Lengthy Super Bowl Post-Mortem
Nearly two weeks later, a Super Bowl post-mortem. No, I haven’t been in denial, or in hiding - just busy.
2006 was a year when a lot of things conspired in the Bears’ favor. They’re in the NFC North, which, outside of the NFC West is probably the worst division in football. This means they’re basically staked to a 7-1 record. Go 5-3 the rest of the way and ba-da-bing, you’ve got home field advantage through at least one round. The baseball equivalent of this is beating up on the bums and going .500 the rest of the way.
Further, the NFC, already weaker than the AFC, had a particularly weak year. Seattle was hampered by injuries. Philadelphia needed a resurgent Jeff Garcia to scrape into the playoffs, and that, unto itself, should imply that the resurgence could only go so far. New Orleans, while heartwarming, played over expectations all year and seemed to agree with that, so getting into the playoffs was enough. New York? New York was evocative of the Napoleon quote - never interrupt the enemy when he’s making a mistake. Step back and they’ll figure out how to implode. Dallas? Well, the fans were a bit quick to hoist godhood onto Tony Romo.
So 2006 was a year when a Super Bowl entry made sense, and arguably, anything less than that was unacceptable.
Then there was a destiny factor. The Bears just kept winning games, even games they shouldn’t have won. You could argue that that was the problem with the 2001 Bears, who always seemed to run back that pick for a TD at the last moment. But the Arizona game, the game in which Bad Rex first appeared, convinced me that this year was something special. Hester was the X-factor. One could understand Dennis Green’s frustrations - the Bears were indeed mortal, but he had lost. And teams kept losing, even after Mike Brown and Tommie Harris went down, and even after Bad Rex kept coming back like a bad habit.