Monday Night Football hasn’t been A THING in many years. Probably not since NBC took Sunday Night Football and made that the game of the week. The games on Monday night usually suck and are typically between two teams that aren’t all that good, with ESPN’s overwrought and over-sweaty broadcasts making the whole occasion a migraine. The broadcast has been a mess for years, fluctuating between Jon Gruden basically stripping nude in the booth and pouring cow’s blood over himself in appreciation of a 6-yard out to Jason Witten bringing all the personality of a Jehovah’s Witness asking for directions at a rest stop in Wyoming.
Last night’s game was hardly any better. The Bears thought they were playing third division Rugby League, at least on offense, and the Rams took a whole half to come to terms with what was across the line from them before realizing it was actually what it looked like and not some elaborate practical joke. It was perhaps the most lopsided 14-point win in NFL history, as the game could have been 180 minutes long and the Bears wouldn’t have broken 20 points, or even 100 yards rushing.
But that won’t be the story to come out of it. In the fourth quarter, MNF analyst Brian Griese told the watching audience that Bears QB Nick Foles basically thought his coach was an idiot. Not in those words of course, as what Foles said to him is that Matt Nagy will call plays that Foles knows the Bears can’t block, and that Nagy doesn’t seem to know how much, or how little, time his QBs have. This is the in-house version of “Watch the game, nerds!”
Of course, there were all the normal denials after the game, with Nagy saying he has never had that conversation with Foles and Foles saying he and Griese had a “miscommunication,” i.e. “that wasn’t on the record, dickhead.”
Anyone who’s watched the Bears offense knows that Foles had a point, even if it was the quiet part of his conversation with Griese. For two seasons Nagy has been running the offense in his head instead of the one on the field, which is why it constantly looks like it’s falling into a ditch. But that’s hardly the point. You don’t want a national broadcast declaring a rift between your QB and coach, or perhaps revealing that the supposed leader of the offense has no confidence in the guy calling the plays. That is usually the first step to full-out revolt.
The only fallout from this is likely to be no player telling Griese anything ever again, while the Bears will use it as something “that brought the team together” should they find a win in the next two months. But it’s at least the first time the Monday night broadcast has been worth talking about since Howard Cosell was doing body shots off Don Meredith in the 3rd quarter.
It certainly livened up a game where the punter was no worse than the third-most important player on the field in the Rams’ 24-10 win.
As for the game itself, the Bears were pretty much outed as the fraud everyone thought they were, despite that 5-1 record they’ve tried to shove in everyone’s face. When Foles wasn’t wearing Aaron Donald and his friends as a tasteful shaul, he was missing his receivers by measurable acreage. This was the fourth straight game the Bears couldn’t manage more than 65 yards rushing, which made them one dimensional, and that dimension is“suckage.” The defense can only hold out for so long before dying of exhaustion, and this time the other team wasn’t Detroit- or Atlanta-incompetent enough to projectile diarrhea the game back to the Bears as happened in previous weeks. The emperor was revealed to have no clothes definitively on Monday night.
The Rams came into last night’s game with every win being against the NFC East, which is essentially repeatedly pinging a dodgeball off the head of the kid who picks his nose until it bleeds (strangely that’s not autobiographical). The Bears probably aren’t much better, if better at all, but at least the Rams can claim something other than the NFC East title.
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