By Steve Rhodes
This town’s sportswriters are never better than when the team or teams they are following become an abject embarrassment. So if you are pained by the wrong turn the Bears have suddenly taken this season, at least enjoy the writing.
* “Two-and-a-half seasons removed from their Super Bowl appearance, the Bears are who they never imagined they would be – just another mediocre football team,” Brad Biggs writes.
“Now, after two humiliating losses in a span of three weeks, you have to start wondering if the McCaskeys and general manager Jerry Angelo are starting to become fed up with who they have become because no one can say a blowout loss at Cincinnati was an aberration, not after the Arizona Cardinals destroyed the Bears 41-21 Sunday afternoon at Soldier Field, another low point in the tenure of Lovie Smith.”
* “They deserved every boo,” Dan Pompei writes. “They were loud and long. Some were deep and throaty. Others were high and piercing.
“Whether they emanated from the cheap seats or the luxury boxes, they came from the heart.”
* “The Bears’ basic defensive scheme is a corpse laid bare in the morgue,” Jim Coffman writes. “The fact that they can’t adjust to cover the same damn play that has killed them on literally dozens of third-and-long plays this season is a bitter joke and emblematic of everything that has gone wrong for this franchise, really, since the Super Bowl in 2006.”
* “Tell you what, Lovie Smith had better think about firing himself as defensive coordinator before someone else thinks about firing him as head coach,” Steve Rosenbloom writes.
* “If one positive came out of this latest humiliating defeat it’s that denial is no longer an option,” writes Neil Hayes.
* “Lovie is not only the head coach but the man who wrested the defensive play-calling from Bob Babich,” writes George Ofman. “Here’s a suggestion: Give it back!”
Funkadelic Relic
“Chicago’s Pedro Bell was the artist behind some of music’s most iconic album covers,” the Sun-Times reports. “Now his life is anything but a pretty picture.”
The Daley Show
“Chicago Begins 24 Hour A Day Booting.”
The Carol Adams Show
Do you ever get the feeling you still haven’t gotten the real story?
I had that feeling reading Laura Washington’s column today.
“In 2003, [Carol Adams] was appointed secretary of the state’s Department of Human Services by Gov. Rod Blagojevich,” Washington writes. “After Pat Quinn took over in January, it appeared Adams’ days in that high-profile post were numbered.”
That was when Quinn was still in fumigation mode.
Adams tried to jump to the presidency of Chicago State University last spring before Quinn pushed her out but she didn’t land the job.
On Oct. 11, Quinn surprisingly handed Adams a cushy assignment to head up a trade office in Africa.
Adams called the appointment “a life-long dream come true.”
Curiously, the chairperson of the DuSable Museum Board of Trustees tells Washington that the museum hired Adams as its new CEO just eight days later, on Oct. 19.
On Oct. 29, we learned that no evidence was found that Adams’ driver did anything other than, well, drive her around – at $84,600 a year. Adams had claimed that her driver had many other duties justifying his salary but refused to elaborate or release any documents that would back her up.
One day later, Adams notified Quinn that she no longer wanted the trade post job, citing “pressing family medical issues.”
And now she’s the new DuSable boss.
Something tells me there are a few missing pieces here – and that Adams will be back in the news soon enough.
The Danny Davis Show
“What remains unanswered is whether Davis’s county board flirtation had a strategic purpose – perhaps for Stroger – or whether Davis simply doesn’t like his Washington job much but can’t find another one to get elected to.”
Machine Wars
“Hynes sprang from the Machine and Quinn has been adopted by it. There’s bound to be resentment between two guys who now find themselves brothers.”
Northerly Island Makeover
And don’t say put an airport on it.
Mystery Solved
“The room itself is quite larger than the men’s,” our very own Nick Shreders writes in his review of the women’s bathroom at the Beachwood Inn. “It has a raised floor that goes back several feet to the toilet at which Minnie Mouse greets you from the back wall.”
The Political Odds . . .
. . . have changed.
Trivial Pursuit
We’re up to 575 items, and the latest one is particularly good.
A Good Question
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The Beachwood Tip Line: Groovin’.
Posted on November 9, 2009