More ragging on everybody's favorite Canadian

I will not stop.

Here are some, uh, interesting post-game comments from Steve Nash:

"We have to be a little hungrier. I think some of us just didn't have the fire it takes to beat a championship team."

Besides using several meaningless cliches to say "We lost," this is coming dangerously close to throwing your teammates under the bus. Personally, I think it's there, since he is clearly not including himself in this anonymous group of "some of us." But I want a second opinion, since my disproportional hatred for Steve Nash is matched only by my disproportional hatred for Brady Quinn. The only thing that might save him is that it's not obvious who he's referring to since no one on the Suns had a particularly bad game, which might actually make it worse.

What do you say YCS Nation? Does this qualify as throwing your teammates under the bus?

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Keep this one in the memory bank

It's today's column by Len Pasquerelli, which basically affirms the optimism of the drunkards in Bears jerseys on last night's local news.

Now here's where I contradict myself yet again. Though I'm usually critical of Chicago sports fans for crying poormouth all the time, I think in this instance they're behaving too optimistically. And I'm not trying to be irrationally pessimistic. I don't claim to get the cart with the one bad wheel any more regularly than the average grocery store customer. There are just a lot of good reasons not to expect a repeat of this season in aught-7.

1. It's like that song "Spinning Wheel" by Blood, Sweat, and Tears. You know--"What goes up must come down." Come on; it's the 45 all the kids are buying right now.

Anyway, that principle usually proves true in salary cap-era NFL. Being in the Super Bowl is kind of like being on the cover of SI. You got in the Super Bowl because your franchise is at a peak. And peaking by definition implies the start of a downturn. There's no SI cover curse, and by the same token, the post-Super Bowl hangover is overblown. Much of it is simply the NFL's natural cycle turnin' its turn.

So drop all your troubles by the riverside. Hop a painted pony on the spinning wheel ride that we call the NFL, Bears fans. After two straight division-winning seasons, chances are we'll see leaner days ahead.

2. Don't Super Bowl losers have a particularly horrendous season-after track record? I should really take the time to look this up, but I'm just gonna lazily throw the question out and let Zuch or statboy Mike answer it in the comments.

I guess I'm sorta disagreeing with what I said three paragraphs ago now. But if I'm not mistaken, haven't Super Bowl losers historically fallen off way more than players-as-robots performance trends should dictate? Sure, the past trend is no guarantee the Bears will suffer the same falloff, but forty years is a lot of data.

3. Old guys. Every team has them, and admittedly, the Bears don't have all that many. In fact, they have plenty of young impact players (like Rex Grossman who's still gonna be awesome, and yes, I'm being biased but he's still good so shut up). Mostly, I'm talking about the offensive line. They didn't pass protect very well this year, and none of them are all that young. Fred Miller and Ruben Brown are pretty old in fact.

Also, Thomas Jones is at that point in a running back's career when the persistent beatings slow a guy down considerably. Yeah, I hope he's like Curtis Martin and keeps it up into 30s, but that's rare and unlikely.

4. Devin Hester. I hope everyone enjoyed the exploits of the Windy City Flyer a.k.a. Anytime a.k.a. Hurricane Hes this year because that will no way happen again. That's 30 regular season points you can't at all count on for next year or any year thereafter. Guys like Hester (Dante Hall, Desmond Howard) tend to be one-year wonders--at least in terms of such palpable results. Eric Metcalf is the one modern exception I can come up with.

Maybe I should attempt some research before throwing out these generalizations, but I'll leave it up to you readers to tell me I'm an idiot. All I'm saying is that it's very unrealistic to expect Hester to perform nearly as well or for the return unit to stay in tact, let alone give Hester such good lanes.

5. Robbie "Vinnie's gonna resist the intentionally hokey pun this time" Gould will probably lose some shimmer. (Ha, I lied!) Keeping with the theme of "the special teams were unusually special," Robbie Gould was atypically awesome as well. Kickers are funny creatures. And while Gould could end up the next Gary/Morten Anderson/sen, he could also be the next Mike Vanderjagt.


Hey, sweet. I ran out of talking points at five, a nice round number. I'll pretend that was intentional. Anyway, I'm not predicing anything radical like the Bears finishing behind the Lions next year, but it's crazy biased for Bears fans to think this team is so much better than your average 9-7 team. Such is the way of the NFL, where a couple guys passing their primes or one big free agent loss (i.e. Lance Briggs) can pull a franchise to earth in a quick hurry.

Remember, Chicago--Someone's waiting just for you. The spinning wheel, spinning true. Chew on that.

[Carnival music] Doooo, d-do da-da doo doo, doooo da-da doo doo [brass riff, carnival music, fade out]

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