UMFan83

Hahaha I forgot about that. Their players are as delusional as their fans.

I would be more pumped if the Bears weren't playing the Lions. The game is pretty much a no win for the Bears. If they lose, they are probably horrible and pretty much everyone will be down on them. If they win, they should have won. Unless they win like 41-10, it doesn't really mean much, other than we beat supposedly the weakest team on our schedule.

You spell "Gar Forman" funny. It's GarPax and don't forget it.

Sam Smith basically shot down the entire rumor and said that the Nuggets haven't even talked to any other teams about Melo and the Bulls would not consider trading Noah and have told him such. Who knows whats true, but just throwing that out there.

I doubt the CEO of the Bears is going to come on the radio 2 days before the season starts and say "if we don't make the playoffs this year, Lovie and Jerry are canned" I guess he could talk around the question, but either way it doesn't really do anyone any good to imply they'll be gone. I'm sure they both have a pretty good idea that they don't have a ton of job security.

No one had any hope in 2006? Not a very scientific measurement, but a quick check through the 2006 contest thread had NSBB people predicting an average of 87 wins for the Cubs in 2006, some as high as 94 wins.

Yeah I know its tickets sold, but in 2006 we bottomed out at ~27,000. But looking back at the schedule, the 27k game was the only game where the attendance was less than 30k

33,000? I am really disappointed in the Cubs fans. The attendance should be well under 30k at this pint

How do you miss 2 kicks in your home stadium that happens to be a dome?

Save for the first drive of the game, which was spectacular, what an awful half for the Saints offense.

omg, it's twitter time. Let's hear who is the front runner every 5 minutes!

Damn that's awful. I'd take Dixon for week 1. He had a really nice preseason.

It's tough to see Denver trading us Melo without giving up Noah, mostly because there will likely be other teams in play that would offer more than the Bulls platter of Deng, JJ, Taj, and picks. NY, as much as I laugh at their talent could offer Gallinari, Randolph, and Curry (expiring) for Melo and I think that's a better match for the Nuggets than ours long term.

3-13 seems a bit extreme even for the most pessimistic of Bears fans. Lovie Smith has never had worse than a 5-11 record, and that was in his first season when a ton of injuries destroyed a young team learning a new system. The last time the Bears finished a full season with just 3 wins was 1973, back when they only played 14 games in a season. I find it really hard to see this Bears team as currently constructed, not good enough to finish better than 3-13.

The Hawks signed Ryan Potulny, formerly of Edmonton to a two-way 500k contract. He had 15 goals and 17 assists last year but apparently isn't all that great if he's getting a 2 way contract. I'd imagine his 32 points on a horrible team is the equivalent of a mediocre NBA player scoring 20 ppg for a bad team, because someone has to score. But that's just a guess.

Again, unbalanced scheduling makes rewarding division winners necessary. There is no way that teams from different divisions have the same schedule strength. So a 95-67 record in one division may not be the same as a 95-67 record in another division.

Theres really no perfect way to do it. If you just seed everyone by records, then the issue is devaluing the divisions. There is a reward for winning the division. If the teams were playing balanced schedules, I'd feel differently, but if you are playing close to half your games against teams in your division, it doesn't make sense to rate teams from different divisions solely on the basis of record. But I think unbalanced schedules are really stupid personally because there's no way around having to compare teams from different divisions based on their record, whether it be for the Wild card, or for seeding, HFA, etc. Also, I'd prefer a quick 3 game series between 2 WC teams to determine the WC instead of a 1 game. Baseball is just too flukey in a single game to let one game decide a "play in" series.

Writers and sports prognosticators just good off trends. Very rarely do they take chances unless they are purposely trying to be "out there" Right now based on an 0-4 preseason and i guess people observed major issues on the oline as well as a slow adaption of the Martz offense. So right now the vibe around the Bears is negative. More negative than before the preseason. So most people have the Bears somewhere in the 19-24 range in power rankings. Banks is just taking it to the extreme. Peter King had the Bears 32/32 before their 2005 11-5 season, so these predictions have little correlation to the actual season results. The only thing they are good for are retroactively seeing what the general public opinion of a team was before the season started.

Seriously. Especially because baseball spring training is about 7 weeks long, and football training camp is about the same. It's weird to see training camps wrapped up in 3-4 weeks.

I'm pouring through this schedule and I just cannot see better than a 6-10 season with this schedule. It's too tough. In order to win 8 games and finish .500, they need AT A MINIMUM 3 wins to come from these teams @ Dallas vs. Green Bay @ NY Giants @ Carolina vs. Minnesota @ Miami vs. Philadelphia vs. New England @ Minnesota vs. NYJ @ Green Bay And that's if they go 5-0 against Det, @ Det, vs. Sea, vs. Was, @ Buf 3 of the first 4 games and all of the last 4 games are extremely difficult, making it very hard to start out or finish strong. Basically if you want to be a believer for the playoffs, you need to hope the Bears play .500 ball in the first 4 and last 4 games, and dominate the middle 8 where the teams are a big easier. Of course some of the teams we think will be good might not be (Giants, Panthers, Dolphins, Eagles, Patriots, Jets). By the end of the year, the schedule could look crazy easy, and/or the Bears could turn out to be very good. But it looks quite daunting sitting here in the eve of Week 1.

Can't wait for Michigan-ND this weekend. Last year both teams came into the game with the expectations that the winner is on track to a good season. That didn't happen. This year they are saying the same thing. There have only been like 4 Michigan games in the last 2 years that I've looked forward to because it was actually meaningful. This is number 5.

Dammit, my boss gave me 2 free tickets to the game in section 111. I'm gonna go but I was hoping for a much better lineup. Blah.

The Bears don't get treated like the Cowboys in the media because they are simply not a very colorful franchise. Cowboys: 5 championships in the last 40 years Bears: 1 championship in the last 40 years Cowboys: 8 Super Bowl appearances in the last 40 years Bears: 2 Super Bowl appearances in the last 40 years Cowboys: Owned by a very media friendly owner who is vocal and fairly colorful. Does things like envisions and eventually builds (with public and NFL help) a $1.5 billion stadium Bears: Owned by the McCaskey family, whose figurehead is a 90+ year old woman. It is almost impossible to get any sort of quote or message from the ownership that isn't relayed through Ted Phillips or other figureheads. Cowboys: Known as unafraid to gamble, take chances on malcontents or players with issues, all (mostly) for the sake of winning. Bears: If the Bears were an ice cream flavor, there's no doubt they would be vanillia. They don't want distractions, they don't particularly want players to make headlines for anything other than winning, and if they do they can most likely count their remaining days on the squad. (there have been exceptions - McMahon being the most obvious) Cowboys: Have won with many different styles over the years Bears: Have been known as a defensive team with a conservative offense based heavily on running the football. In this age of fantasty everything, the Bears haven't had much in the way of fantasy studs other than their kicker and defense most years. Cowboys: Have had several popular Quarterbacks in their history (Staubach, Aikman, Romo), who are good, and for the most part embrace their celebrity. Bears: The Bears may have had some colorful QBs from time to time, but they haven't had many good ones, that's for sure. They might have the worst historical collective QB talent of all 30 franchise. Fair or unfair, the QB is to most fans the face of the franchise, and by having names like Craig Krenzel, Cade McNown (entertaining but bad), Rex Grossman, Jim Miller, etc. manning the QB position, the face of the Bears franchise is empty. So there is a ton of reasons why. I'm not saying what the Bears do is bad, and/or what the Cowboys do is good. I'm not saying that the Bears can control all of those things, and I'm not saying that the Bears need to even be where the Cowboys are in terms of visibility. All I'm saying is that those are several reasons why the Cowboys almost have their own ESPN show, and the Bears are only heavily talked about when they are good. Ironic that despite all this, the Bears had one of the most popular, colorful and entertaining teams in the history of american sports in the mid-80's. And they did it with mainly defense, the same invisible ownership, a QB that was not hall of fame caliber (but was pretty good and clearly colorful), and relied heavily on the running game (I believe?). And everytime the Bears are good, suddenly the media, not just in Chicago, wants to bring up and relive that team. Because that's what the media wants.

Oregon State is the only chance. The WAC is awful. how much is the coaches poll worth in the BCS? If Boise State goes undefeated, I'd expect 3 of the 4 teams above them to lose at some point this year. If South Florida was able to make it to number 2 before (albeit in a BCS conference), I'm sure BSU can.

Thank you Quade for taking your name out of the running for manager of the 2011 Chicago Cubs.