Run To Remember
Run To Remember
Never Give Up, Baby
September 27, 2020
Bears 30, Falcons 26
It’s Better to be Lucky Than Good. (Or at Least it’s Better to be the Bears Than the Falcons. Or The Lions or the Giants)
The Chicago Bears are not great. They are not fearsome. They are not feared.
They are 3-0.
The Bears did it again on Sunday, this time in Atlanta, rallying from a 26-10 fourth quarter deficit to defeat the Falcons 30-26 to remain unbeaten and unquestionably questionable.
The Bears had 14 drives in this game, so did the Falcons. The Bears averaged 5.6 yards per play on offense, the Falcons averaged 5.7. The Bears averaged 5.8 yards per pass; the Falcons’ number was 5.7. The Bears turned the ball over twice; the Falcons coughed it up just once. The Bears were penalized ten times; the Falcons’ flag total was eight. The Bears were on the road, the Falcons, not that anyone would know it, were at home.
The key stat of the game? It could be this one; the Bears held the ball for 34:50, the Falcons’ time of possession was 25:10. When you have it and they don’t that’s better for you.
But the most telling statistic within that statistic within this weird and wonderful game must be this one: 22 seconds.
When the Bears scored a touchdown on a Nick Foles’ pass to Allen Robinson with about four minutes left in the fourth quarter to cut the deficit to 26-23, the Falcons got the ball back and held on to it for…22 seconds. An incomplete pass, another incomplete pass, a holding penalty, another incomplete pass, and then a punt.
Twenty-two seconds.
Steve Bartkowski has had farts that lasted more than 22 seconds.
We don’t like to pick on the Falcons and we certainly like to celebrate the Bears, but this Atlanta team has proven it couldn’t hold a lead if you stapled it to their hands and put Stickum on their soul.
This great Atlanta collapse comes just one week after the Falcons surrendered a huge lead to the Cowboys and then lost, in part, because they couldn’t recover an onside kick. Granted, it was an onside kick that looked more like a spinning top but we swear it was still a football and dang it, fellas, you gotta grab it.
But that was last week. This was today and the Falcons, who are now 0-3, don’t know a good thing when they got one. Mick Jagger might have told them that time was on their side but Jagger is British and probably doesn’t watch much American football.
Twenty-two seconds. That gave the Bears plenty of time and, behind a rejuvenated offense and an exhausted Atlanta defense, Foles needed just five plays to move 44 yards and hit Anthony Miller on a 28-yard strike for the winning score.
Our only fear was that the Bears left too much time on the clock. They didn’t.
The Bears defense is not dominant like we’d thought (hoped?) Running back Tarik Cohen might be lost for the rest of the season with a leg injury, and the Bears are just barely scraping by some really bad teams. And we haven’t even mentioned Mitch Trubisky. He was the starting quarterback but he’s not now. How many times in NFL history has a QB started the first three games of the season and his team had a 3-0 record but won’t start the fourth game when he’s perfectly healthy?
This is 2020, these are the Bears, and we have no answers, but man, we’re having fun.
We’re also in mourning. This was the first Bears game since 1964 that Gale Sayers was not either a Bears player or a Bears living legend, or both. The running back joined the Bears in 1965 and quickly became one of the most exciting, dynamic, and simply greatest players to ever put on a helmet.
If some of us could wave a magic wand we would make ourselves a combination of Walter Payton and Devin Hester. Who would that person be? Gale Sayers.
We’re not saying Sayers was better than Payton. We’re saying he was pure magic. He was the stuff of speed, mud, grit, and myth. And we still have an autographed photo of #40—ball in hand, eyes ahead, legs pumping, green gridiron grass galore—right behind us as we type these words.
Gale is now in eternity’s backfield, playing alongside Brian Piccolo, with George Halas on the sidelines, and 18 inches of endless daylight stretched before him. –TK
Sunday, September 27, 2020