Sunday, December 03, 2006
Rex Grossman is terrible at football
There. How's that for a clever headline about Rex and the Bears?
Fortunately for the Bears, the other 21 starters are very good at their jobs. Especially the 11 guys who line up on defense and spend most of their time simply stealing the ball from opposing offenses. I was watching the game today and after the defense picked off Brad Johnson for the 9th time, I thought of Creed Bratton, from The Office:
"Oh, I steal things all the time. It's just something I do. I stopped caring a long time ago. Honestly, I love stealing things."It's just something the Bears defense does.
Six turnovers, a handful of sacks and a safety. Another typical day for the best unit in the NFL.
On the other end of things, Grossman was 6-for-19 for 34 yards with three interceptions. That all accumulates into a 1.3 passer rating. That's not Kyle Orton bad. It's not Chad Hutchinson bad. It's not Shane Mathews bad. It's not even Henry Burris bad. It's drunken-blind-concussed Kordell Stewart bad.
And sadly, there isn't really much the Bears can do about it. There are lots of people calling for Brian Griese to start, as if a career journeyman (he's played for four teams in the last five years; that's a journey, man) is the answer to all of the Bears' troubles.
He's not.
He's Brian Griese.
If you yank Rex and let Griese take over, there's no guarantee that it's going to make things better. You'll hear that Griese will do a better job of "managing the game", which doesn't actually mean anything. It's just a term tossed around by broadcasters that really means "this quarterback poses no real threat."
In a sense, I'd like to see what Griese can do. But I think the risk, as of now, is too great. If Grossman is benched, you've basically given up on him. And if Griese is bad -- and there is a very real chance of that -- how can you go back to Rex? And what about next year? The Bears will have a still-young quarterback with nothing but funny eyebrows and a shattered psyche.
At this point, the situation is akin to having eaten nothing but broccoli for about two months. You're sick of it, it's not doing much good, and you feel like you're ready for a change. However, the only other option is to switch to spinach. And there's a 50 percent chance that the spinach is ridden with ecoli.
Any way you look at it, you're still eating nothing but vegetables, day after day after day.
Yuck.
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