The Bears' narrow victory against last week's sucky Seattle Seahawks is actually a good thing
The Detroit Lions are in pain.
The clobbering that the Bears were supposed to deliver last Sunday as part of a "go out and make a statement" game never materialized. They were up against a Seattle Seahawks team so injured and ill-equipped to be playing professional football that there were rumors around Qwest Field that the team was just throwing those disgusting neon-green jerseys at homeless people in Capitol Hill, dressing them, and lining them up for special teams coverage. Yet the Bears managed a fourth quarter rally for victory instead of a high-powered beating. And, while it means we may run the risk of a heart attack every Sunday until the New Year—or, dare we hope, February?—it's actually way better than what might have come from a decisive, easy victory. The lesson that you have to show up and work hard to win each game against any team in the NFL increases the odds of a season that ends in triumph, and it comes at a crucial time. For today, we face the Detroit Lions.
All of that sounds intuitive, but it's not, really. If you're not a sports person, a statement like "you have to show up intending to actually play to win every week" sounds like a cliche, but it's a constant danger in a league with such giant, stinking losers. In the end, we're lucky on a few counts: Not just that the Seahawks provided a wake-up call, but also that the Lions are now officially not the worst team in the NFL (half the teams in the league either have a worse record or the same one), and therefore can't be treated as complete pushovers. And, with that 19-game losing streak finally broken, there's slightly less for the Lions to prove.
Which has one more benefit. Now, in the event of an astonishing loss, it won't be the Bears against whom they finally broke the streak. The stakes going in on Sunday are high, as they always are in a league that plays only 16 games a year, but the more pathetic the Lions were, the higher the stakes would have been for the Bears. Those assholes to the north would have never let us live it down, and the stigma that accompanies providing the Lions with their first win since December 23, 2007, might have dealt a severe blow to a Bears team that's found tenuous footing over the last few weeks. Instead, it's the Redskins who have to deal with the crippling existentialist dilemma of, "If we lost to the worst football team of all time, what does that make us?"
