Bernstein: Bears Choke Away Any Chance
By Dan Bernstein--
CBSChicago.com senior columnist
(CBS) You lose to Blaine Gabbert, you're not a contender for anything.
You let Jim Tomsula out-coach you, you don't deserve to pretend you're on track for a playoff spot.
You squander multiple gifts of starting field position, miss two easy field goals, commit costly penalties, allow a quarterback to scramble for a 44-yard game-tying touchdown and then blow the coverage on the winning 71-yard bomb in overtime, the silliness has to stop.
We spent all week pumping the tires of a 5-6 Bears team, surer than ever that the 49ers were a speed bump on the road to respectability. We worried not about the upcoming game, but losing one or both of the coordinators to a head coaching job elsewhere.
After an embarrassing 26-20 overtime loss Sunday at Soldier Field, the Bears now confront mediocrity full-on -- and not the fun kind, in which viability in a blob of a league keeps people dreaming of a puncher's chance in January. This is the other, truer kind – now laid bare for a remaining schedule of crossing off games until there are no more this season.
And what a hideous morass of a game to go out on, too, three-and-a-half hours of tepid football porridge played by two teams seemingly doing everything in their power to keep themselves from winning until the opponent finally obliged.
Allow what looked like a fatal fourth-quarter kickoff return? No worries. Drop an interception that would have set up a chip-shot winning kick in overtime? Forget it. The "no consequence" rule came into play again amid our confusion over a punt at one point, but it essentially applied to an entire day in which there were few consequences for anybody until it just ended.
A lot of things ended.
As this was going on, we got a good look at the NFL's reflexive reaction to the Case Keenum concussion debacle, with two 49ers exiting for the newly enforced protocol. Oddly, an obviously woozy Bears quarterback Jay Cutler was allowed to remain in the game after being thrown on his head by 49ers safety Jaquiski Tartt in a play that should have been penalized and will likely incur a fine.
I'm thinking of requesting that we have an independent neurological consultant available to anybody who had to watch that garbage, administering tests all week to see if we should be allowed to consume anything like it ever again.
It was one of the worst Bears games I can remember, on a short list with some other miserable afternoons and evenings. The outcome was one thing, any stupid playoff dreams suffocated by losing to a team that was previously winless on the road, but how it all got there was even worse. Robbie Gould's miss of a 36-yard field goal as regulation time expired looked like one of my tee shots yanked into the woods, a stumblebum quarterback was made to look athletic and resourceful and Chris Prosinski's coverage on the final play should have him paying copyright royalties to Chris Conte.
Not to mention that for all our praise of John Fox, Adam Gase and Vic Fangio, they lost to a completely overmatched counterpart – an oft-confused mouth-breather who used to live in his car.
The Bears' 2015 season is all but done, blown up by a multifaceted exhibition of creative losing that exposed them for what they are and certainly are not.
But at least that game is over.
Dan Bernstein is a co-host of 670 The Score's "Boers and Bernstein Show" in afternoon drive. You can follow him on Twitter @dan_bernstein and read more of his columns here.
