May they one day be making movies about Williams, set in a great new stadium
Whenever I see artistic renderings of wonderful new stadiums or see overpraised new Bears quarterbacks, I think of the troop inspection scene from “The Dirty Dozen” when Donald Sutherland turns to Robert Ryan and says, “Very pretty colonel, but can they fight?”
Given the choice between a great football team and a great stadium, I believe Bears’ fans would take a great football team every time. To have both may be beyond the reach of reality.
But for a couple of days there, it did seem plausible, a lakefront wonderdome and a franchise savior coming one after the other, merging merit with architecture, or to quote one of the endorsements, “a visionary city and a legendary football team.”
As far as vision and legend go, history is not helpful. The Bears are a faded memory, and the city is a once-was. Both last century symbols of significance, like Gatsby “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Would an ambitious redickering of the lakefront restore the grandeur that was then, or will a Southern California quarterback who couldn’t beat Notre Dame make the Bears what they haven’t been since Sid Luckman?
That seems to be the plan. And the hope. And may it work. Read that again. Not “it may work” but “may it work”; the wish is the father of the plan.
First, and more possible, is the anointing of quarterback Caleb Williams as the face of the Bears’ franchise, an honor by default since there are no other faces. The last one was sent off to Pittsburgh mostly because Justin Fields was somebody else’s idea.
With only the evidence of game highlights so far it does seem that Williams is not that much different from Fields, a runner as well as a passer, just as eager to flee the pocket but maybe more accurate and with a better arm.
How effective Williams will be depends, as it did with Fields, on what he is allowed to do by a coaching staff not known for its creativity. Instinct says the Bears have simply changed one Fields for another.
As skeptical as I was of Fields, and still am, I can see him with better coaching and proper imagination causing regret the way Patrick Mahomes does for being passed over for Mitch Trubisky.
With Williams being the first of six quarterbacks taken in the first round of the draft, he will always be measured against them. He has been quoted as saying he wants to be immortal when a more realistic goal is to be better than Jayden Daniels or Drake Maye, each taken after him.
This class of quarterbacks is, until it proves otherwise, “legendary,” with Williams being Legend 1, the way John Elway was in the most legendary of all quarterback draft classes, that included Jim Kelly and Dan Marino.
If Williams is as generally agreed, a “generational quarterback,” and the Bears are now not the usual ground-grinding outfit, relying on defense to win, but a ball-slinging, big-play offense, never would an enclosed stadium seem more necessary, especially come November and after.
And I do notice in all the parkland illustrations for the new place, the flowers are out, the boats are in their slips, the sun is shining and the folks in the foreground are happy. It is as if wind and winter do not visit the shores of Lake Michigan.
All the excitement for Williams appears unanimous, probably forcing Poles to do the expected rather than to resort to his preferred cleverness. How dull it is to do the right thing.
The addition of a first-round receiver named Rome Odunze from LSU also came with general applause, giving Poles top marks for being obvious, a break from the usual second-guessing of Bears draft choices.
We are left at this point with merely hype, flim and flam, wondering how to pay for a genuinely marvelous idea and whether a consensus quarterback makes more sense than the last one.
And there you have it, “a world-class destination for a world-class city” and a “quarterback on his way to being really good.” A two-for-one dream in the same week. Daniel Burnham, not to mention the Dirty Dozen, would be proud.