David

It's pretty much a lock to vest unless he suffers a career ending injury or something.

Yep. He made Eli Manning look like a decent quarterback. Imagine what he could do with a good one.

The Bears are 30/1? Are you sure? Is that stale info? Chicago always gets a decent amount of money placed on them, and after the Cutler signing I'd think they fall more into the 12-15/1 range. As of a week or two ago, I could've placed a bet on bodog at 30-1. I'll take a look right now to see if it has moved. It's now 20-1. Damn. Should've placed that bet then. I thought it was outrageous immediately.

Yeah, makes no sense, especially since the Bears have done pretty well vs. GB in Lovie's tenure. If anything, he could say he was brought in to beat Minnesota, who is a better team than GB and has a defense that is almost impossible to run on. But I'm pretty sure the Bears brought in Cutler with the hopes of him helping them beat whoever represents the AFC in the Superbowl. In the quotes provided, Dungy doesn't even mention Green Bay. He just says "one team" and the writer apparantly assumes it's Green Bay. It would make more sense as Minnesota, but it's still a rather ridiculous sentiment. He was brought in to be the quarterback for 19 games this year and the next 10 years after. :D He just meant preseason. The regulars don't really play in the 4th one. :grin:

Marshall is a world class d-bag, though. I mean, I'd be more than happy to have him as a player, but I'd have a hard time rooting for him after watching that Outside the Lines on him.

I agree with all of that wholeheartedly, and it's part of the reason why, at 30-1, I'm tempted to put a hundred or so on the Bears to win the Super Bowl. Not because I think we're anywhere close to a lock, but I think it's a hell of a lot better than 30-1, and I'm not sure why people aren't realizing that.

I really think there's a good chance we'll get Plaxico. Coupled with my post from before about the organization's mouthpiece, Larry Meyer, on the official website being very supportive of a potential Burress signing, I think there might be some fire with this smoke. http://www.suntimes.com/sports/football/bears/1606293,CST-SPT-bear04.article

That's not the most comforting thought, either. I'm still not sure why no AL team picked him up. The Red Sox could sure use him right about now.

http://www.sawauto.com/uploader/up2/Donkey%20Show.gif lol

Ugh. Hopefully, it's nothing.

Mike Brown and Rex Grossman were two of my favorite Bears and it would suck for them to not find a team to latch onto. There are plenty of worse QB's than Rex out there. Hell, there are almost certainly two on our roster. (That's not to say I want him on our roster. I'm tired of hearing him get ripped on. We've done way worse than him at that position.)

There's a ton of them. It's like a perfect storm right now. Rarely have I ever wanted June and July to go by this quickly.

BTW, today's OTA is open to the media, so maybe we'll have some cool footage/stories coming.

I just like to think/know I have a good idea of who the best teams actually are *shrug* and I feel like I'm able to separate that from what the results actually are.

Mike Brown is visiting the Chiefs soon. I still think it's sort of dumb to not just sign him if it's cheap. If he's around, he's not worse than our other options. Reminds me of when many/most Cubs fans wanted to get rid of Prior just for the sake of getting rid of him. Granted, it seems nothing good would've come of it, but I didn't see much to lose there and I see even less to lose here since Brown is at least capable of taking the field for a decent percentage of the time.

The funny thing is, I agree with your sentiment here, but at the same time, it almost seems illogical. Football is such a fluky game with an odd oblong ball that bounces crazy ways and can shift the tide in a game in a split second. A first and goal from the one can turn into a 99 yard fumble/INT return and completely change the complexion of a game. It just seems like when the mistakes or accidents (or straight up flukes when that ball just bounces crazy ways) do happen, they have a much more profound impact on the outcome of a game than in other sports.

I don't know. The best baseball teams win a little more than 60% of the time, and that's including against all competition, good or bad. How often does the best baseball team beat another top 8 team? 53%? The best NFL teams win 80% or more of the time. I think being the best might matter more in football, but it still doesn't absolutely determine the champion. Zona got to the Super Bowl with a 9-7 record last year. Pitt recently won a Super Bowl as a 6 seed. I really do think, after all is said and done, alot of this analysis winds up being just bunk. Give me the 6 seed Steelers and a Super Bowl championship over the other team that was better, but didn't make it. I'm an emotional guy. I'll take that emotional Super Bowl run from a team that maybe wasn't all that great on paper any day. The championship is really all that matters to me. That goes for all sports. It's not bunk. Unless it's actually attempting to predict one team as a champion. And in that case, said analysis usually amounts to a big chart with pictures of "experts" and their Super Bowl picks, which is obvious crap to begin with. Legitimate analysis tells you things of value. And the fact that it isn't going to do a great job of saying who ultimately wins is implied due to the nature of all this. I don't think legit analysis attempts to do that, anyway. It tells you who is likely to win and might or might not give you a good idea of what teams are actually better than others, but you're not going to see them say, "Team X will win the Super Bowl," at least, not without major qualification. If they do, you know what you're reading is crap to begin with. Unfortunately, like 90% of fans don't realize this and that's why the crap analysis is what you mostly find in the mainstream sources.

Lack of clubhouse leadership is why everyone not from Japan in our lineup is OPSing like 100 points below where they should be and why we've had to replace our best hitter with a complete offensive void.

Sure, but then the playoffs and the champion comes down to what amounts to a crapshoot in the playoffs.

Even if they win the division, this team is not winning the World Series. I love statements like this that have no basis in reality. If they win the division, they have approximately a 1/8 chance of winning the World Series. Just like every other playoff team (some marginally more, some marginally less). There's no curses, jinxes, or inherent failure genes in the players. There's nothing to keep bad players from playing very well or great players from playing very poorly in a stretch of a few games, especially in a game like baseball. I don't understand why people continue to make absolute statements like this when it's obvious that the playoffs in baseball are, for all intents and purposes, a slightly weighted crapshoot.

Larry Meyer on Bears.com is typically nothing more than a propaganda-ist/mouthpiece for the team, so it is weird how much he seems to pimp the idea of Plaxico in his latest mail-bag. Makes you think the Bears are looking in that direction...assuming he doesn't end up in jail.

Well, not necessarily. The best team and the champion aren't the same thing, especially given the nature of the NFL playoff format. That said, the analysis is still a bunch of nonsense. I can't see any measure being worthwhile other than winning the Super Bowl. If that's not the measure, then it's just blowing wind. Therefore, if your system isn't predicting Super Bowl winners -- it's rather pointless. We can argue who's good and who's not until we're old & gray, and still accomplish nothing. I guess that's why you wind up with articles like this in the offseason: people want to argue pointlessly about stuff. For me, who wins the Super Bowl: they had the great season, they had the success. After all the pontificating about who might be good and who might not be, that pretty much ends it for me. What I'm saying is that there's a team out there that is intrinsically the best. It may not manifest itself in the results, but there's a team out there that has a (marginally) better chance than the rest to win it all. It can be difficult to measure, and even if it were measurable, it's not going to predict the Super Bowl winner all that often because the Super Bowl winner is just the last team standing after a group of team qualifies for the playoffs and then purposefully eliminates all but one team in a series of single elimination one on one match-ups based on a bracket. Lots of things stand in the way of a team becoming the last one standing. I don't know if what I'm trying to say there makes sense, but basically, the best team will win the Super Bowl sometimes, but the Super Bowl winner isn't necessarily the best team. Had the Cardinals held on at the end of last year's game (when they very easily could have), for instance, they would've been the Champions, but I think very few people would argue that they were the best team in the NFL last year. The year before, the Patriots were probably the best team in football by a decent margin but lost to the Giants in the big game. The fact that there's so much parity in the league and the fluky nature of the game itself makes it even harder for me to say that whoever wins the Super Bowl = the best team. I guess I've always separated the idea of the "best team" and the "champion," though. The latter is a result. It's the one that came through, after the fact. It's the one that ultimately performed the best in terms of winning football games and winning important ones. The former is the one who simply had the best chance to come through. Can be the same team, but not necessarily.

Well, not necessarily. The best team and the champion aren't the same thing, especially given the nature of the NFL playoff format. That said, the analysis is still a bunch of nonsense.

Who are we dying to get onto the roster?

Is it possible that Randy Wells is actually good? I didn't know the whole back story on him (on how he was recently converted and hasn't been pitching for very long)...