more yards. On second down, with two timeouts left and four minutes remaining in overtime, there is no excuse for attempting a 47-yard field goal. The team had turned the ball over once all afternoon on a flukey play and were in no position to need to try putting the ball in the air, risking an interception. There was no aspect of urgency to the play. And there was no reason to think, after gains of 7, 4, 9, 1, and 3 by Forte, that they couldn’t exact even more yards from the flabby Vikings run D. So why the Hell did Trestman think this was a good idea? For the life of me I could not come up with any excuse, whether genuine or whether flimsily invented from the perspective of a self-defensive and probably embarrassed head coach, that could conceivably lend any sort of explanation for kicking a 47-yard field goal on second down with time to spare. I was so bamboozled by the stupefactive inanity of this decision that I decided I needed to scour the internet for Trestman’s postgame comments, secure in my certitude that the beat writers covering this game were intelligent human beings with equal capacity for bamboozlement as I. Thankfully this was easy to find, as the Bears’ own website heads the video of this particular media availability “TRESTMAN EXPLAINS DECISION TO KICK ON SECOND DOWN.” Easy enough. What had Marc to say about this outrageousness? His response was simple: “Once we got inside the 30-yard line, we were gonna kick it.”

What? WHAT??? The 30-yard line was the target? WHY??? Even though I know that NFL head coaches, with their unimaginable work schedules and stress-swamped lives, are not always thinking about how to phrase a dispatch from the press podium with the mot juste of a master conversationalist, this ludicrous answer should have been understood by Marc to be a poor one before he ever uttered it. Regardless, this was insane. Gould’s kick from 47 yards was the same distance that the 1990 Bills had to settle for in their attempt to win Super Bowl XXV – that kick sailed right, going wide and falling off into the dusk along with Scott Norwood’s career. Robbie Gould’s kick did the same. Trestman continued to dig his ditch of ignominy unprompted, though, and noted that another reason they wanted to kick the ball was that they’d gotten the spot of the ball to the middle of the field. Again, you wonder if any of these thoughts had been actually thought-out before they were uttered. Good sir, if it’s second down, you can run whatever kind of play you like on the following snap, and still have the option to “center” the ball on third down!!! Teams do this ALL THE TIME! Worse than all of this, though, even coming as it does as largely an afterthought, is the fact that Trestman actually used his final timeout before the kick – after Gould had taken the field. Indeed, the man iced his own kicker. On second down. With four minutes left. It is in no wise hyperbolic, I think, to say that this rivals Nathaniel Hackett’s special teams hecatomb in Week 1 of 2022 against the Seahawks.

Even though I felt confident that I’d satisfactorily proven the lunacy of Trestman’s illimitably illogical argument for the suitability of this decision to myself, I needed to seek other professionals’ opinions on this, just to make sure others felt the same way about this bizarre decision not holding up under close, or even hazy, scrutiny. Sure enough, one of my favorite early-2010s sports media units, TYT sports, had a special segment dedicated to commemorating the presencelessness of mind demonstrated by Trestman in the December Minnesotan air. “This is the worst decision I’ve ever seen a coach make, and we’ve seen coaches make some terrible decisions. Marc Trestman? Fired, today. Today, today, today, today, today.” Thank you for the affirmations, Ben Mankiewicz. I’m glad the Bears didn’t take your advice, though – how could I have written this series otherwise. 

Lost in the foofaraw about the kicking game silliness was the manifestly magical play of Josh McCown. This was someone who two years earlier, in his previous most recent extended playing time, had thrown two touchdowns to four interceptions. He was now up to nine touchdowns, a single interception, 1,461 yards and a passer rating of 103.6. Incredibly, if his season had ended here, he’d have finished 2013 with the sixth-best passer rating. It was an unusually beautiful year for passing across the NFL, due in large part to the two pitilessly efficient seasons posted by Peyton Manning and Nick Foles, who both posted seasonal ratings north of 115 (this has happened only 11 times in NFL history – that two of them would happen in the same year is nuts). Josh McCown’s 2013 season, *if* it ended after the loss in Minnesota, would put him behind Manning, Foles, Phillip Rivers, Aaron Rodgers, and Drew Brees.

 But it didn’t end there.

On December 9th, 2013, Josh McCown played perhaps the greatest game a Chicago Bears quarterback had ever played.

V. Royal Procession: Joshua the First

On the night they retired Mike Ditka’s #89 jersey, Iron Mike himself was not the star of the show. He was the rich interlude, the meat of a wonderful sandwich. Don’t get me wrong – Mike Ditka is a stratospherically fantastic personality whose richness of élan actually belies just how great of a coach he was in the 11-year period between 1982 and 1992 as HC of the Chicago Bears. It’s a tragedy he had the misfortune of co-existing with the West Coast 49ers, the Big Blue Wrecking Crew Giants, and the Hogs Redskins – if even one of those semi-dynasty (or fully-blown dynasty in the case of the 49ers) it’s a virtual certainty he would have more than one Super Bowl ring. But Ditka’s Bears – especially the sacrosanct 1985 team, the greatest in NFL history, but also the criminally forgotten ’84 and ’86 teams – are too dense a trove of NFL legendry and living history to be properly chronicled here as an aside in a much different story. But they were good. Mike was good. Incredibly good. Anyway.

On December 9th, 2013, the Bears found themselves at 6-6 with 4 games to go. For any sort of chance at the division or even the playoffs, which they grievously diminished their chances at seizing through a less-valuable out-of-conference win versus Baltimore and with their dismaying tumbles against St. Louis and Minnesota the previous two weeks,  they would most likely need to win out.

Winning Out is a scary term in sports. It means “be perfect for the rest of the year.” Only one playoff team per year is ever able to do that (naturally, since ties aren’t a thing in the NFL playoffs), and only a handful of teams each year even go into the playoffs on a winning streak. The previous two Super Bowl Champions, the 2024 Eagles and 2023 Chiefs, were walking shakily on two-game winning streaks going into the postseason, with neither streak featuring eight straight uninterrupted quarters of play from their starters (you can do that when you get to play the fair-weather dalliers that are the late-season Cowboys and Chargers). The previous champs, the ’22 Chiefs, had lost a December game in Cincinnati before embarking on a six-game streak which featured numerous close shaves against the awful Nathaniel Hackett Broncos and Lovie Smith Texans. And a year before that, the 2021 Rams had lost their season finale against hated enemies San Francisco, which they needed to win to steal the 2-seed against eventual postseason opponents Tampa Bay. Those same Tampa Bay Bucs from a year earlier had dropped two straight games 27-24 against LA and Kansas City going into their late bye before facing a procession of football corpses in Minnesota, Atlanta, Detroit and Atlanta again to ride a four-game, offensively godlike streak into the playoffs. None of those teams “had” to win out to make the playoffs, either. The whole reason we play 17, once 16, soon to be 18 games is because that’s how many we feel like we can get away with playing without risking too much injury while getting a long, good look at 32 teams. The NFL is nothing like the other major North American professional sports in this regard: after 82 games in the case of the NBA or NHL, or, unfathomably in comparison to the NFL, 162 in the case of MLB, there’s positively no argument that a team “is” or “isn’t” its record. You can’t say that a team jelled too late if 41 games, almost four dozen contests, separate the beginning of the season from its midpoint. The MLB season is even worse, being two games short of equaling two NBA or NHL seasons, and eight games short of ten individual NFL seasons. As George Will, polarizing former sports scribe and, puzzlingly, occasional PragerU contributor said in an interview for the magnificent Ken Burns Baseball documentary, “You know when the season starts that the best team is going to get beaten a third of the time. The worst team is going to win a third of the time. The argument over 162 games is that middle third.” As fun as it probably is to track baseball teams over 1,500 innings, it is manifestly and diametrically opposite to the NFL. 16 games. There is no margin for error whatsoever. Even a single slip-up can be costly – in fact, of all the hundreds of teams who have started 0-1 since 1940, only 224 have gone on to make the playoffs, or about 30% of all playoff teams. Only 12 Super Bowl Champions lost the first game of their season. At 0-2, the odds begin to close in sharply – only 52 teams have gone on to make the playoffs after dropping their first two, with only three Super Bowl champions counted among them. And when you fall to 0-3, your chances are basically dead, with only six teams since 1938 losing their first trio of contests and making the playoffs. It’s happened once this century, to the very weird 2018 Houston Texans. Only two teams since 1940 have ever made the playoffs after not winning a single one of their first four team games, and one of these was the Buffalo Bills of 1963, who tied one game and still only finished 7-6-1. The 1992 San Diego Chargers are the only team in the history of pro American football to fall to 0-4 and still make their postseason. That should show you how hard it is to dig out of a hole – and how important a four-game stretch is.

At 6-6, and with four games to go, you’d think the 2013 Chicago Bears would have made life easier for themselves than the harrowing improbabilities of teams that drop their first few games make for early-season losers. But incredibly, being at .500 with four games to go carries even worse odds of your team eventually making the playoffs than starting 0-1 does. Think about it. To finish with a winning record, which is often – not always, but often – an understood prerequisite for making the playoffs, you need to win three out of four remaining games, which is always tough to do. If it was easy teams would be finishing 12-4 a whole lot more than they currently do. To be close to assured of a playoff berth (again, not certainly assured, as the 10-6 2012 Bears proved, but close to assured), you need to win all four. Only 157 teams, since we started playing postseason football in 1932, about 21% of all playoff teams, have ever won all four of their final quartet of contests going into the postseason. About two teams a season. This is what Winning Out is, and it is not easy.

Because of their infuriating three-game, 1-2 stretch that saw them win, rather unconvincingly, one interconference game and drop two in-conference ones to terrible opponents, the Bears had basically no breathing room. They would have to defeat the playoff-hopeful Cowboys in Chicago, beat a bad Browns team on the road in December, beat a very good Philadelphia team in Philly, and then beat down the Packers once more at home. Aside from the everlasting disaster that is the Cleveland Browns offense, which would finish 27th in scoring in 2013, the Bears’ opponents were 5th (Dallas), 4th (Philly) and 8th (Green Bay) in scoring O at season’s end. But the Bears themselves? They would finish second. Behind only Peyton Manning’s record-setting Denver offense. And it happened this way in great measure because of the heroism of Josh McCown that cold December night in Soldier Field. 

Ultimately, you don’t need all that much to happen to win a game of football. In paucis verbis, all you really need to do is outscore your opponent. That is the only way to win a football game. In slightly more specific terms, you just need the opponent’s defense to be worse than your own offense. And as awful as the Bears defense was and would continue to be, for one night only, Big D’s D played smaller than Chicago’s. And Josh McCown took full advantage. After establishing the run with Matt Forte and Michael Bush before hitting an open Earl Bennett for a score on the opening drive, McCown began to unsympathetically vivisect the Cowboys’ laggard defense, doing a convincing Joe Montana impression that saw him move gracefully inside the pocket, step upfield to avoid pressure when it rarely came close to him, make broken-play completions out of the pass-protection envelope and finally run for an Elway Copter-esque touchdown to make it 14-7. The Cowboys tried to respond with a smattering of tactical Tony Romo throws and DeMarco Murray runs, and after a brief, effective drive that saw Murray carry the ball 5 straight times bookended by two Romo throws and completions to tight ends Gavin Escobar and Jason Witten, the latter for a score, the game was tied. From here, though, the Bears mauled the Cowboys in every which way. They dominated time of possession, holding the ball 23+ minutes to the Cowboys’ 12. They embarked on a gluttonous scoring junket, reeling off five straight scoring drives for a total of 28 unanswered points during which the Cowboys possessed the ball for only 13 plays and gained only 35 yards. The Bears held the ball for over 12 minutes in the third quarter alone, scoring 17 points on 3 drives. The Cowboys had as many scoring drives as the Bears had total negative plays. The Cowboys punted three more times than the Bears. That’s because the Cowboys punted three times, and the Bears did not punt. The sallow imaginings of the Cowboys offense and defense were nothing in comparison to the imaginative, improvisational might of the Josh McCown Career Game, which is a wild sentence to type but is borne out in the viewing of this game.

The Bears scored on every possession until their last, which came with 6 seconds left in the game and the Bears leading 45-28. This was due unquestionably to the blinding brilliance of Josh McCown, and a discombobulatingly pliant Cowboys defense. The Cowboys gave up on average 272 passing yards, 2 passing touchdowns and a ridiculous 31 points in their final five games – all of them against QBs who were not their team’s week 1 starter. Yes – those numbers above are the Cowboys’ passing defense numbers against backup quarterbacks in 2013 (they did face the two-man-band of Nick Foles and Matt Barkley earlier in the season after Michael Vick exited the lineup, performing more admirably by limiting the duo to 209 yards and three interceptions). If we remove the numbers of an organism called “Matt McGloin” from these figures (the Cowboys played the Raiders before their game with Chicago), the numbers skyrocket: over their final four games in 2013, all against former backups thrust into the starting role under center, the Cowboys gave up 1,050 passing yards, the same number of touchdowns (11), and 2 interceptions, allowing opposing passers a supreme passer rating of 109.3. They went 1-3, winning their lone victory 24-23 against the Kirk Cousins Redskins. But Josh McCown was the star of this group, far and away. When the atomic dust that was once the 2013 Cowboys defense settled into the sepulchral turf of Soldier Field, the stats were sanguinary in aspect: 27-of-36 for 348 yards, four touchdowns and no interceptions. That’s through the air. He added three carries for 16 yards and that rushing touchdown, too. Subtract a lone sack for a loss of seven yards and he finished with 357 total yards and five total touchdowns without a turnover. Only 12 quarterbacks, ever, have thrown four touchdowns, ran for another, and accounted for 350+ total yards of offense without turning the ball over. And Josh McCown is one of them. Unbelievably, three of those other 12 quarterbacks are named Drew Brees. Because I lied. There have only been 10 quarterbacks who reached the above marks. Drew Brees just happened to do it three different times (no one else did it more than once). And in typical Brees fashion, whereas the nine other QBs to accomplish this feat went undefeated in their games and won by an average score of 47-27, Brees only went 2-1, despite scoring 46 points in his lone loss (a memorable late-season game against the eventual NFC champions 49ers in 2019, in which a failed 2-point conversion for New Orleans proved the difference in their 2-point, 46-48 loss). Even more fittingly, another quarterback on this list, Ryan Fitzpatrick (the very same) accomplished his 4-1-350-0 Club membership audition against Drew Brees, in another memorable game from week 1 of the 2018 season, which the author of this piece remembers as perhaps the greatest week 1 razor in Eliminator challenge history. Across just 12 separate 4-1-350-0 games in NFL history, Drew Brees was involved in four of them. Remarkable.

But this is about Josh, not Drew. This was a performance from the very stars, which were certainly aligned, and which only the most wholly in-the-zone, fearlessly flow-state-immersed passers have ever accomplished. It could be argued it was the sort of performance that could and should make a head coach think twice about who the long-term starter should be. It certainly is the sort of performance that ought to give a head coach pause about who should get the nod for the rest of the year with three games to go and an on-fire backup clearly outplaying the season’s initial starting QB. At the very least, at the minimum threshold of expectation, it should have given Marc Trestman an easy decision on who to play against the next opponent, the Cleveland Browns.

VI. Dual Monarchy: The Cutler Does It Again

There are several reasons for this. One, we should answer the question that beggars an answer: where was Smokin’ Jay, as he was becoming known around this time, during this interlude of incredible QB play from his erstwhile backup? It turns out that, despite his lack of onfield action, November and December of 2013 were eventful times for the one-time Vanderbilt Commodore from Santa Claus, IN. For one, he publicly disassociated himself from the image of him as a vehement smoker of cigarettes, dealing a grievous blow to early Meme culture operatives who thought he looked like exactly the avatar of apathetic resignation who would have a lonesome dart hanging from his mouth as he trotted off the field. According to ESPN writer Michael C. Wright, when pressed on the subject and asked how many packs a day he smokes on November 18, Cutler said “I don’t smoke at all, bro. I hate cigarettes.” (If you think I’m exaggerating when I say “early meme culture,” the photoshopped image of Cutler with a lit cigarette in his maw originated on Tumblr of all places.) He also had to face the pressure of being briefly profiled on the Daily Herald along with his physical therapist, John McNulty, in an article titled “The man (and machine) behind Cutler’s recovery,” which anointed the wound Cutler suffered on October 20 against the Redskins as “the most talked about groin injury in the NFL.” Quite burdensome stuff, you ask me. On the less trivial side of things, Cutler had been awaiting a glorious, Return-of-the-King-style resumption of royalty on the throne of Bears quarterback for longer than he initially thought he would (with some sources pointing to December 1 as a potential return date for the QB in the days after initially suffering the injury against Detroit which thrust McCown into the role) – but McCown had been already been playing gloriously. There’s only so much gloriousness to go around, and McCown was no Denethor to Cutler’s Aragorn. This should not have been as easy a decision as Marc Trestman ultimately made it out to be. In what has to be one of the most pusillanimous instances of damning-with-faint-praise – and simple understatement – in the history of NFL coachspeak, Trestman voiced the following thoughts in the week leading up to the Browns game, the first featuring a rehabbed Cutler: “Josh has done exactly what we’ve asked him to do – he has performed very, very well as a backup.” That quote per the Chicago Tribune.

Several, perhaps many, unintentional mistakes are made by Trestman in that assessment, but the two worst are 1. The notion that the Bears asked Josh McCown to throw 13 touchdowns to 1 interception over a four-game stretch as starter, and 2. The idea that he played well, as a backup. That unceremonious verbal engraving on Josh McCown’s 2013 season headstone should appall and aggrieve anyone who watched the Joshaissance take glorious form during the Bears’ November and December offensive hot streak. Blech. There might be nothing so unwholesome to connoisseurs of coachspeak as a back-handed, deflective, evasive caveat meant to diminish the doings of a high-performing backup who is about to lose his job. Sure, it’s worth remembering that Cutler only lost his job due to injury, not performance, but you could not have asked for anything better from McCown over this sojourn as The Guy for Chitown. 

Regardless, Trestman made his bed. Now he had to sleep in it. On December 15, a cold, windy day epitomizing the rigors of Chicago pro football conditions, the prodigal son returned. Jay Cutler re-entered the starting lineup against the Cleveland Browns, hoping to prove his coach right (who, truth be told, had consistently and unwaveringly, even stubbornly, adhered to the dictum that Jay Cutler was and would continue to be their QB1 whenever he was healthy, saying as much as far back as November 19) and probably also hoping to make a statistically-substantiated good impression on his general manager, Phil Emery, with a looming contract negotiation awaiting him upon the expiry of his existing deal, which was in its last year in 2013. He looked good in his first drive, propelling the Bears offense to a few first downs through the air and causing FOX Sports color commentator Brian Billick to assert “Jay Cutler looks awful comfortable...if they don’t get more pressure on Jay Cutler, he’s gonna cut them up.” Well, either the Browns defense had jerry-rigged their helmets to play the FOX broadcast and sought to disprove Brian Billick, or the broadcaster had just pronounced the least longevity-blessed prognostication of his commentary career, because Jay threw an interception in the endzone to Tashaun Gipson on the very next play. The Jason Campbell-led Browns then punished the Bears defense with a 44-yard wide receiver screen to Greg Little before seeing their drive sputter out and settling for a field goal.

Things were not going well for the Cutlerssance through one drive. On his first drive back from injury replacing a red-hot stand-in, he’d committed a red zone turnover which led to enemy points. It was a 180-degree change from what Josh McCown had done against Dallas the week before. To atone for this, he led a 15-play, 75-yard drive that reached the Cleveland 5 but still only ended in a field goal. It’s better than leading a 15-play, 75-yard drive that ends in a turnover or a punt, but come on. All this did was effectively bring the Bears offense back to zero instead of -3. Campbell threw an interception to cornerback Zack Bowman on the next drive, but Cutler could do nothing with this possession, so they punted. The Browns could do nothing with their next possession, so they punted. This game of touchdown-phobic hot-potato was in need of excitement, the Football Gods decided, and on the ensuing Bears drive, Cutler threw his second interception of the day, again to Tashaun Gipson, who proceeded to careen through the Bears’ futile squad of tackling-drill-needy offensive players down the right sideline for a James Harrison-esque, convoy-aided pick six. 

This was as bad a situation as the Cutler-helmed offense could have possibly found itself in. The game was only 10-3, but all of Cleveland’s points had come at Cutler’s turnover-prone expense. The marks that the two Chicago quarterbacks had put up on the seasons now stood at 13 touchdowns apiece, but McCown had thrown only one interception all year – Cutler was up to 10 in nine games. To give you an idea of how prolific Josh McCown had been, and how sloppily giveaway-liable Cutler was, if you combined the two passers’ stats through week 15, you’d have the same number of touchdowns, interceptions, and a touch more yards than Patrick Mahomes ended up with in his 2024 campaign. Josh McCown had basically produced half of a 2024 Patrick Mahomes season, with almost no turnovers, in about a quarter of a season’s worth of play, and he couldn’t keep his job. What a world.

Through four drives, Cutler had a passer rating of 46.79. The day, the Bears’ season, and perhaps the future of Jay Cutler as CHI QB1 looked to be in dire peril, if not irretrievably lost. But after starting 8-of-13 for 104 yards and 2 interceptions, Cutler threw Mr. Nice Guy aside like a crumpled paper cup whose fill of Gatorade has been quaffed and went nuts on the Cleveland pass defense. He proceeded to go 13-of-18 for 161 yards and 3 touchdowns the rest of the afternoon, good for a 139.12 rating, while the rest of the players, both Brown and Bear alike, seemed to self-destruct by turns. The final score was 38-31, Bears. As good as Cutler was after his two terrible turnovers, though, this final score is misleading. The Browns defense actually scored another defensive touchdown, this one at the expense of Martellus Bennett, who fumbled a Cutler completion which was scooped and scored by T.J. Ward, to make it 24-17 Browns heading into the final quarter. This was where Cutler shined, though, leading Chicago to three straight touchdown drives (the final capped with a Michael Bush rushing score). That’s only four touchdowns, though, and the final score would seem to indicate that the Bears scored five. And they did, off a Zack Bowman interception return that was just one yard shorter than his opponent Tashaun Gipson’s scoring stroll earlier in the game. This was a weird, weird game. In fact, it’s one of only 10 games in NFL history featuring two different defensive players who each intercepted multiple passes and took at least one of them to the house. Even more incredibly, these two teams have combined to proffer two such games – the other a 42-0 Browns beatdown of George Halas’s Bears in 1960. Weird! That’s how a game that should have been tied 10-10 at the beginning of the fourth quarter if it were absent of defensive scores instead became 24-17 to start the final stanza. This is the sort of thing that happens, to be blunt about it, when out-of-practice QBs are thrust into the starting role. (Jason Campbell had started for numerous games prior to this one, but, as is the theme of this piece, he was not the Week 1 starter. He wasn’t even the second QB to see action, as he took over for an injured Brian Hoyer, who himself had taken over for an inept Brandon Weeden. But we needn’t delve any more deeply or darkly into the QB genealogy of the post-1999 Browns here.)

8-6. They were 8-6. Halfway from 6-6 to double-digit wins, which should be enough to get you into the playoffs. This would be even better than “getting in,” though – 10-6 would be enough for the NFC North division title in 2013. 2012 was different – even though they got to 10 wins, the almost-always-magic-number, the Bears had fooled around too much in mid-December, dropping two backbreaking one-score in-division games to the Vikings and Packers, which meant they didn’t control their destiny. Thanks to a magical, 2,000-yard-eclipsing performance by the Vikings’ own Purple Jesus, Adrian Peterson, against the Packers in Week 17 of 2012, the Bears missed out on tiebreakers to Minnesota (a 2,000 yard rusher should be the in the playoffs, anyhow). But 10 wins would be enough for a playoff home game this year, a stunning turnaround in circumstance from the previous season. Two. More. Wins. 

The road to 10 wins would not be easy. The Bears faced two NFC powerhouses in their final two games, both of whom had proven themselves capable and good at piling up preponderances of points on bad defenses. The first was Philadelphia. After ditching Andy Reid, who was definitely at the end of his coaching usefulness, on New Year’s Eve 2012 (the same day that the Bears fired Lovie Smith), hitched their wagon to Chip Kelly, erstwhile Oregon Ducks head coach who had more or less revolutionized early 2010’s college football offensive philosophy with his hurry-up spread attack. While some more outlandish concepts of the spread offensive scheme had to be mothballed upon his arrival in the NFL, the Kelly hallmark of running as many plays as possible in as short an amount of time as possible had prevailed through his first season with the Eagles, and through this philosophy the Eagles had gone from a team that accrued 5,665 yards in 1,079 plays in 2012 skyrocketed to producing 6,676 yards in 1,054 plays in 2013. They tied with Peyton Manning’s 600-point-club Broncos for the league lead in average yards per play. But this wasn’t all due to Chip Kelly alone. Michael Vick had begun the season as the Eagles’ starter, seizing the QB1 slot with a great preseason (and probably the helpful perception that his dual-threat skillset made him the best suited of the Eagles’ QBs to run Kelly’s offense) after several seasons of serious cooling-off from his heyday with Andy Reid in the latter half of the 2010 season. But after a great Week 1 game against the Redskins – which incidentally I remember watching live and being both astounded and terrified at the pace of the Eagles’ offense during – Vick lost steam quickly, losing his next three starts (including a turnover-free, 460-total-yard-surpassing loss against San Diego) and failing to crack even 15 completions in a game after Week 2. He was then injured in Week 5 against the New York Giants, ceding the job to Nick Foles, who played capably enough in relief to earn Vick an official win as a starter. The job was now Nick Foles’, and he would not give it back.

The insane story of Nick Foles’ career is too long and amazing to be written of in any great detail here, but suffice to say, he came out of absolutely nowhere in 2013, enkindling an efficient offensive inferno each week which when all was said and done amounted to a 27:2 touchdown-to-interception ratio, the second-best ever among qualifying QBs. It’s really difficult to overstate just how near-impossible a ratio of 10:1 or above is to achieve in the NFL, and Nick Foles was well on his way to accomplishing a 13.5:1 ratio. Only one other player in NFL history with qualifying sample size had registered a 13:1 touchdown-to-interception ratio to that point. He was on the Bears and his name was Josh McCown. He had lost his job to a man who had less than a 2:1 such ratio. C’est la vie. But even though Jay Cutler was decidedly not on his way to authoring a passing season for the history books, he had played well enough in his sporadic, oft-interrupted action to set the pregame Eagles-Bears Week 16 line at Eagles -3.0. Since this game was being played in Philadelphia, it means that the handicappers who handle this sort of thing thought it was probably more or less a pick ‘em on a neutral field, maybe with a slight edge to the Eagles. The over-under was 53.5. If you sit down and do the math, you could figure that Vegas thought this game had a good chance of ending up somewhere in the neighborhood of 29-26, Eagles. 

Well. That’s not what happened. 

The Eagles butchered the Bears in this game. It was the sort of game you just don’t see happen in the NFL very often. Philadelphia inaugurated the incineration of their Chicagoan opponents by sacking Jay Cutler on the third play of the game, taking possession at the Chicago 43-yard line after a pitiful 25-yard punt, and going all 43 yards in 6 plays, finished off with a Riley Cooper touchdown. 7-0 PHI. On the ensuing kickoff, Devin Hester, the greatest return man of all time, fumbled the ball at his own 36 after what could have been a breakaway kick return, giving possession immediately back to Philadelphia. This prompted Cris Collinsworth to muse “Boy, now you have to worry if you’re the Chicago Bears about the avalanche starting.” A prophetic pronouncement. Nick Foles immediately completed a 27-yard pass to Zach Ertz, and four runs later the Eagles were in the endzone again on a LeSean McCoy run up the gut. 14-0 PHI. Eric Weems, a different Chicago returner, who it must be noted was not Devin Hester, decided to take matters into his own hands on the next kickoff, holding his ground in front of Hester and fielding the kick himself, surprising the Windy City Flyer, who almost somersaulted over Weems trying to field the kick. The Bears again went run-run-pass, gaining only 5 yards with some Forte runs before Cutler threw incomplete to bring up 4th and 5. Chicago had to punt again. The Eagles had to go significantly further on their next drive, starting at their own 28-yard line, and Chicago even managed to get the Eagles’ O to a 4th down, but this sticky situation was quickly remedied with an 11-yard LeSean McCoy run on 4th and 1. A few plays later the Eagles were in the endzone again on a Foles-to-Brent Celek touchdown pass. 10 plays, 72 yards, 21-0 PHI. The game was over, for all intents and purposes. The Eagles had scored three offensive touchdowns and Jay Cutler had thrown one pass. It’s not that Jay Cutler and the Bears offense couldn’t come back from a 21-0 deficit – Cutler-led teams scored at least 21 points in 76 of his 153 career games, just one game less than 50% - but the prospect of the appetizingly unredoubtable Bears defense to hold down the Nick Foles/Chip Kelly Eagles enough to let Cutler and Co. work their magic enough to even the odds was an impossibility. Nothing could be done. 

The game continued to go as it had been going after the Eagles’ third and essentially game-clinching drive. To look at the drive chart of this game is to peer into baffling, almost unfathomable vistas of cosmic football horror. After surrendering touchdowns on their first three drives, the Bears still remained dedicated to conservative, field position-driven game management. They punted two more times on their following two drives, down three scores, including on a 4th-and-2 at their own 43. Seriously, what is the worst that could conceivably happen in that scenario if you decide to try and pick up a first down? In Trestman’s mind, the answer must have been “something even more awful than going down by more than three scores,” because they punted all the same. This time, fantastically, the defense was able to force a Philadelphia punt through a Nick Foles sack and some poor playcalling by Kelly, but after regaining possession with a chance to make it at least a two-score game the Bears short-circuited in explosive fashion, sauntering all the way to the Eagles’ 19 but taking a combination of sacks and penalties in the successive set of downs that brought up the comedic down-and-distance of 4th and 28 from the Eagles’ 37. For a drive to both reach the enemy’s redzone and still end in a punt is outrageous in extremis, but somehow it happened.

The defense was able to tourniquet the hemorrhaging, somewhat, after they’d taken the 21-0 point-blank bazooka blast in their first three drives, and the offense, dismal as it had been through most of the first half, managed to squeeze in one measly field goal before the half ended – right at the gun, from the Eagles’ 32-yard line. Only five yards upfield from where they’d elected to punt, to be sure, but a field goal nonetheless. Things were looking up again to start the third quarter when the Bears forced a long Eagles drive to conclude in another punt, but the brilliant Philadelphia punt pinned Chicago inside their own 2-yard line. Matt Forte was immediately tackled for a safety to make it 26-3, and the post-free kick Eagles drive resulted in yet another touchdown. 33-3 PHI. The deficit was growing lugubrious in magnitude. Chicago finally got a break after another punt to the Eagles was quickly absolved by a Brent Celek fumble, after which the Bears embarked on a 12-play touchdown drive capped by a Jay Cutler-to-Brandon Marshall scoring strike and a further Earl Bennett 2-point conversion. An interesting time for Trestman to call for the aggressive move of going for 2, considering that getting a 23-point deficit to a 22-point deficit didn’t help them in the mathematics of possessions, but whatever.

That was the last time the Bears would score. Blanking the Bears in the fourth quarter, the Eagles scored three more of their own touchdowns off of such names as Chris Polk, Brandon Boykin, and Bryce Brown (that second guy is a defender, by the way) to make the final score 54-11, Philadelphia. That’s more than enough to cover the 3-point line Vegas had saddled them with. Their 54 points scored also were enough to hit the “over” bet – by themselves. All told, the Eagles outscored the Bears 42-0 in the first and fourth quarters. They also outscored them 12-11 in the second and third. An evil, unholy smackdown, and a truly unusual Scorigami that will probably stand alone as the sole 54-11 final score for a long, long time.

Nothing else really needs to be said about this game. The Eagles were an unstoppable offensive machine in 2013 once Nick Foles entered the starting job: aside from a bizarre two-week intradivisional stretch in late October when the team scored 10 total points in back to back games against Dallas and New York, the Eagles scored at least 24 points in all games featuring Foles. Six of those twelve games saw the team score over 30 points. They also scored 30+ in the first two games with Michael Vick. I thought this was a lot – scoring 30+ in half of your games is not a small accomplishment – and indeed they tied for second-place in most 30-point games (San Francisco also scored 30+ eight times). Denver, in Peyton’s 55 touchdown season, scored over 30 points thirteen times.

9-6 8-7. A win away from a winning season. A loss away from .500. A win, at home, away from the North division title. Win and in. Win – and in.

VII. Warring States: The Beginning of the End

If you weren’t watching football in late December 2013, then you were missing out on some special, special playoff seeding drama. The intrigue of who would be in and who would be out, across both the NFC and AFC, was complex, volatile and adrenalizing. Even though the Bears had dropped a mephitic stinker in Philadelphia on Sunday Night Football the previous week, they still controlled their own destiny going into Week 17 courtesy of their divisional neighbors being the horrible Vikings, the infuriatingly inconsistent Lions, and the hated enemy – the Green Bay Packers.

 You could write a longform of similar length, breadth and depth as this one on the 2013 Green Bay Packers. Coming off of a humbling loss in the 2012 Divisional Playoffs, and specifically a pitifully pliable defensive performance against 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick who dog-walked Clay Matthews and company for 444 total yards, 181 (!!!) of them rushing, the Packers were in need of significant upgrades on the side of the ball that tries to stop their opponents from scoring points. It didn’t really happen. They were 24th against the pass, 25th against the run, 24th in total yards and 25th in scoring. They were a comparatively 2000 Baltimore Ravens-ian 22nd in turnovers. By any measure this team was squarely in the bottom quadrant of defenses in 2013. And this is sad, because the team was outstanding on offense. Although their passing touchdowns (25) and interceptions thrown (16) were relatively mild, they managed to eclipse 4,000 yards passing and 2,000 yards rushing, something only 25 teams ever did in a 16-game season. As one of three teams to do this in 2013, it put them among company such as Tom Brady’s Patriots, who were obviously good, and Nick Foles’ Eagles, who we know from our reading were good. But the Packers had one gigantic difference between themselves and their Bostonian/Philadelphian counterparts – they did it with so. many. different. GUYS. For one, they, the ’13 Eagles, and the 2000 Denver Broncos are the only teams to reach 4K/2K without a 3,000 yard passer (Nick Foles cracked 2,800 yards in his 10 games and change). In fact, the 2013 Packers saw four different quarterbacks take meaningful snaps, including our old friend Seneca Wallace and something named Scott Tolzien, who somehow threw for 717 yards in 2.5 games (one a relief appearance). Scott Tolzien! But the 2013 Packers didn’t just have multiple guys throwing passes – they didn’t even have a 1,200 yard rusher. Their leading rusher, rookie Eddie Lacy, managed to get to 1,178 yards, but that’s still 800+ short of the 2,000 threshold. For that, they had to get solid contributions from guys like James Starks (493 yards), rookie Jonathan Franklin (107), wide receiver Randall Cobb (78), backup QB Matt Flynn (61), our boy Scott Tolzien (55), fullback John Kuhn (38), free safety M. D. Jennings (6 yards – perhaps on a fake punt?), and one other person – starting quarterback for the Green Bay Packers, Aaron Charles Rodgers. You know him more as a passer.

There is no one like Aaron Rodgers. On his best day, he is probably the best quarterback who has ever played the game of football. On his worst day, he is still better than most other NFL starters. And he doesn’t often have bad days. After a good-not-great first season in 2008 upon assuming the mantle of GB QB from Brett Favre, Rodgers had been almost unquestionably the best quarterback in the NFL, averaging 4,300 yards, 36 touchdowns and a ridiculously efficient 8 interceptions between 2009 and 2012. He won the Super Bowl in 2010, of course, and even though 2011 and 2012 had both ended in playoff heartbreak, he had played good-to-unstoppable in almost every playoff game he’d suited up for, with the only blemish being a poor showing in the 2010 NFC Championship which the Packers still won. Longtime readers will remember that game, and recall their opponent in that fateful contest.

But 2013 had not been Rodgers’ year. At least, the second part of it hadn’t been. That’s because he hadn’t been playing, due to injury. Prior to breaking his collarbone in Week 9, exactly halfway through the season, Rodgers had been his usual awesome self, on track for a by this point typical 4,400 yard, 30 touchdown, 8 interception season. As an aside – the fact that this would be an average to below-average Aaron Rodgers season statline during what I’m calling his prime (roughly 2009-2021), is arrestingly awesome. But missing the next 7 games would necessarily preclude him from any end-of-season awards consideration, as well it should have – you can’t win MVP with 2,200 yards, 15 touchdowns, and 4 interceptions, no matter what the extrapolated stats would look like. Even so, there is at least an argument for the “value” of a player if their team immediately and disastrously suffers upon their leaving the lineup, and the Packers proceeded to do just that over their next five games, dropping their next two games to the red-hot Eagles and rotting corpse Giants, struggling to an inexplicable tie versus the Vikings, and getting blown out by Detroit on Thanksgiving. Their defense was horrendous, horripilation-inducing, hexed, et cetera – they were pathetic through their six straight winless weeks (including the 27-20 Bears loss), giving up 27 points three straight times to Chicago, Philly, and the Giants, allowing 26 in that tie to ‘Sota, and getting schmacked for 40 on Thanksgiving in Detroit. Their softness against the run in this stretch was ridiculous – aside from keeping the Giants in check for 78 yards, their opponents ran up 171, 204, 232, and 241 ground yards on them. With the defense performing like this, time of possession and wringing profitability out of as many drives as possible on O was paramount.

The offense, saddled with the languor of their defensive unit, couldn’t afford to be inefficient, but they were. They actually performed pretty admirably through the air and decently on the ground in this two-loss stretch, averaging 344 total yards per game, but they simply could not complete the translation of yards into points. They didn’t even really hit a lull in their yardage production after Rodgers left, but it didn’t show on the scoreboard: they lost by the identical score of 13-27 in their Philly and NYG losses despite racking up over 390 total yards in each game. Turnovers, in the form of Scott Tolzien interceptions, plagued them like the gout, giving the ball away 5 times through the air in these two losses. He finally exited stage left for Matt Flynn, someone who the Packers should have known would be a better option, who helped lead a 13-point “comeback” from 20-7 against the Vikes to salvage a tie. Sometimes coming off the bench cold and being throw immediately into the action can be helpful for a QB’s nerves. Or maybe being weighted with the anxieties of knowing you’ll be playing in front of God and everyone on Turkey Day is a bit too much for a career backup, as in Motor City the following Thursday Flynn started and was capital B Bad. He threw for only 139 yards, completed only 10 of 20 passes, and added a paltry 4 yards on the ground. He also threw an interceptions, lost two fumbles, and was sacked 7 times. He had the same number of “minus” plays as he had passing completions. Matthew Stafford, Reggie Bush and Joique Bell (remember him?) banqueted on the Packers’ soggy cardboard defense, running up 561 total yards in a balanced blowout that looked like a feast right out of the early 1950s Detroit glory days, when Honolulu Blue rattled off 11 straight wins versus the Green and Gold. They’ve come up before in this writing, but man did the Stafford Lions have so many chances to make a noise in the NFC playoffs; their bad Sundays simply outnumbered their good.

We’ve talked about “winning out” before, too, but for the Packers it was even more dire with 4 games to go than it was for the 6-6 Bears. The Packers could not reach double-digit wins, the accepted threshold for “probably should be in the playoffs” – their 5-6-1 record, a testament to their inability to tamp down bad teams’ offense, would preclude them from the 10-win club. The best they could hope for would be 9-6-1, which they could get to by winning out. Even so, they would need some help from outside. They could not afford to win out and have Detroit win out – at 7-5, and with a 30-point trouncing of the Pack fresh on everyone’s minds, they’d be two games ahead and the unquestioned North champs. Even if they lost to the D-scorching Eagles the next week, Detroit could still go 3-1 – with the Super Bowl-hungover Ravens, the terrible Giants, and the even worse Vikings composing their final three opponents – and still win the division, since even if Chicago equaled them at 10-6, the Lions would hold the season sweep tiebreaker over the Bears by virtue of their convincing (40-32) and razor-close (21-19) wins in Weeks 4 and 10. Detroit had it all in front of them, but sickeningly, they not only lost to Philadelphia – they lost out. Only 10 teams ever have done that, and you can bet these Lions got what they deserved. First, they blew an admittedly difficult, and eminently memorable, game in Philadelphia whose blizzard conditions and snowplow heroism from LeSean McCoy was reminiscent of the loreful 1948 NFL Championship game, which was also played in a driving Philly snowstorm and featured Steve Van Buren setting the then-playoff record for rushing yards in a playoff game. Incidentally, that was the first NFL championship game to be televised. This game was televised too, as all NFL games are now, but the picture quality was probably even worse than the ’48 championship. Seriously:

Football.

This game was close through three quarters, with the Lions actually leading, and the score reflected the Hyperborean inclemency the two teams were dealing with (14-6). But Philadelphia did to Detroit in the fourth quarter what they would do to Chicago in the first quarter two weeks later, glorying in a 28-point fourth quarter that came courtesy of Shady McCoy’s 148 final quarter rushing yards. I’m no expert, but that’s a lot. The Lions surrendered 299 yards on almost 50 carries, worn down into shivering shells of themselves by the time the final touchdown came from Eagles back Chris Polk, who was spelling McCoy. The Lions needed desperately to start winning football games now. On Monday Night Football the next week against Baltimore, though, the Lions let the Ravens hang around for far too long, letting a brilliant Matthew Stafford almost-game-winning drive go to waste when Justin Tucker kicked a 61-yard field goal at the gun to win 18-16 – remarkably, only his second-longest game-winning-field goal versus the Lions.

The Lions were in dire trouble now. By virtue of the rallies going on in Green Bay and Chicago, who had both won their last two, the Lions now needed to win their next game – forget both of them. The Lions had put themselves in the worst possible position two games past their 7-5 high-mark. Losing both of their next two games after Week 13 with the two relevant division opponents winning theirs had been unfathomable a fortnight earlier, but these were extraordinary times. To have a winning record they’d need to win their next two. These seemed like eminently winnable games, to be sure, but when your defense has had its back broken in consecutive fourth quarters one tends to look over their shoulder more than they should, which leads to the lethal contagion of football teams – self-doubt. And with multiple proverbial fractured vertebrae crippling the defense, a similarly spineless offense that hadn’t reached the three-touchdown mark since late November, and a coaching staff now perceptibly in peril of termination, the dam bust against the Giants, of all teams. Though they clawed back from a doomlike 10-point deficit at halftime, Stafford cocked and pointed the lethal pistol at his team’s playoff chances with a fourth-quarter pick six. It was his fifteenth interception in his team’s last eight games. Taking the Giants to overtime, regardless of outcome, was essentially their death sentence. A Josh Brown field goal later and the deed was done. 7-5 to 7-8, and out of the playoffs. In an afterthought of a Week 17 game that didn’t feature either Adrian Peterson or Calvin Johnson, the Vikings defeated the Lions 14-13 in one of the least notable games of the 2013 season.

The Lions are a frustrating team, and their fans know better than anyone that a strong regular season can go up in smoke in no time at all. The Bears and Packers fans knew that too, but unlike the Lions the bulk of their struggles had come in the early-to-mid season, not crunch time. And the Packers had a chance to seize control of the division with both Detroit (out of the playoffs) and Chicago (8-7, on life support) losing suckerpunch losses in Week 16.

The Packers, bereft of Aaron Rodgers still, had had to do some soul-searching after their prostration to the Lions’ offense on Thanksgiving. They had the good fortune of playing the woebegone 3-9 Falcons at home after getting turkey trotted in Motown, still only barely squeaking by 22-21 after shutting out Atlanta in the second half. Flynn played capably enough, averaging over 8 yards per attempt for the first time all season and reducing his number of Fumbles Lost by one (he still lost one and threw a pick, but, progress). Then it was off to Dallas to face the Cowboys.

We spoke a bit about these Boys earlier. Tony Romo was in the midst of one of his best seasons, but in a year defined by great quarterbacks being betrayed by awful defenses, perhaps no one was being made to suffer more despite wondrous individual performances than #9 for Dallas. Going into the Green Bay showdown, they at 7-6 and Green Bay at 6-6-1, Romo was at 27 touchdowns, only 7 picks, and 250 yards per game. In other years this sort of performance should have had his team gunning for a 12-4 or 13-3 season, but a porous defense that could not stop opponents late was giving up 27 points per game. Since their heart-stopping last-second loss to the Lions in which they let Calvin Johnson receive for 329 yards on them, they’d been giving up a stunning 32 points per game, including the bombing from Josh McCown and a 49-17 hellscape drubbing from New Orleans where the Saints set the record for first downs gained in a game – an unbelievable 40 in 80 plays. Matt Flynn was eager to get in on the fun, but the Cowboys methodically built a 26-3 lead that should have – SHOULD HAVE – been insurmountable. But alas. Flynn, who got a big assist from a monster day by Eddie Lacy, threw two third-quarter touchdowns to Jordy Nelson and Andrew Quarless to make it 29-17, then found James Starks on a well-designed play-action screen near the goalline to make it 23-29. A very questionable overturn of a near-interception by Tramon Williams allowed Dallas to continue a scoring drive finished off by an absolutely badass Mossing from Dez Bryant in the back of the end zone which made the score 36-24. Then, The Matt Flynn Game corporealized for real. Facing a 12-point deficit with less than eight minutes left, Flynn went 6-of-10 for 73 yards and another James Starks receiving touchdown, while Eddie Lacy carried the ball eight times for 49 yards and a score of his own. With these drives sandwiching a scoreless Dallas drive ending in a Sam Shields interception that enabled the final Green Bay drive which proved the game-winner, Green Bay found themselves ahead by 1 with less than two minutes to go. Romo, despite throwing for over 350 yards and having the added help of a 134-yard day on the ground from DeMarco Murray, would himself have to lead a game-winning drive after squandering a 23-point lead. It was not to be, as Tramon Williams intercepted Romo’s second pass of his last drive – for real, this time – to win an unforgivable choke job by Dallas.

7-6-1. The nine-win finish line was within sight. To get to this mark the Packers would need to defeat two other inveterately desperate teams on the playoff bubble themselves in the Steelers (at home) and Chicago (at Soldier Field). The Steelers were trying to become only the second team, after the aforementioned 1992 Chargers, to begin a season 0-4 and still make the playoffs. They’d been beaten badly by Chicago back before any of the Cutler-McCown intrigue had commenced, 40-23, but had strung together enough wins to be in reach of 8-8 and a possible Wild Card if a lot of things broke their way. They’d need to defeat the Packers first, though, and this team was also sprinting to the finish to try and secure a playoff spot. Playing at home, in Lambeau, is good for a homefield advantage against most teams, but Pittsburgh is a cold-weather city too, and Heinz Field is one hell of a pit to play in with the winds coming off the confluence of the three rivers that intersect in Pittsburgh. The Steelers had bested the Packers in each of the teams’ last two matchups, in startingly different ways: first, the 2005 Steelers, eventual Super Bowl Champions, traveled to Lambeau Field to play a late-era Favre team that was bumbling its way to an offense-starved 4-12 record and beat them handily 20-10 despite having to lean on Duce Staley and Charlie Batch with injured starters in both the running back and quarterback positions. Next the Steelers defeated the Packers in a much more glorious 37-36 instant classic at Heinz Field to end an overlong, deeply dispiriting Super Bowl hangover losing streak in 2009, with Ben Roethlisberger throwing for just over 500 yards and connecting with Mike Wallace with next to no time left in an astoundingly awesome this-will-be-played-at-your-Canton-enshrinement-esque game-winning drive which was the equal of anything authored by Brady, Manning, Elway or Montana. The play of the quarterbacks arrayed against the Steelers was as different as the games played by the Steelers quarterbacks themselves: Brett Favre offered up a game typical of his mid-2000s slump-prone ways, barely crossing 50% completion percentage and turning the ball over twice, including the decisive play of the game which featured a Troy Polamalu half-sack that turned into a Troy Polamalu full scoop and score. This dropped the ’05 Pack to 1-7. Such a record was not to be possessed by the ’09 Green Bay team, who going into their Week 15 game against Pittsburgh were 9-4 and on a true defensive tear. This team, the second of the Aaron Rodgers (as starter) era, had, following their Week 5 bye, suffered two off-the-wall losses to a revitalized Favre’s 6-1 Minnesota Vikings, 26-38 (understandable) and the 0-7 Josh Freeman Buccaneers (inexplicable), 28-38, but had otherwise utterly shut down their opponents: after the bye, Packers opponents scored 0, 3, 38, 38, 7, 24, 12, 14, and 14 points, an average of under 17 per game (a number which itself is obviously inflated from the two-week spell of incompetence against MIN and TB). Over their final 7 games, the Packers held five of their opponents to 57 points. The issue is that in the other two games, against the Steelers and famously against the Kurt Warner Cardinals, the team surrendered 88 points. 37 of those came in that game against Big Ben and his merry band of Bugatti Boys, which was also the only loss they suffered between Week 10 and the Wild Card round. The Steelers were good at handing the Packers gigantic, capital Ls in spots both meaningful and meaningless.

In the 2013 matchup, it was the team who came in with their QB1 who would win the day. A snowy day in ‘sconsin saw one of the most bizarre plays of the season when the Steelers blocked a potential game-tying Green Bay field goal but, failing to ever actually possess the ball after it tumbled to the Earth, errantly batted the ball forward (an illegal maneuver), leading to one of the longest referee conferences and ensuing reviews ever which once all evidence was adjudged resulted in a first down for Green Bay, which Flynn and company gladly acquiesced to and scored a go-ahead touchdown instead of a tying FG. The Steelers, unfazed, maestro’d a run-heavy drive from LeVeon Bell and Jonathan Dwyer which led to an alarmingly easy Roethlisberger-to-Matt Spaeth touchdown and the lead.

Despite a vintage Lambeau Field Matt Flynn performance in which the onetime LSU Tiger pretty clearly outplayed Ben the former Miami Redhawk, a devastatingly untimely pick 6 on the first play of the next drive with the Packers seeking to tie or surpass the Steelers on the scoreboard gave the Steelers a 10-point lead in the final quarter. Flynn led them back with two scoring drives to even the odds at 31-31, but after the defense mightily stymied the Steelers a third straight time with less than 3 minutes to play giving their offense a chance to lead yet another game-winning drive, Matt Flynn lost a fumble on a 3rd and 8 scramble that set up the Steelers in easy field goal territory at the 2-minute warning. The Packers defense managed to heroically prevent a first down yet again to potentially keep it a 3-point game, but unbelievably, Nick Perry jumped offsides on the field goal attempt to give the Steelers a first down. The Steelers forced Green Bay to use their final timeout before a touchdown run from rookie LeVeon Bell in what was essentially his breakout performance made it 38-31 with under 90 seconds to spare. That’s decent Aaron Rodgers territory, but Matt Flynn had used up all his late-game magic in Dallas, it appeared, as he could not capitalize on an incredible Micah Hyde kick return that set the Packers up at the Steelers 33-yard line. Lacking timeouts, the Packers got to the Pittsburgh 5 with more than a minute to spare, but a spat of ineffective and frankly hare-brained playcalling at the worst possible time which kept the ball in-bounds and the clock running doomed them. On first and second down the Packers went with James Starks runs, getting to the final inch of field space before the endzone but failing to penetrate it. A Green Bay penalty, the second inexplicable and unforgivable one of the final two minutes, resulted in a ten-second runoff and a running clock which gave the Packers only one more shot at the endzone from the five-yard line. Agonizingly, Jordy Nelson flashed open against William Gay in the deep middle of the endzone, but Flynn decided to test Ike Taylor instead, leading to a Jarrett Boykin drop, a very strange decision in the circumstances. Pittsburgh 38, Green Bay 31.

A final play which saw the Steelers play man-to-man across the board while dropping Troy Polamalu below the end zone - it shouldn’t have worked, but it did.

Without any wiggle room left, the Packers faced a crossroads. Like their mortal enemies in Chicago, the Packers, facing nigh-certain annihilation if they faltered an inch in their final four games, had dropped their to-that-stage most important game of the season in humiliating circumstances – they at home against the Steelers, the Bears on the road during Sunday Night Football against the Eagles. The only saving grace, I guess, was that the two oldest teams in the NFL* had not lost their penultimate game to a division rival. But one of them would lose their final game to one. (*Not counting the Arizona Cardinals, bizarrely enough, whose technical progenitor was formed in the 19th century as the South Side of Chicago’s “Morgan Athletic Club”; the “Chicago Cardinals” as we know them entered existence in 1920, a year after the Green Bay Packers formed and the same year the “Decatur Staleys,” what would become the Chicago Bears, were created.)

December 29, 2013. The venue: Soldier Field. The teams: Bears, Packers. The stakes: all. With Minnesota’s down year and the Lions’ Week 16 self-immolation against the ridiculous Giants, the final game of the 2013 regular season for the Chicago and Green Bay football teams would be for the NFC North divisional crown. But the consequences of a loss were even worse than your typical final-week battle-for-division-champions-status skirmish: it was also a win-or-go-home game. You get these sorts of games about once a season or so – the schedule-makers, despite their normal absorption with contorting the weekly slates to forcibly subject the viewing public to the NFC East as often as possible, occasionally being possessed of skill enough to predict which two teams from a given division may wend their way towards playoff consideration just far enough so that their final meeting in Week 17 will be for all the marbles. This can be extraordinarily glorious in cases such as that of the 1993 NFC East, which saw both the Giants and Cowboys sitting at 11-4 going into their final game and with homefield advantage throughout the playoffs on the line. These instances can also be replete with tedium and let’s-just-get-this-over-withedness (a neologism coined by Personal Vowels), such as in the 2014 NFC South “showdown” that featured a 6-9 Falcons team battling the equally feeble 6-8-1 Panthers for SEC country supremacy and, though this was not clear at the time of kickoff, a close-to-certain gimme win against the quarterbackless Cardinals who had to resort to Ryan Lindley after injuries to Carson Palmer and Drew Stanton. But I would argue that neither the clash-of-the-titans-esque Giants-Cowboys duel nor the losing-record-championship-bout of Falcons-Panthers is the ideal in this late-season scenario: the best is when you have two teams that have taken their licks throughout the season but have won more than they’ve lost and are looking for the third- or fourth-place division winner spot. This is more often the marrow of magnificence in Week 17 matchups than is a battle between two 12+ win teams or the opposite, two middling troupes searching for the privilege of a Wild Card or Divisional dismissal from the January dance. In this Goldie Locks middle segment, you have teams who are exciting, not invincible; gritty from tribulation, not garlanded with the plaudits of easy victories. Similarly, unlike with teams at the extremes of the W-L columns (excluding those who are mathematically “out” of the playoff equation), those vying for a division championship that are hovering around 8 to 11 wins cannot garner the collective exhaustion engendered by teams too dominant nor the scorn directed at teams who “sneak” undeservedly into the playoffs. Whoever won the Bears-Packers Week 17 deathmatch would be, without doubt, a team worth rooting for. No more questions, no more excuses, no more buildup necessary. Bears-Packers. Chicago-Green Bay. History awaited. And history, as it so often and so unexpectedly does, did not disappoint.

Before dual losses to East-leading Philadelphia and AFC opponent Pittsburgh, Chicago and Green Bay were separated by the thinnest of margins - a tie to Minnesota. Defeats by both North contenders ensured that the odds stayed even going into Week 17 at Soldier Field.

There is something holily and nostalgically beautiful about late-year football in the Midwest, outdoors, among the elements, with something on the line. Whether it’s a high school rivalry game, a Maize And Blue-versus-Scarlet And Gray year-ending locking of horns at The Big House or Ohio Stadium, or this – the biennial renewal of a nearly-century-old grudge match between two heartland municipalities characterized by Balkans-level enmity between their fanbases – the cold glow of dying grass, frost-swilling gusts and visible breath from out of a grated facemask communicate unmistakably to even the most casual of fans that something of dire importance is going on here. Soldier Field and Lambeau are two of the finest venues one is likely to find to host such contests, and when you get a late-afternoon game on the final Sunday of the year at one of these stadia where matters of consequence are in the balance, you are a guest of the gods. Something special, something that uses football as a vehicle for the apostrophization of human drama, is at work in these circumstances. The ineffable sensation of late-year football’s momentous significance may well be inexpressible, but it is without question one of the principal gemstones woven into the quilt of symbolic Americana known to all of us. Fireworks on the fourth of July. Pumpkin Pie on Thanksgiving. The Rockettes on Christmas. Bears-Packers in the cold. It just makes sense in a certain time within a certain space, and we interconnect, however subconsciously, with all other adherents of football drama when we tune in. There’s something more to this, even, than, say, the Cowboys or Lions on Thanksgiving, teams who are thrust unswervingly before our tired eyes each year without thought for fluctuations in quality of the onfield product, whereas, even in down years, Packers-Bears still adorns its triumphators with the most sacred of prizes – bragging rights. Packers-Bears, Bears-Packers, Chicago-Green Bay, Green Bay-Chicago – a rose by any other name. They hate each other. And that’s good for football, and for America.

There is something else that’s good for America which was on offer this gloriously icy afternoon, and that’s pre-immunization controversy Aaron Rodgers. Having missed seven games with a broken collarbone (which, acknowledging the master over human anatomy that modern medicine has effected, seems like an awfully short time to have a broken bone right next to your neck), the Packers had kept the faith – if only just – and put them in a position where Aaron Rodgers, if he could deliver them to victory just once, would be playing the next weekend in a playoff game. It was all there. Of course, the focus of this piece is not the Packers, though we’ve necessarily gone over significant backstory, context, and supporting evidence on them pursuant to painting the fullest possible picture of Trestman’s Bears. Whether or not you can say that the Bears are the “heroes” of this story is not for me to say – they’re the principal actors, the protagonists, the focal points, the focus of the narratory absorption of the writing here found. But if you think their role extends beyond that, that is the domanial choice of the reader, the perquisite of the peruser. I personally would caution against the decision to identify the Bears as heroes, worthy of good things happening to them and deserving of reward for their labors. Without moving too close to the zen philosophy espoused by the attachment-phobic Buddhist monks, if you know anything about the franchise Chicago has laid claim to for the previous century-plus, you ought to know how fruitless it is to hope for fulfillment to arise from their doings. And in the great tradition of that Midwestern ghost ship’s despair-creating amplitude of rises to near-glory and plummets to utter destitution, the final week of the 2013 season, with their tormentor Aaron Rodgers set up across from them in opposition, doom would come for the Bears.

The game began well enough for the Bears. Despite a 3-and-out on their first possession and a methodical, yardage-eating drive by the Packers after the ensuing punt, Chris Conte (I told you back in 2020 to remember that name, and I hope you did) intercepted an Aaron Rodgers pass in the Bears endzone. Bear in mind the immense athleticism and focus it required on the part of the safety to accomplish this and negate the Packers’ potential advantage here – it would do well to have positive associations in store for Conte as this season winds to a close. With the Bears given a mulligan after this turnover from Rodgers, the Bears embarked on a short scoring drive led by Brandon Marshall and Matt Forte, culminating in a dumpoff score to Matt Forte for 4 yards to make it 7-0. In days gone by, a lead at Soldier Field, even a 7-0 one, would be, if not unassailable, at the very least difficult to challenge. But these Bears were not Lovie’s Bears, nor Ditka’s, nor Halas’s – they could be scored upon. And knowing this, no Bears fan would have thought they were in for anything less than 7-7 after a second Packers drive. But, incredibly, Rodgers, the master of turnover-free football whose six best seasons are the six best ever in terms of touchdown-to-interception percentage, threw a second interception, this time to Tim Jennings, on the following GB drive.

Is this good?

This was, as stated above, incredible. Not only that the king of not-turning-it-over had turned-it-over, not that the defensively dunderheaded 2013 Bears had been the authors of these unforeseeable atrocities for the Pack and their cheesehead acolytes, but that in addition to these two unlikelihoods, the Bears, who had done all in their power to blow their chances at glory the last two years and who had seen their shot at immortality dissolve in the hands of B.J. Raji’s ball-carrying and Aaron Rodgers’s tackling in January of 2011, were on what could have been the inside track for the god damn NFC North title just one week after getting BTFO by a QB far inferior to The Bad Man. It was all there.

But the Bears again went 3-and-out. It would appear that the Bears, despite having a sample size of exactly three drives, would alternate between touchdown and 3-and-out drives for the entirety of the afternoon. Punting the ball back to the Packers, who almost gave it away for the third time on a muffed fielding of the kick that Jarrett Bush headily recovered, the Bears defense finally sagged somewhat, allowing a 49-yard Packers drive that, despite wasting about a third of the second quarter, resulted in only 3 points from a Mason Crosby field goal. The Packers were giving the Bears the game on a second-place-silver platter. But the Bears disproved the alternating touchdown-to-three-and-out drive pattern on the next drive they embarked on. Devin Hester did his best Micah Hyde impression (Hyde being the fumbler whose insecure ball-handling necessitated the Bush punt recovery), fumbling the ball but recovering it himself. Yet again the Cutlerites could do nothing with their golden opportunity, with tackles from Andy Mulumba (a sack), Mike Daniels and that guy Jarrett Bush again forcing the Bears to punt after another unprofitable three-play sequence. On the next drive, the Packers labored through what might be the longest replay review I have ever seen happen live.

Julius Peppers is by any measure of any man who has ever played football in the NFL a remarkable, incredible player of the game. He is also huge and scary, and his signature look – the forbidding, sigil-like #90, the blacked-out visor, the 6’7 287-pound frame and the perhaps less noticeable but still iconic white undershirt, which I always thought made him look like a Victorian butcher with dissonantly-white shirtsleeves – should strike fear into everyone who sets their eyes upon him. The 100-Sack Club member was swiftly ushered into Canton in his first year of eligibility, and though we are not privy to the exact voting figures for the Pro Football Hall Of Fame, it stands to reason that Peppers would be close to a unanimous selection in that first year if we could peer past the portal of the voter’s room and see who voted him in. Regardless of this, his career will be as known for the near-misses, almosts and agonizingly close losses as for his terrorism off the edge to plunder passing pockets from 2002 to 2018. One such instance, both micro- and macrocosmic of his long career, came on December 29th, 2013 at hallowed Soldier Field. With the Packers driving for a potential lead-taking drive and having just penetrated the Bears’ red zone on the previous play courtesy of a James Starks toss-run, Rodgers dopped back on first down to pass. Pressured lightly up the middle by NFL Combine bench press record holder Stephen Paea #92, and pressured more intensely off the edge by the edge-rush combo of Shea McClellin #99 and Peppers #90, Rodgers danced around in his pocket for a few seconds longer than ideal, drifting slightly right before stepping up and trying to fire off the ball downfield. In the milliseconds before loosing the missile, though, the talons of Julius caught up with Aaron’s throwing motion, stealing away the propulsion of the projectile and causing the ball to clatter to the cold Soldier Field turf. In the moment it appeared that the play would simply be ruled incomplete – the ball didn’t fall backwards, as a strip-sack-caused fumble often does, eliciting no immediate or urgent response from the pass-rushing cadre. Nor did it fly far enough downfield for the linebackers or defensive backs of the Bears to essay a grab at the ball for an interception. No one appeared to take much notice of the ball as it rolled around unattended and unpossessed on the ground aside from a few key people: the broadcast team, who, alarmed by the inaction, noticed that no whistle had been sounded and vocalized as much, and Jarrett Boykin, a Packers receiver whose career highlight to that point had been a start against Cleveland due to a rash of injuries. Boykin, showing the headiness and play-through-the-whistle-itude that undrafted players like himself often must engender in themselves to hang around in the league, approached the still-moving ball on the far sideline, joined momently by Aaron Rodgers, who himself hovered above the wayward spheroid for a few long seconds seemingly mystified by the course the object had taken. Boykin tried to pick up the ball at first, but – since footballs are hard to grab, after all – the ball skidded a bit further away from him before, on his second attempt to pick the thing up, he managed to grab hold of it. Aaron Rodgers arrived at about the same instant, and seemingly simultaneously, the two men, on a field of 22, realized that they had a remarkable opportunity before them. Boykin broke into an almost panicked dash toward the endzone, which was by this point totally undefended and free of any Chicagoan watchstanders. Rodgers, maybe sensing the adrenaline-tinged pheromones shooting off of the endzone-intoxicated Boykin, gave an excited push to the wideout, propelling him with whatever energy he could muster toward the score that was now his. The Bears barely heeded the action on the opposite sideline (it ought to be noted that the bizarre staccato play took place nearest the Packers sideline on a pass pattern that saw most of the downfield action drift towards the nearer Bears sideline, making the location that Boykin grabbed the ball almost entirely cheesehead in makeup), looking dumbstruck and confused at the signaling of touchdown by the umpires following the Boykin scramble.

Viewing this action in a somewhat crowded Buffalo Wild Wings with a Bears friend, the entire sequence was impossible for me to make sense of without the broadcast audio. Even so, it was telling, subliminally, to see the Packers’ two principals on the play – their leader, Rodgers, and a relative unknown, Boykin – show so much more attentiveness to the football than Danieal Manning #38, the DB covering Boykin and an established, respected veteran, and James Anderson #50, a veteran who had cut his teeth in Carolina and wound up with an immediate starting role upon arriving in Chicago as the replacement to a retired Brian Urlacher. Anderson had proved durably and reliably stalwart in his Windy City stop-by, playing over 95% of the team’s defensive snaps in 2013 – behind only Tim Jennings #26 and our Person Of Interest Chris Conte, who each appeared in over 99% of snaps. James Anderson’s exact number of defensive snaps played that year was 999. He wishes it had been at least 1,000.

If you can wait, and not be tired by waiting…

The scene on the field, especially on the teams’ respective sidelines, was chaos. And you couldn’t blame the teams for reacting chaotically to an altogether unfamiliar chain of events that led to a team taking the lead in a divisional championship with three minutes to go till halftime. Not even the fans knew how to react – the (presumably) mostly Illinoisan crowd didn’t really “boo” when Boykin entered the endzone with possession of the ball, nor did they boo when the referee signaled touchdown – rather they seemed to collectively gasp, giving voice to their bewilderment in a communal glossolalia of disgust. Upon replay review it was clear that Aaron’s hand was empty before it started going forward (and we can thank the Football Gods that the Tuck Rule had been legislated out of existence by this point), and, even more frustrating for Bears fans, that the person who caused the ball to sputter forward so that it looked less like a fumble than an incomplete pass was Julius Peppers himself. Somehow he had actually been too forceful with his stripping of the football – he’d hit the ball in such a way that it pressed back up against Rodgers’ forearm, which, moving forward itself, pushed the ball forwards in a way more reminiscent of a passing attempt than a strip sack. Infuriating. Regardless, it must be said that the Packers deserve the credit for the way they kept their wits about them while the Bears decided to take half of the down off. Sometimes, seasons come down to moments, not months – broken plays, not perfectly-practiced ones. The Packers were the ones, on this day, that found glory in the needle’s eye. And it was the Bears who, despite their early wins, came up against a team so used to winning the big games with both likely and unlikely stars that they didn’t know how to lose them all that well.

What made the whole fiasco even more egregious was the fact that head referee Clete Blakeman, after starting out back towards midfield following his personal review of the play, was ushered back toward the sideline by some NFL-regalia-clad underlings who apparently wanted him to review the game and play clocks to ensure fidelity. The image of a referee reviewing a play, going out to midfield, then returning to the sideline to review the play more could not have sat terribly well in the minds of the disgruntled Soldier Field faithful, who now did start to boo as the review entered its second, unappreciated stanza. To their displeasure, but probably not their immense surprise if they’d watched the many replays they surely showed on the jumbotrons, Blakeman announced that the play stood as called and that the original ruling had been confirmed, not merely “upheld.” It was conclusive and lead-destroying. Packers 10, Bears 7.

For a final point of order on this play, it should come as no surprise that writing the box-score info for the down in question was a laborious and obscure process. What basically happened was an offensive passing play that turned into a strip sack and still somehow resulted in an offensive touchdown. In case you’re wondering, and I know, dear reader, that you are, a strip sack that resulted in a touchdown for the offense has only happened three times since 1994. Three times in thirty years! Of course it had to happen to Trestman’s Bears. Who were the other beneficiaries of their QB’s mishandled football? Levi Brown and Charone Peak, who probably won’t be gracing Canton with any busts despite their rare achievement.

Whether Peppers and McClellin were more disconcerted by Boykin’s touchdown or Chad Henne’s statline on the chyron is debated by historians to this day.

It took a full 5:20 worth of broadcast time – not including any commercials, including the uncommonly soulful “It’s only weird if it doesn’t work” Bud Light spots from this season – for Blakeman and crew to confirm the touchdown and for the Packers to kick the extra point. It took an additional 75 seconds or so for the ensuing kickoff, during which the infectiously catchy Levels by Avicii rang throughout the Soldier Field rafters in a pleasant shibboleth of 2013 football. The next drive contained even more misery for the Bears, who after a few promising plays turned it over yet again. A Jay Cutler pass to Alshon Jeffrey over the middle turned into a multi-player pileup that eventually saw A.J. Hawk knock the ball from the hands of the receiver, whose fumble bounced fortuitously towards Morgan Burnett #42 who picked up, ran with, and eventually lateraled the ball to Sam Shields #37. It showed what the two teams were in a snapshot of the season. The Bears, with their stars, had relied all season on individuals with incredible performances – Alshon Jeffrey on this day and against Minnesota (249 receiving yards) and New Orleans (218 receiving yards), Brandon Marshall against key divisional opponents Green Bay (107) and Detroit (139), Matt Forte for basically the entire month of December (a string of games with 151, 175, 131, 54 and 157 total yards), and Josh McCown for essentially his entire stint as starter. But reliance on these mighty heroes came with the understanding that a foul-up by the superstars came with outsize consequences. The Packers, meanwhile, had put their faith in so many different people, shuttled such a number of contributors in and out of the spotlight, that they knew if someone messed up there was another Packer waiting in the wings to correct the lapse in mastery. The Two Jarretts (Bush and Boykin) had shown this – falling on a fumbled punt, picking up and scoring a fumbled football – and the two defensive backs, Morgan Burnett and Sam Shields, both homegrown cheesehead faithful who would combine for a single Pro Bowl in their careers, had proven that the Packers were operating as an organism, not an outfit. The Bears, despite all their derring-do, seemed one missed play from a superstar away from coming up empty-handed, yet again, at the very end of the season, when it really counts. The Bears, still capable of maintaining at least a degree of defensive aptitude when at home and in the cold, managed to hold the Packers to just a field goal on this stolen possession, helped in no small part by a rare instance of discomposedness from Rodgers, who had to waste the Pack’s final timeout during an already-stopped clock which prevented them from taking one more shot at a potential touchdown, which would have made it a ten-point lead. The field goal instead made it 13-7 at half. 

Some comedic relief occurred before the beginning of the second half. NFL on Fox sideline gumshoe Pam Oliver reported that Trestman had noted his team practices the “scoop drills” that would theoretically have helped his team in the scenario presented during the Jarrett Boykin touchdown, and as such he was “very disappointed that they didn’t go after that ball” on the play. Two thoughts on this. One, practicing the “drill” part of this play – by which I take Trestman’s meaning to be that the Bears practice the physical motion of scooping and presumably scoring with the football on defense after a fumble or strip – doesn’t mean that the team would necessarily be prepared for this exact situation. The confusing piece of this play, far more so than a bouncing football in want of a possessor, was the fact that the preceding action had looked and felt like an incomplete pass, with the only clue that it wasn’t this being the lack of an official’s whistle to kill the down. If Trestman was being honest with himself and Pam Oliver, he should have also noted that his team should have known that without a whistle, the play is still ongoing. (Then again, maybe they are too busy practicing the scoop drill to practice playing through the whistle). Two, we can’t actually know whether Trestman was being authentically honest with Pam Oliver here, since we don’t have any feed of Trestman screaming at his players to dive on or scoop up the loose football during the eventual Boykin touchdown. I’m not calling Marc a liar here, per se – I’m just saying it’s possible he’s falsely assuming he knew what was going on in that very jumbled and unfamiliar situation when in fact he didn’t. It would not be the first time the Bears coach seemed not to be operating with all pertinent information at the ready, as we know from the second-down overtime field goal mishigas, and we ourselves shouldn’t assume that if there were eleven Trestmans on the field that they would know what was going on enough to chase after the pigskin. If the coach hasn’t mastered the situation enough to even identify what he and his team did wrong in a crucial moment, the players cannot be expected to overcome his muddled thinking. Isn’t that right, Nathaniel Hackett?

By the time the two teams took the field again in the second half there were precious few seconds left in the season for one of these teams. Because of how the season had broken – and we’ve discussed the disastrous tumble from contendership that befell the Lions, whose one-time 7-5 record and fewest-points-allowed mark in the North division of the NFC evaporated in a Honolulu Blue mist of brain matter from the sniper shots of losses to Philadelphia, Baltimore and the lowly Giants – this game was a de facto playoff game, and the winner would advance while the loser would join the merry corpses of Detroit and Minnesota for a long, cold offseason, which due to a memorably monstrous polar vortex in early January would feel even longer and colder than normal. The Bears were staring down the barrel of their own football mortality in a way that few teams ever do – knowing that, before you even reach the playoffs, this could be it. With this front of mind, the Bears seized the day as best they could, forcing a three-and-out on Green Bay’s first drive of the second half. On the following punt, they put the ball in the hands of their most dangerous weapon down-for-down, Devin Hester. The record-setting return ace took a fifty-yard punt that landed at his own 28, retrieved it off the bounce at his own 21, and then, aided by a Green Bay gunnery squad that appeared to have forgotten who and what #23 on the Bears was, outflanked the glacially-decelerated Packers punt coverage team on a right-to-left sweep before taking off like a navy flash of lightning down the Green Bay sideline all the way to the Packers’ 29-yard line. It was a beautifully-blocked return, looking more like the James Harrison Super Bowl XLIII pick six than a breakaway kick return. Unlike the Bears of that era, though – the Lovie Smith Bears, whom we’ve covered already – this Bears team had more to them in the way of explosivity than just Hester. They also had Matt Forte, who looked to be the warmest, most fiery, and least achy pair of legs on the bluster-blown turf on the following drive. And Marc Trestman decided, in this coldest of football cauldrons, on a surcease of any aerial attempts at scoring, and elected to just give it to his wondrous workhorse. The following drive’s plays looked like this: Forte for 15 yards, Forte for 3 yards, Forte for 4 yards, Forte for 3 yards, Forte for 5 yards and a touchdown. Blam! The extra point gave Chicago a one-point lead, 14-13. 

In potential emulation of the strategy of his foe across the 53.5-yard barrier of frozen turf, Mike McCarthy, Packers head coach, did his best Vince Lombardi impersonation, calling five straight runs of his own on the following drive. The first carry went to Eddie Lacy, who at the time was listed at 5’11, 230 pounds. This was a flatteringly inaccurate measure of the man. Though Lacy looked pretty sleek and simultaneously weighty in his time at the University of Alabama (and for a good amount of his rookie 2013 season with the Pack), by the time Week 17 rolled around, whatever weight-cutting conditioning the man had done to meet the suspicious figures listed above (which came from the official 2013 Packers media guide) had dissipated decisively.

Not exactly Brandon Ingram.

This might not be a running back who is going to break the combine record for a 40-yard dash, but Lacy’s largeness was a net positive in the snowy condition at Soldier Field. He’d even hurdled someone earlier on a screen pass, a few plays before the spectral Jarrett Boykin touchdown, crashing forward after the vertical to get even closer to the first down. But this 17-yard run he trundled cumbersomely forth on during the Packers’ second drive of the third quarter wasn’t as elegantly styled as his screen pass Edwin Moses-esque touch from the prior quarter. He followed pulling guard T.J. Lang along the line of scrimmage, shouldering through a halfhearted Major Wright #21 tackle attempt before crashing heavily to the ground around his own 37-yard line. Apparently quite winded after this single play. James Starks received the next four handoffs, wringing 51 crafty yards out of the staggered Bears D before Rodgers, content that the passing defense had been sufficiently softened and the DBs predatorily lulled into complacency enough, riddled them with two quick passes to James Jones and then to Randall Cobb for a touchdown. It needs to be said that James Starks, an oftentimes forgotten back who did more than enough to cement his legacy in Green Bay as one of the franchise’s all-time fan favorites, gained 41 yards on his third of four carries during that drive on what appeared to be the exact same play that Lacy gained his own 17 yards on – a power run to the left with rhinoceroslike RG T.J. Lang wrecking-ball-ing a would-be tackler, this time Chris Conte, out of the way to open the way to daylight. He also made Craig Steltz miss on a nice little juke move – you know, Craig Steltz, the other DB who composed the remaining moiety of the safety combo that allowed the Chiefs to score a Hail Mary touchdown against the Bears a few seasons prior. One run later that gained only a yard later and Lacy went back in the game, apparently as a decoy, as the following two plays were the throws to Jones and Cobb. Cobb easily beat the cornerback Isaiah Frey on an in route into the middle of the endzone, and Craig Steltz (who I really hope has some highlights out there somewhere, given the beating he’s taken in this series) couldn’t quite get enough of a hand on the pass to knock it down before it reached paydirt. He did lightly graze it, though, so at least he was in position. The same cannot be said for all safety plays by the Bears in this game.

 At this point it’s worth noting a quirk of early 2010’s football that probably would not manifest in mid-2020’s football this game to be played today. Due to the Packers’ failure to score a touchdown on their final possession of the half and consequential settling-for of a field goal, they entered the third quarter up 6 instead of a clean 7. Once the Bears scored on their All Matt Forte drive, they were up 1, instead of tied with the Packers. The imbalance of scoreboard power was restored after this most recent Randall Cobb touchdown, which the Packers, now somewhat curiously, kicked the extra point after to reclaim their 6-point lead. It’s curious because in such an instance, in the second half with a lead, following the scoring of a touchdown in which the lead is increased to 5 before the kicking of the extra point, coaches should recognize that going for two, to be up by a full touchdown, is the proper course. Mike McCarthy chose not to take this route, and instead kicked the extra point, putting his team up a mere 6. A Chicago touchdown and extra point would lead to the Packers being behind once again, as they were before the Cobb touchdown. This is, to say it plainly, playing with fire. You’d rather be tied at the end of regulation than down one, obviously. This assumes the Bears score a touchdown and go up 1. But assume they don’t, if you’re the Packers. What’s the difference between being up 5 (if you score the touchdown, go for 2 and miss, or fail to convert the extra point) and being up 6 (if you score the touchdown and successfully kick the extra point)? The answer is, basically nothing. There is a big difference between being up 6 and being up 7 - in the latter case, you can give up a touchdown and extra point and still be tied. Of course there are minute considerations even more granular than this - if you’re up 5 and give up a touchdown, the opposing team could go for 2 to be up a clean 3 points, and if you’re up 7 and the opposing team scores a touchdown, they could decide to put all their chips in the middle and go for 2 to win by 1 point - but the most important thing to remember is that coaches are mostly creatures of habit, and if you’re up 7 and the other team scores a touchdown, they’ll most likely kick an extra point to tie the game. That isn’t always the case, even before the comparatively conservative game management of the 2013 era, but deviations from this are exceedingly rare. Stick a pin in this - we’ll come back to it. 

What did make sense was the following Bears drive. Their defense done in by the solar system of small-name, reliable offensive contributors in Aaron Rodgers’ orbit, the Bears took the field yet again. Their defense, bad all year, was wetting the bed yet again, but the offense could ignite into a scoring sunstorm at any minute, and a resident of Chicago could convince themselves that though Aaron Rodgers was Aaron Rodgers, he had only re-entered the lineup this week, and his stats were pretty bad by his standards to this point. He’d finished the first half 14/22 for 145 yards, two costly interceptions, and that ridiculously fortunate strip fumble. He was having one of the worst games of his career to this point, even including the Cobb touchdown. And yet somehow this unfortunate effort still equaled 20 points on the porous, corpselike Bears D, whose legacy’s cement was beginning to firmly set as the darkness of a Midwestern winter and the prospect of annihilation hung over both of these teams. But this wasn’t 1973 - this was 2013. Offense should have been enough, just this once, with the defense and all its flaws notwithstanding, to win one for the Bears faithful. To get back to the playoffs. To prove that this corps of players had the moxie and mojo and motor to win when it actually mattered. To make memories in January for their fans’ frozen souls.

Back to Forte the ball went. To the right for 4 yards, to the right again for 2 yards. 3rd and 4. And now the offense blossomed into a beautiful football flower. Alshon Jeffrey got behind a lassitude-stricken Sam Shields and away from the safety Morgan Burnett - the two guys who’d combined for the interception and lateral earlier - and caught a streak pass from Cutler for 67 massive yards. At first glance it looked like a clear touchdown - but Jeffrey, brought to the ground just inches before the threshold of the goalline, did not quite broach the holiest of football spaces. It would have probably been a matter of one or two handoffs to Forte to score that touchdown whose subsequent extra point would have put the Bears up one, but, very strangely, and for no discernible reason other than maybe inducing the replay crew to review whether Alshon Jeffrey got in after all and maybe giving his team a breather after a massively explosive play, Marc Trestman called a timeout on the field. Again, this wasn’t a challenge of the play where Alshon Jeffrey appeared to potentially reach the endzone before being ruled down - it was just a regular timeout. Bizarre. Not like you might need that later or anything. At any rate, the ruling was upheld (Jeffrey short of the goalline) and Forte as expected plowed in from short yardage a play later. This was his third touchdown of the day. Savior of the season garlands would have been a welcome and suitable prize for this winterized, workmanlike wunderkind.

It was 21-20 now, since, as discussed, the Packers had chosen not to go for 2 after the Cobb touchdown. Rodgers was asked to strike up his symphony again. He picked up a first down to Jordy Nelson #87 through the air and then found Andrew Quarless #81 on a diving juggle over the middle - or so it seemed. The refs ruled that, even though it was in no way clear that the ball hit anything other than Andrew Quarless’s tattooed forearm before bouncing upward and back down into the tight end’s mits, the play stood as called (incomplete). Rodgers missed a shot to Nelson in double coverage on the next play, didn’t receive a pass interference call despite his whining for one, and they had to punt again. The punter Tim Masthay this time simply sky-ed one short and high so that the speedy lethality of Devin Hester could not cudgel the Pack’s punt coverage team again, giving the Bears O dreamy field position at their own 31. And on the ensuing drive, the Packers still could not stop Matt Forte. He ran up the middle for a first down. He received an inside handoff and bumped it outside for a double-digit gain and another first down. On a deep passing pattern for the receivers, he collected a Cutler checkdown and devoured 33 more yards through the air to set up a first-and-goal at the Packers’ 8 yard line. He was simply moving better than anyone else on the field, his own team included, and the Packers could barely even put their hands on him in open space, much less tackle him with anything approaching ease. Finally they sold out to stop the indefeasible back, loading up with a heavy personnel pack with backs against the wall to ensure that he didn’t wrestle a fourth touchdown from the encumbered D, and even on second down, the only thing that seemed to stop Forte from busting down the door for a quartet of scores was his own lost footing on a toss to the right. But even this momentary stumble served a purpose, as the Pack’s hyperfocus on the touchdown-maker Forte opened up the airways for Chicago’s mammoth pass-catchers. Cutler found Brandon Marshall, who would garner AP first-team All Pro honors in 2013 and who the Packers had hazardously elected to cover one-on-one with Tramon Williams, in the right corner of the endzone on a dazzlingly agile fade route which required Marshall to spin around and re-locate the ball in the air after beating his cover man. This was the first play of the fourth quarter and it gave Chicago a 1-point lead, pending the extra point.

Now, what would you do if you were Marc Trestman in this scenario? You were up 1 point before the touchdown, recall. Now you are up 7 after the touchdown but before the extra point. There are two possible chess moves you can deploy here. You could kick the extra point to go up 8 - requiring the Packers to steal a touchdown and a two-point conversion to tie the game. This is a tougher road for the green and gold to travel than simply needing a touchdown and extra point, of course, but this would keep the Bears’ lead within one possession. The other option, which Trestman might have done well to consider more seriously, would be to go ULTRA-aggressive, and go for two. A successful two-point conversion would have made the score 29-20, and would have required the Packers to score twice to take the lead or tie the game. In the fourth quarter, at home, in the season finale, with a defense that had been easily perforable all year long, such a course of action should have been taken under sincere advisement. But Trestman took the comparatively more conservative option and kicked the extra point to go up 28-20. The Packers remained within a score.

The Packers, one score removed or two, were on the brink. This was full crisis point. Without time to mount more than maybe three, at the very most four, more drives in their game - in their season - they needed a savior. I Need A Hero was screaming from the sky all around Title Town. And their most primordial of mortal enemies, the destroyers of Packer worlds, the Chicago Bears, looked to be not only the better team - but they may have been, on this day at least, in possession of the better quarterback, as amazing as it was to say. In a season of impersonations, Cutler had put on his finest Josh McCown act, passing efficiently, unflappably, calmly, and for all intents and purposes heroically in the season’s ultimate test.

The eyes of one who knows it isn’t over.

But things can change fast. And Jay Cutler, who was a mere 1-7 versus the Packers as Bears QB, knew the game was not over until the final gun went off. The vampire was not dead until you saw him in the coffin, with a stake through his heart, a crucifix shackled to his breastplate and a bushel of garlic garlanded around his neck with a deluge of daylight streaming down on his gaunt, defeated features. Such exequies had not been consummated - not just yet.

Not fear - just the faintest incipience of it.

With 14:50 left in the game, Jay Cutler had out-passed Aaron Rodgers in yards (185-to-175), touchdowns (2 to 1), and passer rating (148.3 to 60.9), and thrown two fewer interceptions. Cutler had also gotten to these figures despite throwing the ball 13 fewer times and completing 5 fewer passes. In short, he was operating beautifully within the Marc Trestman offense, leaning without reservation on his cadre of skill position weaponry and letting them do what they do best - gain yards after the catch or after contact and score touchdowns to wit. But Rodgers still had ammo in his gun too. Jordy Nelson existed, after all, and he was in the midst of one of his finest days ever as a pro. He’d caught six passes for 96 yards in the first half alone, and would have gone well over the 100-yard mark but for several truly back-breaking drops that helped the Packers land in the hole they found themselves concurrently in. One of the drops was on a well-schemed slant route to Nelson which would have put the Packers inside the Bears redzone while the game was still 7-0 Chicago that Nelson batted up into the air and into the waiting hands of Tim Jennings. He’d dropped or been just out of reach of 4 other Rodgers passes to that point, making for a very inefficient day by the standard of the rapport that he and his quarterback had established in their association as passer and receiver. But I will borrow a line from Sports Pope Mike Francesa in service of describing Jordy Nelson on this day: “When it’s nitty-gritty time, quarterbacks go to one guy.” More so than anyone else, Jordy Nelson was Rodgers’ Guy. After a short run from Lacy, who had sufficiently convalesced from his exhausting 17-yard gallop some series prior, Rodgers threw a quick screen to Nelson, who was facing off-ball coverage from Jennings. While he’d been a quick-thinking and sure-handed interceptor earlier in the game, his tackling, along with that of the rest of the defense, was badly wanting, and Nelson broke four different tackles in the subsequent scrum before being finally ridden out of bounds by safety Chris Conte. Tim Jennings missed him, Julius Peppers and Major Wright couldn’t grab hold of him enough to bring him down, a plodding Lance Briggs didn’t have anywhere near enough speed to gather him up as he repositioned himself along the sideline, and Chris Conte was barely able to nudge him past the sideline boundary after a 34-yard gain. This put the receiver at 148 receiving yards on the day, and he wasn’t finished.

The Packers took notice of the fact that the Bears were having issues tackling their catchers in space after receiving a pass, and as such they went back to the well. This time it was the James Jones well. Fun fact - this is one of only several games in NFL history that featured six different players, all from the same team, possessing the ball whose name starts with J. On this point you’ll have to trust us. McCarthy drew up a quick screen with WR blockers comprised of Randall Cobb and no one else, with James Jones running a quick dummy route before retreating to near the LOS, catching a quick pass from Rodgers and splitting the effete would-be tackling duo of Zack Bowman and Chris Conte before the latter managed - after being dragged by the willful wideout some yards beyond the first down - to bring James Jones to the cold cold ground. The Packers clearly had hit on a solid strategy for getting the ball downfield. But you know what’s better than having hard-to-tackle dudes? Having Aaron Rodgers. On the following play, Rodgers made one of the greatest throws of his brilliant career. Again it was Conte who suffered the vertical victimization of the ball traveling propulsively toward the Bears’ goalline, this time ending up at the Chicago 6-yard line. Fearing that the catch, which seemed to transmogrify into immateriality through the body of Chris Conte before recomposing itself in the awaiting arms of Andrew Quarless, may be ruled incomplete, the Packers busied to the line and ran a quick run up the middle to Eddie Lacy before any referees could review the play or Trestman could throw a challenge flag. Lacy met a stiff and resistant scrum in front of his interior OL, and with unexpected agility jump-cutted outside to the left and into the undefended extremity of the endzone. Aaron Rodgers, thinking quickly, ran in front of him just in time to redirect and slow Shea McClellin and Major Wright enough to prevent their tackling the young halfback. Chris Conte, now in a drudging pattern of feeble plays, could not catch up to the dashing Lacy from the backside in time to trip him up short of the endzone. On a subsequent replay after the next kickoff, it became clear that not only was the Packers’ hurry-up tempo after the Quarless catch unnecessary, but that it was the Bears who should have been sick to their stomach because of the wildness of the play’s outcome. Aikman noted that “Chris Conte already has one interception in the first quarter of this ball game, and they don’t get much easier than this one would have been.” Indeed, the missile flung from Rodgers to Quarless didn’t just grace Conte’s fingertips - it transported directly through the diamond formed by his gloves in anticipation of the pick. It was an absurd window to fit a ball through, and frankly, we can’t give Rodgers all the credit for this one - luck, and maybe fate, were on the Packers’ side.

The tetrapartite tragicomedy.

Lost in the wonderment of the Quarless quandary was what Mike McCarthy decided to do on the extra point after the Lacy touchdown. Look, it was 2013. Conservative football, though not quite pulsating at the same fathomless magnitude that it had in the 1970s, was still in, and so the following maneuver didn’t receive the same apparently deserved gust that it would have had this happened in 2013, but it was bad enough that Joe Buck, Mr. Personality himself, noted the dilemma facing the Packers coach - “In case you’re wondering, now down by 2, [Packers placekicker] Crosby is on the field for the extra point.” Aikman added, with a suspiciously conspicuous if ever-so-faint modicum of sardonic surprise, “The Packers deciding to settle for 1.” Yes, it’s true - down 8, in the fourth quarter, on the road, after a magnificent drive featuring both short and long passes and a very #FootballPlayer moment from Aaron Rodgers as a lead blocker on the Lacy touchdown, Green Bay kicked an extra point instead of trying to tie the game. We should note the ramifications of this move. For one, being down 1 is obviously worse than being tied. Two, being down 2 if a two-point conversion attempt fails is only worse than being down 1 if you allow your opponent to score a touchdown, in which case said opponent can go up by 9 - two possessions - with a touchdown and an extra point. I think it’s fair to say that most coaches aren’t thinking that far ahead, nor are they assuming that they are going to give up a touchdown. I can’t verify this, but I have to think that it takes a remarkably self-aware head coach - and one, to be sure, who is leading a team with a not-so-good offense, which the Packers obviously were not with a HOF QB leading the troops - to implicitly admit that his team will probably give up another touchdown in the fourth quarter, cook this information into his decision-making process, and thereby take the less risky path by kicking the extra point. By this same token, I can’t understand a coach not going for two in this situation  because he fears his team won’t convert it. Even if you only give up a field goal, you will still be down by more than a field goal whether you kick an extra point or go for 2 and fail to convert. The difference between being down 4 and 5 is basically nothing, in a vacuum. Yes, if you’re down 5 - meaning that your team went for 2, failed, then gave up a field goal - you are now in danger of, if you do not score on your next drive, giving up a touchdown and extra point, which would put you down 12, which would require you to score at least two touchdowns, but again, the labyrinthine passage of causation a head coach’s mind needs to travel in order to arrive at this scary scenario is so far past the here-and-now that it can scarcely be taken into account during the heat of battle. And even if you went for 2 and didn’t convert, your team could still stop the opponent, kick a field goal, and be ahead!!! The only defensible reason a coach could claim that they did not go for two in this situation would be to say that your team has a mediocre-to-inferior offense that probably won’t convert a two-point conversion and that simultaneously your team is facing a superior offense who will probably score a touchdown again. This supposition does not square with the reality of the game in question, nor, I’m confident the advanced predictive analytics will substantiate, is it ever likelier that you will fail to convert a two point conversion and give up another touchdown in the fourth quarter of a given game. The likeliest scenario is that you go for two and get it, anyway. You’ve got AARON RODGERS!!! And after all, even if you’re down 1 and give up a touchdown, you’ll still have to go for 2 later in the game to tie it without banking on getting the ball back with almost no time left and a chance to kick a game-winning field goal to triumph by 2 points instead of 3. Sure, perhaps McCarthy was, inversely, dismissing the Bears’ ability to continue scoring, insinuating through his choice of an extra point in substitute of a two-point attempt that “we don’t need any more points - we know we’re gonna win.” If that’s the case, why not just go for two to tie the game then run out the clock on them? Nothing made sense about this, but thankfully for him, Trestman hadn’t gone for two earlier, to go up by 9, which actually would have made the Packers’ decision to go for or not go for 2 down 3 more significant - but we digress. 28-27, Chicago. At the end of the day, all you can really say is that McCarthy didn’t seize the initiative that Trestman had heedlessly thrown his way by letting it stay a one-score game when the Bears could have made it a 9-point, two-possession game. Weirdo behavior? Perhaps the best and last summation of the sequence and the era itself that we can find is that given by Troy Aikman on the following Bears drive: “I think it’s worth noting too that Mike McCarthy elected to go for the extra point instead of going for two to tie it with eleven minutes left in the game…usually in the fourth quarter you go for two…I don’t disagree with the decision by McCarthy.” In case it’s unclear - Aikman basically laid out the simple reason why you should go for two in this situation, then disregarded his entire thought and said simplemindedly that he didn’t have an issue with the decision. That’s the unpunished, indulgently acquiesced-to thoughtlessness of the NFL on full technicolor display right there, folks.

A harrowing second-half drive chart that may have given Mike McCarthy undue pause.

The Bears could have made all of the foregoing a moot point by increasing the lead back to 8 and just stopping the Packers on their following drives. But the near-misses and mental errors that had plagued the defense all game - all season, really - began to poison the point-scoring unit of the Bears on their next drive, beginning with a false start before their first play that gave them a 1st and 15 instead of 1st and 10. Forte gained back that penalty-pilfered yardage and more on a screen, then gained 5 more on a run to the right. The Packers just could not stop the once-viridian Tulane product in crunch time. The Bears knew this, and kept feeding the beast. He gained 11 on the next play, a toss to the left. Then Marshall got in on the fun, running a James Jones-like quick screen out to the right boundary for another 7 yards. Marquess Wilson, a forgotten figure in this offense, caught a 10-yard pass for a first down after this. This was shaping up to be the sort of drive the Packers could not possibly afford to have happen at this late juncture. Giving up a first down on three straight Matt Forte touches after a false start to begin the series? Getting punctured for 7 yards on the same type of play your own team just knifed the Bears’ D with? Surrendering a moving-of-the-chains to a guy who just caught his second pass of the year??? DO SOMETHING, PACKERS!

On the following play, destiny’s pendulum began to swing back to its master, those of the cheese and forest green. Chicago tried to steal another Green Bay trick, running another quick screen of the same make and model of Brandon Marshall’s earlier play, this time to Alshon Jeffrey on the left side of the formation. However, this time Marshall was called for an illegal formation for covering the tight end, an infraction regarding how many men can be on the LOS. A small mistake, to be sure, but the kind of issue that you simply cannot make in the season’s finale. The kind of penalty that the Packers, with their Super Bowl-winning partnership of McCarthy and Rodgers, would never make in such a critical situation. This was now the second 1st and 15 they’d face on this most solemn of season-deciding drives. Cutler hit Forte for a short gain on the next down, but A.J. Hawk $#50 quickly obliterated any chance the back had at yards after contact, tackling him at the 40-yard line - the utter cusp of field goal range. Positive yards. They just needed a couple, lousy positive yards.

They wouldn’t get them on the next play. A routine handoff to Forte, who was being The Man, got stopped-up at the line of scrimmage, leading to Forte doubling-back the way he came to his left. He was met again by a pack of Packers, leading to him retreating even further upfield and farther out towards the left sideline. His blockers doing him no favors, he was swiftly met five yards in the backfield by a combination of A.J. Hawk, Mike Daniels, Morgan Burnett, Andy Mulumba, and Sean Richardson, with only Jay Cutler and Jermon Bushrod flailing rather unhelpfully in support of their running back.

Matt Forte and Jordy Nelson have different reactions to being met head-on by four different tacklers.

It was 3rd and 17. Last ditch effort, forlorn hope, almost-no-shot territory for the Bears. They obviously weren’t in a position to go for it on fourth down, so could they at least get those elusive positive yards to try and squeeze in a direly-needed field goal to increase the lead to 4, forcing the Packers to get a touchdown instead of a comparatively much-easier field goal of their own? Jay Cutler said to hell with that, and tried Jeffrey, deep down the sideline.

The tetrapartite tragicomedy, pars duus.

It was not to be. The ball was not touched by Sam Shields, the covering cornerback, nor was it poorly-placed by Cutler, the questing quarterback. It was not tracked terribly in the air by Alshon Jeffrey, the willing wideout. It simply went through his hands, very Conte-ly.

Podlesh was on to punt, and the initiative was the Packers’. McCarthy’s gambit, if you could call it that, had paid off beautifully - all the Packers needed was a field goal to take the lead. They went back to Lacy - a run, then a checkdown, to bring up 3rd and 2. They went to Lacy, who was dealing with a bad ankle that had to be screaming something awful at this point, up the middle for the first - but he didn’t get it. Chris Conte combined with Jay Ratliff to stop the running back mere millimeters from a first down. This was another test of mettle for Mike McCarthy. They had one timeout left, and over 5 minutes to play. They were down one. They could have punted. But the game wasn’t tied. McCarthy had to make the difficult decision, which he had chosen not to make earlier, now. Aikman said as much - “Those are hard calls to make as a head coach.” McCarthy made the right one. Putting an I-formation on the field with Randall Cobb as the tailback and John Kuhn (I told you about guys with names starting with J, didn’t I?) in his usual fullback spot, right behind Rodgers. With almost no time left on the play clock, Rodgers expertly directed Ryan Taylor, a reserve blocking tight end, to move up onto the line of scrimmage, then snapped the ball as the clock expired. He avoided two potential play-nullifying penalties in a single stroke - delay of game would have made it 4th and 6, and almost certainly would have necessitated a punt instead of an offensive play, and an illegal formation penalty, which Cutler and the Bears failed to avoid on their last set of downs, would have done the same. But that’s not how this game was destined to end. Not for The Bad Man. Kuhn easily made the first down, barreling through a weirdly light Bears front seven.

The game of ball is a game of inches. Excruciating, unspeakable inches.

The Packers once again went back to the quick-screen game on the next play, using the same Cobb-Jones combo with Cobb blocking as on their previous drive. Jones picked up only 6 this time, setting up a 2nd and 4. They should have run the same play again, as the next down saw Jones drop a pass beyond the sticks from Rodgers. Enough reliance on pass-catchers, Rodgers thought to himself, as on the following third down Rodgers simply scrambled to his left and juked-out Lance Briggs to pick up the first. As badly as the beginning of the last Bears drive had gone for the Packers D, this Packers offensive drive was going as well as anyone could ask for. They were slowly - very slowly - moving the ball downfield, having already taken 3 minutes off of a clock that read 6:24 despite only traveling from their own 13 to their own 35. They would need about 30 to 35 more yards to be in Crosby range.

Rodgers found his Guy, Jordy Nelson, on the next play, for 7 yards. A Lacy run off the tackle for two yards. Then another, for no gain. The two minute warning arrive, and it was fourth down, again. 4th and 1, again. A heavy formation with Jonh Kuhn in the backfield, again. This time though it was a heavy pistol-like formation with two “backs” (one of them being Andrew Quarless, clearly in just to block) lined up to Rodgers’ left; and again, though the down was fraught with uncertainty as a Jordy Nelson curl route was forced to wait a beat longer than comfortable at the top of the route tree for a slow-moving Rodgers pass to reach its target, it resulted in another first down. They were right at the 50 yard line now, in need of just a few more first downs to kick that victory-delivering field goal.

The Bears were reeling. They needed to do something to stop the bleeding. But the defense hadn’t been a viable tourniquet all season, and the Packers’ winning 30-28 - or at the very least taking the lead with very little time left by the same margin - seemed an inexorable inevitability. But the Packers started having issues of their own, beginning with an early, unlooked-for snap to Rodgers on the next first down that flustered the usually collected QB enough that he short-armed an open Andrew Quarless down the left sideline which would have put them in easy, assured field goal range. The next play was almost disastrous in the circumstances. They decided to hand the ball off to Eddie Lacy again, facing 2nd and 10 from the 50 with less than 90 seconds left. He gained only two. Third and 8.

“In nitty-gritty time, quarterbacks go to one guy.” That is what Aaron Rodgers did on 3rd and 8, with the season in the balance. He looked for His Guy, Jordy Nelson. But Nelson either got too far into his in-cut, or Rodgers threw the ball too far behind him, because the ball, close though it was to Nelson, was just out of his reach in his in-breaking-route’s contrails. It was a stroke of good fortune, frankly, that the defender in coverage, Tim Jennings, didn’t bobble the ball to himself, gain possession, and intercept the pass for a Bears win. But in any case he was on Nelson’s trail close enough to make it a tighter-than-feasible window to throw into, and the ball fell to the sullen turf of Soldier Field in demi-defeat, penultimate pusillanimity, almost-consummated-capitulation. If the Packers could not convert on 4th and 8, their season would be over. The Bears would be NFC North division champions. With only one timeout left and 46 seconds left on the clock, this was it - the last meaningful snap the 2013 Packers might play on offense. The fat lady was singing an etude in the other room and pouring drams of Malört for the gathered, adorational throng. Everything was coming up Dark Navy and Orange. 4th & 8.

VIII. A-Rodgalypse Now: The Veil Is Torn

Fate has a way of prophesying itself. The special moments in life can often seem preordained, inescapable, without equal, beyond the power of man to apprehend or contravene - indeed, some moments can even seem like they’ve happened before, as though the cosmic powers have admitted one into a theater of déjà vu during those points in the human experience that hold the highest drama. Randy Cross, an offensive lineman and four-time All Pro who won three Super Bowls with the San Francisco 49ers who was asked to reminisce about his team’s first Super Bowl in 1981, put it like this: 

“There are a few moments in my life that, I’ll always be in the moment. I’ll be there when my kids are born. I’ll be there when a lot of tragic things have happened to our country, and other things in my life. But for me, I’ll always be in that season, in that moment.”

Cross is speaking in a uniquely poignant, uncommonly authentic, verifiably legendary way in this quote. One hears a lot of people talk about the great moments in their lives - the best nights of their lives, the great achievements of their lives in sports, business, or their personal lives, “where they were” when their favorite team won the biggest game of their fandom’s lives. As friends, we humor our friends when they’ve had a bit to drink or smoke and choose to, welcome or otherwise, regale their present company with such reminiscences, regardless of whether or not one thinks “Remember When” is a lowly form of conversation. I hope, my reader, that you do not think so - that’s kind of the idea behind this whole site. My point is this - it’s very rare for these conversations to actually impress the listener, much less ring true and lend glorious credence to the words of the speaker. But Randy Cross is one of the few humans to announce the power of the important moments in his life in a way that should and does make most listeners say, “Yeah - that is pretty awesome.” The important, transcendent moments in sports history can do this. Not only to those present onfield for the action itself, but for the viewers too.

Cross didn’t just help fortify the offensive line during The Catch, which was the seminal moment of the 1981 San Francisco 49ers season. He was also a starter throughout the season, and was present during a rapturously Saturnalian football feast of vengeance against the same Dallas Cowboys earlier in the year in Week 6. That game held special significance for the 49ers, many of whom had been on the team for a few years and as such had trudged through years of irrelevance and downright pitiful levels of play, often spiked with humiliatingly one-sided losses to the Cowboys, throughout the 70s, including by scores such as 59-14 and 42-35, plus losses in the NFC Divisional and Conference Championships earlier in the preceding decade. In ‘81, the Niners beat the Cowboys to a royal blue pulp, 45-14 - “an ass-whooping of Biblical proportions,” remembered Cross - and were certain that for the first time in their careers they’d be featured on the hallowed Monday Night Football halftime highlights show. But for sooth - Howard Cosell and the two bombastic broadcasters he partnered with for the classic ABC program skipped over the 49ers that week. That week’s MNF broadcast, a one-dimensional slaughterfest by Buffalo over Miami with a halftime score of 31-7, instead chose to feature highlights of the Steelers’ 13-7 win over the Brian Sipe- and Paul McDonald-led Browns, a Tommy Kramer-Dan Fouts QB duel which would be won by Minnesota thanks to an unreal performance by wideout Terry LeCount, and a Rams-Falcons intradivisional matchup (seriously) that saw return man Leroy Irvin take two punts back for touchdowns. The “Outstanding Player” segment highlighted Houston’s Earl Campbell and Denver’s Steve Watson. There was not a single mention of the magnificent 49ers - there was a brief mention of the foes they’d flattened, though, as the Cowboys’ Sunday night matchup against the Rams was promoted during the highlights. It is astonishing in 2025 to think that once upon a time a Monday Night Football broadcast could transpire that did not even passingly mention a game played that weekend between the 49ers and the ever-plentiful wellspring of sports content that is the Cowboys, but it was a different time. The fact of the matter is that the 49ers pinpointed this game as their arrival to the party of those teams with bona fide Contender Status - to be snubbed as they felt they were by the acknowledged authorities of the time during their spell at the summit of pro football early in the season grated on them. They brought this anger, this discontent, this sense of overripeness for lionization with them when they met again with Dallas in the NFC Championship. They kept the moment with them, and made a new one in so doing. 

But resonant moments and competitive symmetry do not need to occur in different games. Sometimes it can happen drive to drive. And on December 29, 2013, the Packers found themselves at the utmost fundament of tumult. They were down one, outside field goal range. They had one timeout left and less than a minute with which to work. They had to deliver, now. The Bears were conceding nothing at this point - they did not call a timeout to discuss defensive tacticianship, they did not choose to mass players at the first down line, and they did not choose to play deep coverage, as though they were defending a Hail Mary - they weren’t facing this exact scenario, to be sure, so it makes sense that they’d choose to defend it as a “regular” down, despite the immensity of irregularity that prevailed upon the coming down. At first the Bears appeared to be playing Cover 1, with four DBs in Man Coverage and Major Wright #21 playing deep middle. But then the corner initially covering Randall Cobb, Isaiah Frey #31, scurried into the tackle box, showing blitz. This left four defenders in coverage, with Wright motioning in towards the middle of the field to cover certified Guy Jordy Nelson. This was risky, in one sense, as having single coverage on all receivers typically gives an advantage to the route-runners - it also allows the fifth receiver, the back in the backfield, to go uncovered and potentially catch a short pass uncontested and pick up a first down with his own legs. But the Bears looked to have out-guessed the Packers in this regard, as the back who was in was John Kuhn, a fullback who was almost certainly was not going to flare out into the flat or on a wheel. This meant that you had six blockers against seven rushers. The numbers weren’t in Green Bay’s favor on the personnel, they weren’t in Green Bay’s favor on the down and distance, they weren’t in Green Bay’s favor on the clock, and worst of all, they weren’t in Green Bay’s favor on the scoreboard.

They did have one advantage, though. 

Aaron Rodgers. #12. In a way, a doubled mirror image of Jay Cutler’s #6. One who had been utterly liable for much of his team’s misfortunes in the first half contrasted with one who had more than doubled the former’s passer rating in the first half, a  mere 10 points shy of a Perfect Passer Rating. One who had thrown two interceptions and fumbled in the first half versus one who had led his team to three straight touchdowns on three straight drives in the third quarter. But it wasn’t the first half anymore, and it wasn’t the third quarter anymore. It was the fourth quarter. The final stanza. The utter test. And in that situation, you throw out all that’s come before. What can you do for me now? This, this right here, is why you want Aaron Rodgers. You don’t want the watchstander - you want Robin Hood in Lincoln Green (or Forest Green, as the case may be). The poetic symmetry continues. All season, the Packers had been a team who banqueted bountifully and opportunistically on almosts and near-misses of opponents. They hadn’t been perfect - they’d lost one-score games early in the year against tough opponents in San Francisco and Cincinnati, they’d blown their chance to beat bad teams like the Giants and Vikings and had settled for losses or ties withal, they’d missed the final play of the game at the goalline in Lambeau against Super Bowl nemesis Pittsburgh, and most damning, they’d let a late-third-quarter lead slip away against Chicago earlier in the year, a loss that, like any of the others they’d suffered, could be seen as the difference if they lost this game. But when they were most in need of heroes, when the most chips were in the middle, they’d come up. They’d beaten Dallas in Dallas. They’d gotten one over on Atlanta at home to stop their 0-3-1 slide in late midseason. They’d gotten lucky that their late-season loss to Pittsburgh was to, well, Pittsburgh - an interconference opponent without as much bearing on their tiebreaker status - and been even more lucky that the Bears schedule broke the way it did, getting to see their ursine rivals play the white-hot Eagles to be almost assured that this game would be a winner-take-all one. And in this game, the near misses, the almosts, the should-have-gottens and could-have-hads had started turning the Packers’ way. They’d almost seen a ten- or even fourteen-point swing gravely wound their chances when Jordy Nelson’s drop early in the second quarter which would have put them in the redzone turned into a Tim Jennings interception, who almost got away from the tackler Nelson down the near sideline. They’d almost lost possession, and a score, on the Rodgers-to-Boykin fumble touchdown, after Julius Peppers almost sacked Rodgers. They’d almost been forced to pay a hefty price on the scoreboard by giving up three straight touchdowns to go down 8 - almost 9, if Marc Trestman had made a different call on that last touchdown - but had done enough to keep the deficit within reasonable comeback territory. Chris Conte had almost gotten his fingertips on the holy silver bullet fired through the heart of the Bears’ pass defense to Andrew Quarless - who almost didn’t collect the ball on the bobble, just as he’d failed to do earlier in the game on a key down. And, perhaps most paramount of all, Alshon Jeffrey had, almost, caught a near-perfect pass down the left sideline from Jay Cutler to put them on the doorstep of glory - next to the endzone, a possible touchdown, and a much likelier win. Almost.

And now, with these almosts all cascading on top of one another, all the players on the field, Packer or Bear, cheesehead or windy city stalwart, wearer of green-and-gold or navy-and-orange, could only hope that the next almost, the final near-miss, was to their opponent’s detriment, and not their own. The next play would echo in the eternities of football lore. This was the greatest game the Bears and Packers had ever played - not with the highest stakes, not with Lombardi or Halas on the sideline, not with any certain playoff glory forthcoming at the finale of this snap - but the greatest nonetheless. It had had everything. It just needed a bit more before it was immortal. 4th & 8. The Bears showing blitz. Rodgers in the shotgun. Fourth and Destiny.

The Bear trap activates. The cheese seems doomed.

The snap came. The receivers flew. The Bears brought all of their seven men showing blitz. Somehow in the chaos of the onslaught Chicago wreaked on the Packers’ pass protection, the one man that the OL didn’t block was the archdemon Julius Peppers, who lunged for Rodgers almost as soon as he got past the LOS. John Kuhn, the inimitable utility fullback, somehow managed to weave his way around to the other side of the pass pocket and throw his body at the knees of Peppers. It had almost no effect - but it did buy enough time for Rodgers to turn left, un-square his shoulders, flee the pressure that was bearing down upon him from all angles except out to his left, set his feet, peer sagaciously downfield, and find his man.

The Bear trap fails. The cheese escapes its jaws.

Cobb.

Touchdown, Randall Cobb.

Touchdown, Randall Cobb?

It was unthinkable. The Bears had done what almost all coaches want to do in this situation, but only occasionally have the balls to actually do - they brought pressure on a do-or-die passing situation. In this instance, no one would have faulted Trestman and his defensive braintrust if they’d rushed four, or even three, and put seven or eight men back in coverage or simply massed all his linebackers and defensive backs at the sticks. They inverted this strategy, forcing Rodgers to get rid of the ball, and fast, with the full fury of the zero blitz coming at him as serious as a heart attack. But in the crux of fate, in the hour of destiny, it was Rodgers, the peerless, the unsurpassable, the ever-exemplary and ultra-unfazeable, who outdueled the other future hall of famer on the field in Julius Peppers in the single biggest play of each of their seasons - and one of the most dramatic in all of NFL history.

On the back end of this play, the cover-zero pass defense, in a perverse reversal of how near-perfectly the pressure on Rodgers had worked, had capsized. No one had stayed in coverage on Randall Cobb. Unbelievable! The replays showed a bevy of bumblings by the Bears. The least offensive was a pretty blatantly illegal downfield collision by Major Wright on Jordy Nelson, who may have been slipping from his feet already as the safety reached his heat-seeking destination. It’s not improbable that Wright was doing two things: one, banking on the fact that Nelson, who was running flat-out, would be seen by any viewing referees as having “initiated” the contact, and two, assuming that by the time this contact happened Rodgers would be in the unholy embrace of two or three navy-clad cacodemons. From where he was standing it probably looked like the play had been categorically ended by Julius Peppers as he leapt over Kuhn towards Rodgers, which would make any chance of an illegal contact call imminently less likely.

The far more glaring issues happened further downfield. The Bears, despite needing above all to protect two areas - the area directly past the first down line, and the deep field leading directly to the endzone - failed spectacularly to cover either of the holy areas they needed to keep well-guarded. For one thing, the widest-split receiver, James Jones, ran essentially a 12-yard curl terminating about 4 yards past the first down, and though defenders were in the general area of where he would have caught the ball, Rodgers certainly could have fit in a screaming fastball to him - it was the same route, in essence, that Jordy Nelson had converted the previous 4th down using. They’d learned nothing from that failure, apparently. While we’re here, it should be noted that to Rodgers’ right, Andrew Quarless looks to have been covered pretty air-tightly by Tim Jennings, who - as their best corner on the field on this play - probably should have been covering one of the wide receivers. But that’s neither here, nor there.

One other thing wasn’t here or there on this play - Chris Conte, #47. As mentioned, he appeared to be (and, unless the Bears called a truly bizarre combination of man- and zone coverage that would cover the shallow left of the field at the expense of an undefended deep middle third, was supposed to be) in man coverage on the Y receiver, who was Randall Cobb. For a moment it looked like Isaiah Frey would be covering Cobb. Prior to the snap, Frey was playing inside coverage about two yards off the line, in good position to defend a slant or other quick-breaking inside route. In this situation, this wasn’t really a viable option for the Packers, so it might have been a better idea to line up more directly across from the guy, perhaps a few yards deeper too just to be safe, but whatever the curious decisions he made before the snap, immediately before it, he skulked down into the tackle box to join his blitzing brethren, probably hoping however ill-advisedly to confuse Rodgers a bit. That left Chris Conte, who had squatted down a bit inside of Cobb right at the first-down marker, in coverage of the Packers’ speediest weapon. Conte stayed mostly put at the snap, breaking down a bit to be in good position to react to the top of Cobb’s route. But then, at roughly the same second that Wright plunged his body in front of Jordy Nelson, Conte’s brain ceased operating properly. He seemed uncertain of who to cover in the craziness of the Nelson collision, the curl-route of James Jones, and, most important to him, the upward-flying hand, universal gesture signifying the message THROW ME THE BALL, of Randall Cobb. He should have kept covering Cobb. But since this happened at almost exactly the same time as the Peppers attack on Rodgers, Conte may have thought the only possible place the ball could go was to the one receiver who was facing Rodgers, ready to catch the pass, which was James Jones. Jones was to Conte’s right, Rodgers’ left. It would have made sense for Rodgers to throw it to Jones there - it was the easier pass, if not the easier completion. Conte may also have thought that Rodgers, having escaped the immediate lethality of the blitz, might have tried to run for the first down. Not inconceivable either, since Rodgers had done just that on this very drive a few plays earlier. But Rodgers was firmly in command of the  Packers’ fortunes, and those of the Bears too, at this point, and though he could have tried to just pick up the first down to Jones, or just pick up the first down running, he chose the home run. Chicks dig the long ball. No one throws a better long one than Rodgers. The Bad Man was poised to author yet another instance of evildoing to his Illinoisan adversaries, and he did his duty. He who hesitates is lost. He who hesitated would lose the game, indeed. And Conte, in a season of defensive infamy, was only the last to hesitate. Unfortunately, his hesitation, the final one, is the one we all remember.

The picture worth thousands of (above-written) words. Rhapsody In Green.

Cobb was all alone downfield. Zack Bowman, seemingly the only defender who realized the impending disaster that was shortly to come to pass, frantically sprinted away from the man he had been covering (Jones) to at least try and stop or slow Cobb before he reached the endzone. But his position was hopeless. In fact, he did the right thing, whether he intended to or not, by letting him score. With two timeouts and less than 40 seconds on the clock by the time Cobb caught the pass, the Packers could have run the clock all the way down to 2 or 3 seconds left and kicked a sure-thing field goal to win, forcing Chicago to burn their two timeouts which remained. Recall that the Bears had burned their first timeout, which was actually, now that they were in this position, their most important timeout, back in the third quarter following Alshon Jeffrey’s massive 67-yard catch. It was for no good reason other than to avoid a delay of game one yard away from the endzone. A hideous misallocation of resources given the circumstances. Had they had all three, they could have stopped Green Bay on three plays, conceded the go-ahead field goal, and at least tried to drive for one of their own. Now they had to score a touchdown. Had to. Green Bay attempted a two-point conversion to go up a clean 7, finally finishing off the bizarre saga of football math that had mushroomed into fully-bloomed lunacy throughout the second half, but Rodgers’ pass was batted down by a still-stunned Chicago defender. That was it for the 2013 Bears defense.

Ecstasy…

It wasn’t over over. But it was pretty close. Asking the Bears to score a touchdown in 38 seconds was a hell of an ask. Devin Hester did set them up with great field position by taking the Crosby sky kick up to the Bears’ 40, but he gobbled up 7 seconds in so doing. The Bears now had 31 seconds and two timeouts to go 60 yards. Cutler opened this most desperate of drives well enough with a 15-yard strike down the middle of the field to Martellus Bennett, who was tackled immediately.

…and anguish.

The Bears had 24 seconds left at their own 45. It reminded one of the final drive Tom Brady attempted to lead against the Colts in the 2006 AFC Championship, which saw the Colts score a late touchdown to go up 4 while leaving next to no time for a Patriots response, though that team did cross midfield with a ghost of a shot at a miracle win. Perhaps more fitting for our purposes, it was also similar to the drive Danny White and the Cowboys embarked on, doomed though they were, following The Catch by Dwight Clark which saw a late lead change in San Francisco’s favor 25 years prior to that ‘06 showdown. Both of these games were imbued with the preternatural power of Moments, to be sure - but there’s only so much magic that one game can hold. Both Brady’s drive against the Colts and White’s drive against the Niners ended in mute, abrupt quietus - Brady’s on a memorably magnificent MARLIN JACKSON interception, White’s on a strip sack after a beautiful long completion (which was probably ended by an illegal horse collar tackle - but karma’s a bitch in the playoffs). Cutler was now in Tom Brady’s and Danny White’s shoes. These shoes were uncomfortable, sole-piercing 9-inch heels, and Cutler was being asked to run the Barkley Marathons in them. On the final few plays, Cutler did flash some of the better-than-you-think athleticism that had made him so dangerous on his good days, escaping an admittedly cautious Green Bay pass rush on each of his final three throws to try and find his deepest reachable receivers. The first was a deep heave to his left towards Alshon Jeffrey. Double covered, batted down. 16 seconds left. The next was a well-placed strike across the middle to Brandon Marshall, who (forgivably) dropped the pass. This most likely wouldn’t have changed the outcome, but it was a classic “bad drop” to see it in real time. The last was a prayer to the right, again to Marshall. Double coverage, intercepted by Sam Shields. Ballgame. The game is gone. The season is gone. The Packers reign. The Bears go home.

The Bad Man, at his very baddest.

A conclusory aside: I watched this game in a Buffalo Wild Wings with my friend, a Bears fan. I wish I could go back and watch it again. The fact of the matter was that I was myself glued to a similarly consequential though much less exciting game being played between the San Diego Chargers and the Chiefs’ backups, helmed by Journeyman QB Mt. Rushmore initiate Chase Daniel. The reason I gave this game anything more than passing notice was because of the utterly insane spiderweb of playoff implications its result would prove the final thread within. See, the 2013 Pittsburgh Steelers had a rollicking, oftentimes unpleasant, almost always gleefully gripping season that had seen them start 0-4 - including a 17-point full-body-cast-necessitating beatdown from the Bears that dropped them to that winless mark on Sunday Night Football. The Steelers, behind young stars Antonio Brown and Le’Veon Bell, rallied, though, winning 8 of their final 12 games to finish at 8-8. That wouldn’t be enough to win the AFC North, as this was a classic Marvin Lewis season where the Bengals went 11-5 (8-0 at home) before bowing out noiselessly in the playoffs against the Chargers. The reason the Chargers got the privilege of playing these cats was because they defeated the Chiefs, who had nothing to play for, on this day, becoming the final AFC wild card entrant. But it could have been the Steelers!!! Bear (eh?) with me for a minute while I go through this. At 7-8, the Steelers could not finish with a winning record, but they didn’t need to. They, the Dolphins, the Ravens, the Chargers, and the Jets were all either 7-8 or 8-7 going into the final week of the season. Only the Jets, by virtue of being the Jets, could not reach the playoffs, owing to their mathematical elimination against, weirdly enough, the out-of-conference Panthers in Week 15. Every other team within one game of .500 was game, though. For the Steelers to reach the playoffs, they needed four things to go their way. One, they needed to defeat the dead-ass Browns, who were playing out the string with one-year-head-coaching-wonder Rob Chudzinski at HC, one-year-general-manager-wonder Michael Lombardi in the GM chair, and similarly nonentitative one-year-quarterbacking-wonder Jason Campbell calling signals. The Steelers won easily, 20-7. They then needed the Bengals to defeat defending world champions Baltimore. It had not been Baltimore’s year, and it wasn’t Baltimore’s day - they lost 34-17 behind a career day from Andy Dalton, who bested Carson Palmer’s franchise records for passing yards and passing touchdowns in a single season in the win. Then, they needed the Jets, who were a bad team in 2013, to defeat the Dolphins, who had themselves beaten the Steelers in Pittsburgh in one of the most entertaining games of this century a few weeks earlier. The Jets were up for the challenge, and though it ultimately only extended embattled head coach Rex Ryan for one more or less meaningless year, they held up their end of the bargain, downing Miami by that familiar score of 20-7. This was a Dolphins team that had beaten these same Jets 23-3, then the Steelers 34-28, then the freaking New England Patriots 24-20 in a three-game span to begin December before getting bonked over the head by Buffalo (0-19) and New York (7-20) to turn a 3-0 start and 8-6 mark in Week 15 into an 8-8 shit sandwich of a season. It all came down to San Diego versus the Chiefs’ reserves. In an amazingly even game that featured both teams running the ball over 35 times in what looked like a throwback to the Dick Vermeil-Marty Schottenheimer days of the rivalry, the Chiefs drove for a potential game-winning field goal down to the Chargers 24-yard line. But Ryan Succop missed the gosh darn field goal, thanks in no small part to a very weird-looking and very illegal kick-block formation from San Diego which featured 8 men lined up on one side of the line, which you aren’t allowed to do. If it was called, this would have been just another agonizing annal in the weighty tome of Chargers special teams gaffes, but with the refs not noticing (or more likely, forgetting that this obscure rule was even in the rulebook), the game went on. In overtime, the Chiefs had a chance to win again, stopping the Chargers on their first possession to force a punt and a short field for Chase Daniel to drive down and win the game a second time. But surprise of surprises, the Chargers decide to try their luck on special teams again, this time in a far ballsier, much more risky way, by running an Eric Weddle fake punt inside their own 30-yard line. On first and all subsequent views, it really looks like Weddle got past the first down, was stood up for just a moment (not long enough for his “forward progress” to be considered stopped, in my opinion), had the football stripped away from him by Nico Johnson, and saw running back Cyrus Gray collect the bouncing ball, weave over to the far sideline, and take it in for one of the most brain-destroying overtime touchdowns ever. The sepulchrally unenthused broadcast team of Marv Albert and Rich Gannon, who sounded like they were watching putting practice at a PGA Tour Champions match, barely mentioned the possibility that that play had even transpired, instead noting necromantically that the Chargers got the first down, and that they were courageous for attempting such a stunt. The Chargers went on to kick a field goal which proved the difference after Chase Daniel could not match them on his only drive of overtime. Give the Chargers credit - they rattled off a 17-play, 62-yard, 9:25-long field goal drive that featured one pass caught by a wide receiver beyond the line of scrimmage. Bananas. Chargers go to the playoffs - no playoffs for the Steelers. The Steelers would eventually be repaid by the Football Gods for this heretical insolence by the referees, the announcers, and the Chargers, though. The maddening end-of-regulation, beginning-of-overtime sequence was blood-boiling to behold as a Steelers fan. It was so infuriating that a Mercer, PA Department Of Corrections inmate filed a motion seeking a “temporary emergency injunction” on the NFL playoffs compelled by the blown no-call on the Chiefs’ field goal attempt. Needless to say, the litigious impinger was ignored, and San Diego promptly dispatched the playoffphobic Bengals before themselves being ushered out of the tournament by Denver. But it was a nice little sideshow. Who says Fox doesn’t report on important news topics? 

IX. Indefensibility: The Answer To The Question

Football games pervade the way that Americans speak about not just their sports, but about their lives. As such, we have borrowed many different twists of gridiron phraseology and fashioned them into suitable usages for description of the day-to-day: someone who got destructively drunk was “blitzed,” an action which has been temporarily given up on or tabled for another day has been “punted,” a particularly significant, important, or climactic moment in business or pleasure may be referred to by one saying “this is the ballgame.” And of course, a low-probability attempt to achieve something, typically with not enough time left for any other attempt or done out of such chimerical desperation that its fruitlessness is a near certainty is frequently and delightfully renamed a “Hail Mary.” There’s more to this than you might expect, this merging of gridiron lexis with English language corpus, but this has been discussed elsewhere already. 

A Hail Mary. A supplication, as stated in the NFL Films masterpiece “The History of the Hail Mary” by Deacon James Cattanea, which “is a prayer within the Catholic Church. We pray to Mary as an intercessor; it’s our way of saying ‘I need help, God – what if I use your mother to get to you?’” While what Aaron Rodgers and the Packers drew up, attempted, and achieve on their fateful 4th and 8 at Soldier Field down 1 with next to no meaningful plays left to run and time dwindling, was not a Hail Mary in the traditional sense – it didn’t come on the last play of the game, it didn’t feature three or four receivers running to a single point downfield and “overloading a spot,” as Jim Harbaugh would say, and it didn’t involve the telltale tactic of, one, jumping up for or batting up a pass thrown high and arching by the quarterback and, two, catching it. That wasn’t what the play looked like. But for the love of God it felt like one. And the beautiful changeability of football is that, though the game of ball is infinite and various and can be played so many different times that, like chess, no two games could ever hope to be the same, the similarities play-to-play, drive-to-drive, game-to-game, season-to-season, career-to-career and era-to-era echo themselves in poetic resonance. The Packers didn’t try to throw a Hail Mary on 4th and 8 – the football gods deemed that it should be so, entering the play into the ledger of last-gasp legendarium.

It’s almost impossible to overstate how unlikely the final drive was for the Packers. Converting three different fourth downs on a single drive is an achievement of staggering improbability. Only 402 games since 1991 have seen a team convert at least three fourth downs in a single game - about 4% of all teams, in all games. That figure nearly halves, to 211 (2%), when we look at teams who went a perfect 3-3, 4-4, or (in one ridiculous instance) 5-5 (100% conversion rate) on their fourth down attempts. For a team to go perfect on 4th down, converting three of them, all on their final possession, in a game-winning drive? It’s possible that this is the first and only time that has ever happened. The only other game that springs to mind that fits (though not perfectly) in this category is the Chargers’ magnificently mammoth game-tying drive against the Raiders in the 2021 regular season finale. This drive featured three different conversions of 4th and 10, and a 3rd and 10 conversion to boot, and a last-second, final-play-of-regulation (only 5 seconds left, so seriously last play) touchdown pass. But this only tied the game - and the Chargers had failed on fourth down earlier in the third quarter, too. Plus, they lost this game. There has never been anything like the Packers’ last drive of the 2013 regular season in the history of pro football. By this same token, it is almost impossible to overstate how improbably macabre the unserviceability of the Bears’ defense was - in this game and throughout the season.

At first blush, things don’t look so bad: 8-8. Another kind of hard-bitten symmetry. But unlike the Steelers, who only needed 8 wins, got them, and were hideously betrayed by a Chiefs team and the presiding football gods who could have cared less about a team that started 0-4 and squandered their September, the Bears had destiny within their own delimitations. They’d started remarkably well, by turns 3-0, 4-2, 5-3, 6-4 and 8-6. They had never had a losing record the entire season, and were only twice at .500. They needed no outside help on the final Sunday. They’d not dug themselves to the bottom of a staggering divisional hole. Significantly, they’d gotten to play at home in a game that, provided they won, would have afforded them another home game (those Steelers were playing at home against a flatlining Cleveland outfit for the privilege of going to Cincinnati, who’d easily handled the Steelers at home in Week 2). And if they could have just beaten the god damn Packers, it would have been like winning two different playoff games - they’d be advancing to play the Saints or 49ers, and would know that they would never have to play the Packers in these playoffs. But it was ashes in the grate, embers of a guttering campfire on the cold shores of Lake Michigan. And with nothing left on the schedule, no more games to play, no further glory to be won or lost, the Bears were left, as were twenty other playoff non-participating teams, with essentially nothing. Nothing but the memories of what could have been and where they could have been better. There are always fingers to point.

The fortunes of a football team are never due solely to one man - one coach, one quarterback, one receiver, one defender. Many combine to produce the results one sees each week, and over the course of a year. True, there was blame to go around, and when your final three games see you score 26 points per game but give up 39, it is clear that both offense and defense share in the ignominy. 38 points from Cutler and Co had been enough, true, to defeat the Browns (who’d only scored as many points as they did against the Bears, 31, two other times in 2013), but 11 points had been not quite enough against the Eagles, who beat them by 43 points, nor 28 sufficient versus the Packers, who’d beaten them by 5. Over their final three games - those after the change back to Jay Cutler as QB - the Bears finished with a point differential of -41, losing by an average of 14 points. Over the course of the 7 games Josh McCown had played significant snaps, the Bears scored 196 points, good for exactly 28 per game (a notch better than Cutler’s 27.6 over 9 games), but surrendered 199 - going 3-4 over this stretch. In the 9 games started by Cutler, where the team scored 249 points, the team surrendered 279 points - 31 per game. A difference of just over 3 points per game. More sickening than the closeness of these figures are the touchdowns that proved the difference between them: in a world where the Cutler Bears’ Points For (249) and Points Against (279) are separated by a mere thirty points, six touchdowns and 42 total points are accountable to the Bears’ offense, either in the form of pick sixes or fumbles returned for scores. Remove these scores and they surrender only 237 points in the entire 9-game Cutler saga. Remove all non-passing non-rushing touchdowns scored against the Bears in 2013, and you’d probably be in the playoffs - this would eliminate a Nick Fairley touchdown in Week 4 which the Bears lost by 8 and the grotesquely cruel Jarrett Boykin touchdown against the Packers. But that leaves 5 other defensive touchdowns by opponents which either came in Bears wins (as in the case of the Browns, as well as a fumble return and kick return touchdown surrendered in the same game to Minnesota) or Bears blowout losses (as against St. Louis and Philadelphia). Ultimately, the Bears’ fate was mostly ironclad, and if the offense had deported itself with less slovenliness when it came to scores off their own turnovers, it just would not have made that much of a difference.

The numbers for the Bears in 2013 are, simply, unbelievable. Let’s think about this for a second. The Bears had existed for 94 years in 2013 - the third-oldest team in the NFL. Not once had they finished last in points or yards allowed on defense. They had finished as the best scoring defense 12 times, and had surrendered the least yardage at least 8 different times throughout league history. I say “at least” because we don’t have yardage stats before 1932, but since the Bears finished with a winning record and positive point differential in every season but one between 1920 and 1932, it’s possible and indeed likely they surrendered the fewest yardage more than merely 8 times. The Bears’ legacy on defense does not extend to offense. They have scored the most points in the league 10 times - all of these seasons occurring in the 1950s or earlier - and led the league in offensive yards at least 11 times, with all of these seasons occurring, again, in 1956 or earlier. The Bears have finished second in scoring a few times throughout their history, too - as with their high water marks for defense, most of these were before 1960. One other time was in 1965, smack-dab in the middle of the AFL-NFL competition, and since the merger (1970), the best the Bears have finished in scoring offense, second in the league, has occurred three times: once as the 1985 Chicago Bears, the best team in NFL history; once in 2006, a year they reached the Super Bowl after going 13-3; and, you guessed it, in 2013, when they went 8-8 and missed the playoffs.

It gets so much worse. Remember when I said that the Bears had never finished with the worst scoring defense or the worst defense by yardage surrendered, ever? That’s true - but they have been, rarely, very bad. In 1997 they finished 29th of 30 teams in scoring D. In 1975 they finished 25th of 26. And in 2013, they finished 30th of 32. What makes 2013 “special” is that, unlike in their other awful down years, the yardage they gave up was equally scream-inducing. Whereas in 1975 the defense by yardage was fairly average (17th-ranked) and in 1997 it wasn’t actually that bad (12th of 30), in 2013, their total defense was just as bad as their scoring defense - 30th of 32. 

And it gets even worse from here. Sure, there were two teams worse than the Bears, Washington (who should count themselves lucky they even went 3-13 and didn’t finish below the Bears in yardage too) and Minnesota (who gave up 2 more points than the Bears) in scoring, and there were two teams worse than them in terms of yards given up (Minnesota, a horrible team, and Dallas, whose last-ranked total defense reached the depths it did in large part due to The Josh McCown Game), but they were all rankly horrendous. Dallas and Minnesota had both finished in the cellar of the defensive standings before, but this was new, strange, and dark territory for the Bears. It was the lowest the Bears had ever finished, from an absolute value perspective (even if they were “only” third-worst in 2013 instead of second-worst, as in ‘97 and ‘75, this 2013 team was worse) and from a combined scoring-and-total-defense-combined perspective, which is a stat I’ve created for this exact situation.

But the very worst part is this. Only once in their history had the bears scored more points in a season - in 1985, their Super Bowl Shuffle magic carpet ride. That team scored 456 points, the 2013 Bears scored 445. Never in their history had the Bears ever given up more points than the 478 they surrendered in 2013. When looking at total yards, no Bears offense before 2013 had ever accrued more total (6,109) or passing (4,450). It just so happened that this team, one of 94 different unique seasons, should, in the infinite sadism of the football universe, also be the year that the defense, during the offense’s best season in nearly a century, had its worst performance. The 478 points allowed, the team’s 6,313 yards allowed, and the bloated, nauseating total for rushing yards surrendered (2,583) were all club records, too. 2,583 was by far the most overinflated rushing number among the 32 NFL defenses, proving the Bears could be bad in stats where, like golf, the higher the number, the shittier you are. They could also be bad in the opposite type of stats – that is, the stats that, when encountered in low volumes, aver your atrociousness. Such was the case with their sacks, which didn’t pile up in droves like in 1985 when their second-ranked offense performed identically standings-wise to its 2013 descendant. The Bears registered 31 total sacks on the season – not even two a game in a pass-happy league – to tie the Jacksonville Jaguars, who went 2-14, for worst in the league. The Bears were alone in last place for QB hits, with a less-than-bone-rattling 55 total instances of contact against opponent passers. Bad against running backs. Bad against quarterbacks. Were they good at anything? They did manage to convert 54% of their hits into sacks – good for the fourth-best such rate in the league. It goes without saying that when this only equates to about a sack and nine-tenths of another per game, you’re in deep trouble. They did, in all fairness, grab their fair share of interceptions – 19, to be exact. What should come as no surprise is that of these 19, 14 came in the Bears’ first ten games, after which opponents probably realized there was no need to risk tight-window throws when the run defense was so in want of average performance. Passers probably also realized they didn’t need to worry about pass rush, either, with Chicago’s eminently pedestrian sack-seeking squadron scaring no slingers of pigskin and posing no threat to skiddish signal-callers.

In sum: No Bears team had ever been better on offense. No Bears team had ever been worse on defense. It doesn’t help that they let Aaron Rodgers, in his first game back from a collarbone injury, lead the Packers to more total yards than any other team in Week 17, aided by a seismic paradigm shift from first half (14/22, 145 yards, 2 picks, 44.7 rating) to second half (11/17, 173 yards, 2 touchdowns, zero picks, and a 137.2 rating). 

Beyond even the entirety of Chicago Bears history there is evil that abounds in the remembrancing of this cursed team. Across all of NFL history, over 120 teams (124, to be exact) have scored at least 445 points, which is the total number the Bears scored. Only 14 failed to make the playoffs. And only one team, out of all 124, has ever finished with a negative point differential. That is these 2013 Chicago Bears. And if you think that perhaps it is unfair to compare across eras, know that of teams who average 28 points per game on offense (forget “total points scored,” as this favors teams in the 16- and 17-game eras), only the 2013 Bears - only these Bears, whose franchise can boast along with maybe the Steelers the most formidable defensive heritage of any in sports - have reached the four-touchdowns-per-game mark and not qualified for the playoffs.

These Bears are unique. They were singular in their dismayingly dismal defense. They were, at times, inspiring in their offensive firepower. They beat superior teams and lost to lesser ones. They had been the Monsters of the Midway under Lovie Smith. They’d fallen in their defensive abilities in 2012 – I called them “Mice of the Midwest” in Pt. I for their failure. But to be so bad that four touchdowns per game on offense isn’t enough to get past a .500 winning percentage…we need a new diminution, a new cutting-down-to-size of these Bears. They were microscopic on defense when it mattered most. They were microorganism-like in their mediocrity. Microorganisms of Michican Avenue. 

And after all this, it should go without saying that Marc Trestman’s Bears, in the year 2013, given how high they climbed and the cavernous abysms to which they fell, were pretty gosh darn bad. But this isn’t over – just yet.

(It could be worse. Imagine if they’d had to play the 2013 Broncos.)