Without question, the peak of the past decade for the Bears came after Devin Hester returned the opening kickoff of Super Bowl XLI 92 yards for one of the most electrifying touchdowns in franchise history.
Hearts raced inside the living rooms of Bears fans across America, especially Chicago, and in the press box at Dolphin Stadium in Miami Gardens, Fla., an almost overwhelming sense of inevitability mixed with anxiety. There were 14 minutes, 46 seconds left in the first quarter, and Colts quarterback Peyton Manning had yet to take a snap, yet I still remember already worrying as I sat at the keyboard. The Bears are really going to win the Super Bowl. How can I ever capture something so big?
"Can you believe it?” CBS announcer Jim Nantz exclaimed in the booth after Hester crossed the goal line.
I honestly couldn’t. Almost nobody could.
Yet now, 10 years later, it seems almost as hard to believe the Bears have gone from a team with a legitimate chance to win a Super Bowl to one of the NFL’s most underachieving organizations. The Super Bowl appearance Feb. 4, 2007, came 21 years after the Bears’ first one. From the looks of things at 1920 Football Drive in Lake Forest, it could take even longer for the Bears to play in their next one — but circle Feb. 6, 2028, on your calendar anyway, just in case.
And if somebody asks you at a Super Bowl LXII party what took the Bears so long to return, impress your friends by pointing to three specific decisions in the past decade of futility: Firing defensive coordinator Ron Rivera in 2007, trading for quarterback Jay Cutler in 2009 and hiring coach Marc Trestman over Bruce Arians in 2013.
It all started when the winning foundation Smith had built first suffered a crack 15 days after the Bears lost to the Colts 29-17. Having leverage in negotiations for a contract extension, Smith used it by forcing out popular defensive coordinator Rivera and promoting linebackers coach Bob Babich, a buddy. In the teleconference Feb. 19, 2007, announcing the worst decision of the Lovie Era, Smith infamously asked everyone to "trust me.”
"You should trust me as the head football coach to put us in the best position to win games," Smith said. "It’s as simple as that.”
A look at the 10 biggest Bears headlines of the past decade: the one each year that had people talking.
(Brad Biggs)
It wasn’t that simple, of course. Smith’s increased power that came with his new contract exposed his shortcomings as a talent evaluator. Had Smith stuck to coaching his team on Sundays instead of dabbling in personnel, he might have been able to build on the momentum of his first three seasons. But, for example, he pushed to acquire safety Adam Archuleta and endorsed Hester as a No. 1 wide receiver, which he wasn’t. He once thought Jamar Williams made Lance Briggs expendable. He developed a blind spot for quarterbacks. And Babich bungled calling defenses badly enough that Smith took over those duties himself by 2009.
Injuries interfered greatly but, as much as anything, power in the post-Super Bowl XLI years corrupted the Bears, who proved incapable of handling success. Like any good relationship, the bond between an NFL team and a football city depends on trust and Smith had damaged it, irreparably as it turned out.
A second chance to reestablish a connection came April 2, 2009, when general manager Jerry Angelo stunned the football world and traded quarterback Kyle Orton, two first-round draft picks and a third-round selection for a 25-year-old Pro Bowl quarterback. Cutler represented the franchise quarterback the Bears never had, the one that always had eluded Angelo. The Bears paid a steep price but, at the time of the deal, I applauded with the majority of giddy Chicagoans impressed with Angelo’s aggressiveness. It was boldness easy to justify for anybody who isn’t studying revisionist history.
We know now Cutler came to symbolize mediocrity and that the 2010 season that ended in the NFC championship game would be the exception, not the rule, for Januarys on the lakefront. Here’s why, in a nutshell: Cutler receives a bulk of the criticism he has earned because of his personality and imprecision, but the Bears also never surrounded him with proper talent or coaching. The Cutler Era included too many pedestrian receivers like Roy Williams and Devin Aromashodu, too many soft offensive linemen and hard-headed offensive coordinators. Everybody understood why Angelo made the biggest trade of his tenure but, in retrospect, it betrayed a football tenet he routinely preached.
Angelo always believed in keeping strengths a strength on a football team and, in acquiring Cutler, the organization’s entire emphasis shifted to offense and away from defense — the team’s traditional strength under Smith. Depth eventually suffered as defensive stars aged. The neglect kept the Bears from maintaining their identity. Hindsight allows us the benefit of wondering if the Bears would have been better off developing an efficient game-manager at quarterback like Orton, continuing to invest heavily in defense and the running game, and staying true to the principles they followed to Super Bowl XLI.
In preparing for Super Bowl 51 on Feb. 5, we’ve done our homework, ranking all 50 previous Super Bowls on how enjoyable they were to watch. Arriving at these conclusions was actually pretty simple. Ask yourself a few questions: Was there exciting drama? A legendary performance? A moment that we still can’t forget? Or were they just all hype and no substance?
Here’s our complete list.
— Jeremy Gottlieb, Washington Post
By the time Smith was fired after the 2012 season for going 10-6 and missing the playoffs for the fifth time in six seasons — Lovie fatigue had swept the city — then-general manager Phil Emery’s objective was obvious: Maximize Cutler. Emery lost confidence in Smith’s ability to do that, so he was gone. The Bears didn’t make a mistake firing Smith; the major gaffe came in hiring the wrong replacement.
Perhaps the quirkiest executive ever to work at Halas Hall, Emery chose a coach who meshed with his idiosyncratic personality in Trestman. They bonded over the TV show "Criminal Minds” and unwittingly conspired to ruin the Bears, who lacked discipline and direction in two disastrous seasons. Meanwhile, Arians, who was rejected by Emery, went to Arizona, where he won NFL coach of the year honors and instilled the Cardinals with all the qualities the Bears were missing.
In some ways, the Bears are still recovering from that faux pas too. The dysfunction that festered under Trestman left general manager Ryan Pace a mess to clean up when he replaced Emery two years ago. The long-term contract Emery gave Cutler saddled the current regime. Pace hired John Fox for credibility, a logical move at the time, but you wonder if both men have since questioned it on winter nights when their minds drift.
Attrition and apathy made 2016 drag as slowly as any Bears season in recent memory. The Hester Super Bowl highlight seems so long ago now it should be shown in black-and-white. Optimism around town is as scarce as ever concerning the Bears, who were better than only two other NFL teams last year — the Browns and the 49ers.
Can you believe it?
dhaugh@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @DavidHaugh
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