Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, and family stuff is paramount. So, I bid each and every one of you a Happy Holiday season and a Happy New Year. If I get the opportunity, I will post something here, but I can’t say for certainty that I will.

In every newspaper, on every television news broadcast, all over sports radio here in Chicago, the big story is the collapse of the Chicago Bears. Not even great starts by the Blackhawks and Bulls can knock the Bears off the front pages of the sports sections. Partly it is because the Bears are the one team that everyone gets behind. They were your dad’s favorite team; they were your grandfather’s favorite team.
It is also in part due to the epic collapse. The Bears hardly ever have great offenses, but last season, the offense was the second best scoring offense in the league. Head Coach Marc Trestman seemed to have the offense together: Jay Cutler was showing flashes of his potential; Alshon Jeffrey and Brandon Marshall were one of the most dangerous wide receiver tandems in the league. The offensive line was young and solid. Now, about that defense…
I was personally surprised that defensive coordinator Mel Tucker kept his job. The 2013 Bear defense wasn’t just bad, it was historically bad, and for a fan base that is much more used to having stout defenses than potent offenses, the fans were confused – what to do?
Still, expectations were moderately high: not Super Bowl high, but at least division title and playoff appearance high. The season may have been lost when Trestman allowed linebacker Lance Briggs to miss a practice early in the season so that he could appear at a restaurant he invested in? Perhaps the season was lost even earlier when the coach allowed Marshall to fly to New York at the beginning of each week to film a segment of “Inside the NFL?” Maybe the final straw was when offensive coordinator Aaron Kromer complained about Cutler to an NFL Network reporter, owned up to it, then was not fired immediately by Trestman. Either way, there appears to have been bedlam in the locker room: no discipline; players treated differently, limited accountability.
The woes on defense and special teams were as responsible for the losses, two of which were most embarrassing giving up 50+ points to the Patriots (which could be overlooked by the fans) and to the Packers (which is the cardinal sin to Bear fans). Cutler was the scapegoat, leading the league in interceptions and total turnovers, and as I’ve written here, it is unclear whether he can be an elite quarterback despite being paid like one. (This latter factor may have put Bear GM Phil Emery’s job in jeopardy also.)
Well, we will get to see one last time. Last week, Trestman benched Cutler, choosing to start little used backup Jimmy Claussen. The Bears lost anyway, but Claussen played admirably, completing 23 of 39 passes for 181 yards, two touchdowns and only one pick. Unfortunately for the Bears, Claussen suffered a concussion and won’t be available for this week’s season ender in Minnesota, so, back under center will be Cutler.
It isn’t often that a staid franchise like the Bears has such a breakdown and open turmoil. It has made the beat writers happy; even bloggers like me have had a field day. As a family owned franchise, there are a lot of McCaskey mouths to feed from the Bear trough, so they tend to throw nickels around like manhole covers. Paying for two coaches, two GMs, and buying out the remaining money on Cutler’s $126 million contract (more like another $30 million in guaranteed money) in anathema to the McCaskeys.
All that’s left is what do I think will happen? Trestman is out; Emery is 50/50; Cutler will be back with the Bears next year unless Tennessee really wants him. The next step is, who will be GM to pick the next coach, and who will be interviewed. If Cutler remains, who wants to be head coach of a team with a “coach killer” at QB? Wait until Monday.

Yes, I felt like John McEnroe as I typed that.
For whatever reason, I have been using the Albert Einstein quote about insanity a lot lately: insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” Perhaps Northwestern Head Football Coach Pat Fitzgerald should take this quote to heart. After two consecutive seasons of 5-7 records and offenses that were sorely lacking, Fitzgerald announced that all of his assistant coaches would be returning.
Long time readers know that I have been calling for the school to fire offensive coordinator Mick McCall all last season. His offenses are overly simplistic; he calls the same plays, which, if I can see it coming, what does he think the defense will do? This past season, if it weren’t for the emergence of star freshman running bank Justin Jackson, the offence would have been a bigger disaster than it was. McCall has not done a very good of making quarterbacks better, only the most talented ones were able to do anything. And when the starter goes down, the second string QB is woefully unprepared.
Many NU fans like me were calling for McCall’s job, but defiantly, Fitzgerald won’t have it. His hard ass act caused two prized recruits to commit to other programs, and while I do agree with him being angry with the twins talking to others schools after committing to NU and dropping the school’s commitment, they was he did it, publicly and indignant, showed a lack of understanding of young men. Maybe they were contacted; maybe they listened; but Fitzgerald isn’t Nick Saban, he doesn’t have a national championship level program every year and a real chance at the NFL. Yes, NU provides a quality education, but this once again shows the inflexibility of Pat Fitzgerald.
Well Pat, I know that you have job security and bleed NU purple, but if McCall has another season like the past two seasons, your seat will be awfully hot. You can be replaced too.

Someone contacted me and asked why I never wrote about Major League Umpire Dale Scott came out as a gay man, and there’s a simple reason – it wasn’t news. True equality is when it is no longer news that someone is gay. Only the fundamentalists cant deal with a changing world. Love who you want.
But I decided to make a brief mention of a comment made by Michael Sam, the first openly gay football player drafted to the NFL, to Oprah Winfrey on an upcoming show that is certain to make Pat Robertson call for a witch hunt. Sam says that a number of current players reached out to him and confided that they were gay too, but didn’t have the courage to come out of the closet. Oprah tried to press for details, but Sam provided only that he was talking about “men” meaning more than one player.
I know that there will be people trying to find out who these players are, but I won’t be among them. Like Scott, this is not news; it is like saying that tomorrow is Christmas Eve. There are gay people in all walks of life including football, and hockey, and baseball, and basketball and all other sports. It’s more than OK – it isn’t anyone’s business.
The only sad part of his story is that all of the other gay men don’t feel comfortable in just being themselves. That is the sad part.

I do love comedy movies, but I admit that the current fart/dick/gross out movies haven’t done anything for me. I like wit move than “Jackass,” and have not been much of a Seth Rogan fan (although “This Is The End” with Rogan and James Franco was hilarious). I personally cant wait to see “The Trip to Italy” with Steve Coogan that comes out next week on video more than any other comedy – although I did see Chris Rock’s “Top Five” in Toronto at the film festival and I did really like that.
So, I don’t think I would have run out to see “The Interview” in which Rogan and Franco play a television journalist and producer who get an interview with Korean lead Kim Jung-Un and the CIA tried to get them to assassinate him. Like a three-year-old throwing a fit, North Korea promised retaliation on theaters showing the film, calling on 9/11 style destruction. Suddenly, there was a hack of Sony, the films distributor’s mainframe and numerous e-mails, scripts and other tidbits were leaked and it turns out, came from North Korea,
At first, the New York premiere was cancelled, then three top movie chains dropped the film due out Christmas Day. Now, Sony has announced that it will not release the film next week and has no plans on distributing it on video-on-demand, video or anywhere else. Now, I want to see it – if it is ever released I may pay for it, just to thumb my nose at this puissant country. North Korea is a third world country with perhaps, a couple of nuclear weapons. For them to have a hissy fit over a modern entertainment AND have major corporations back down is ridiculous. (One Texas theater is showing “Team America: World Police” the film from the South Park gang that pokes fun at North Korea and its leaders.)
As I posted on Facebook yesterday, even if they attacked the U.S,, we could obliterate them in seconds and even Russia and China wouldn’t make much out of it since we just removed a boil on their figurative behinds. I also think that we should set our hackers on them. For a country that does not even allow most of its citizens access to the Internet, we should have superiority over them in computer expertise. Now, we should attack their computers ruthlessly; try to expose every little secret they hide and publish as many of them as possible. There is nothing more painful to a despot than to have his
Already a Steve Carell comedy that was set in North Korea has been cancelled. One thing is certain, don’t take any scripts that could offend anyone in the world (including torture scripts that may send Dick Cheney into apoplexy) to Sony – they cave faster than a house of cards in a hurricane.

I was the last Jay Cutler supporter; the key word here is “was.” I still marvel at the arm strength; the near impossible throws that he has been able to make; he is tough, taking a pounding behind weak offensive lines. All he needed was help, I thought, but for one, the Bears’ stepped up and got him help. They kept running back Matt Forte; they got receiver Brandon Marshall; they used many draft picks on the offensive line, and last year, the improvement was significant. Unfortunately, the defense was a sieve and the Bears missed the playoffs again.
This led to excitement over the 2014 season – the Bears will be in the mix for the playoffs, we all expected. I don’t need to recount the disintegration of the 2014 Bears – the defense continued to be horrible; special teams are not at all special; the teams lacks leadership; the coaches are too lenient and then speak out of turn; and the offense has regressed to being one of the worst in the league. (Honestly, we Bear fans are used to and are resigned to mediocre to bad offenses, it probably wouldn’t be as big a deal if the defense weren’t so bad. Butkus and Urlacher teams had bad offenses, but the Bears were always close in games because the defense was so good.)
Which brings me back to Cutler. I thought he was the answer, and obviously, the Bears’ front office agreed signing the quarterback to a seven-year, $126.7 million contract with $56 million guaranteed. With this financial security, I thought that he would relax about the future and concentrate on being a winning quarterback. However, Cutler, despite lots of yards and a decent QB rating, has thrown the most interceptions in the league and when one adds the fumbles, he leads the league in turnovers.
Like many QBs, Cutler has had his share of tipped balls come out of receivers’ hands and into defensive players’ mitts, but as I started thinking about QBs with big arms and “gunslinger mentalities,” Cutler fails. The others, like Brett Favre, John Elway, and Jim Kelly, especially early in their careers, relied on their powerful throwing arms to try and squeeze balls into tight spaces between receivers and one or two defenders, which got picked off. Cutler’s interceptions however, are hardly ever like that, they are overthrows and balls directly to defensive players. Too often, the receiver is the one blamed even by Cutler, for making the wrong move, or not being where the ball was thrown. Hardly ever did Cutler say that he misread the play or made a bad pass.
And that is why Cutler has been vilified so much in the local press: his aloofness. Week after week he faces the media, makes the obligatory comments about the next game and trying to get better, but he never does. It doesn’t look like he gives a damn, and in a town where the fans care A LOT about the team, it pisses them off. Add the huge contract, and Jay Cutler has been the target of all the frustrations of the fan base.
It is unfair to blame Cutler for the horrible defense (and why defensive coordinator Mel Tucker wasn’t given his walking papers after last season’s debacle). However, when offensive coordinator Aaron Kromer says that he was frustrated with the quarterback’s play management and complained to the NFL Network that Cutler’s refusal to audible out of bad run plays has “absolutely killed” the team.
Cutler isn’t changing the play – is it stubbornness, stupidity, or lack of ambition. To compare Cutler to two more Hall of Fame caliber quarterbacks, one sees Peyton Manning and Tom Brady working to improve not just week to week, but quarter to quarter, or even play to play, but Cutler doesn’t improve. Its akin to the attitude of Blackhawks’ late owner “Dollar” Bill Wirtz – I’m doing things my way and if we lose, so be it. Obviously, Cutler’s play management, reluctance to throw balls away when something isn’t there, inability to change plays based on what the defense is doing is not characteristic of what winning quarterbacks, even those with less physical skill than Cutler, have to do to win.
I think the last straw wasn’t the New Orleans game last Monday night, I think the Bears’ ownership couldn’t stand being criticized by Monday Night Football analyst and former Super Bowl winning coach Jon Gruden absolutely blasted the team, the coaching staff and especially Cutler. Gruden, an offensive coach and solid evaluator of quarterbacks absolutely lambasted Cutler: “this is hard to watch” Gruden said. “One of the most disappointing first halves I’ve seen from anybody in a long time, he added. “If I’m Marc Trestman (who was an assistant for Gruden with the Raiders), I’m going to take a look at Jimmy Clausen to see what I have down the stretch. It’s just not happening for Cutler,” Gruden added.
Fans can be ignored; the media can also, but to be openly exposed on national television by a qualified football expert was the last straw, so yesterday, the team announced that Claussen will start this Sunday against the Lions. Being a home game, I wonder if this move was just to get fans who may have stayed home if Cutler was starting a reason to show up on Sunday?
It is more than obvious that Tucker is out after the season; the lack of discipline along with the poor performance will probably lead to Trestman’s ouster; Cutler’s big contract and mediocre draft history may have also doomed GM Phil Emery; but the contract made it seem that Cutler was untouchable, but his benching makes the prospect of him leaving more likely.
I left the Cutler bandwagon this season. Einstein said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, and I don’t see Cutler making any changes to his game. To use a basketball analogy, after Magic Johnson won an NBA title with the Lakers his first year, he went out and worked on his outside shot, the one glaring weakness in his game. I don’t see Cutler checking down when pressured; I don’t see him throwing the ball away; I don’t see him moving to get more open. Maybe it’s the coaching, but now, Cutler has proven to be a coach-killer: Mike Tice, Mike Martz, now Trestman and Kromer with the Bears, and before that Mike Shanahan in Denver have failed to make Cutler into an elite quarterback. I don’t know if anyone can.

It is time again to give the list of my favorite music of the year. Many critics list CDs that no one has ever heard of, trying to influence the reader into trying something new. I however, am old, don’t get loads of free CDs from artists, and therefore, my favorite artists tend to end up on my year end lists. Hey, it’s my list.
It was a very good year for music for a change. I had a hard time limiting the list to ten (actually 11, but there were two CDs from the same artist that I lumped together – again, author’s prerogative). If I included all of the deluxe reissue releases from this year, there would have been over 25 different selections headed by the Bob Dylan & The Band “Complete Basement Tapes” collection, which is incredible as music and as a historical document.
First, the honorable mentions: Smashing Pumpkins – Monuments To An Elegy (short poppy end of year CD; not as good as Oceania, which topped this list last year); Lost In The Flood: The New Basement Tapes (Elvis Costello, T-Bone Burnett and Marcus Mumford put unused Dylan lyrics to music – uneven collection, but there are some gems on here); Weezer – Everything Will Be Alright In The End (a return to earlier geek/punk rock era Weezer); Johnny Marr – Playland (former Smiths guitarist’s second turn as a solo artist shows tuneful playing and a more than decent voice); Morrissey – World Peace Is None Of Your Business (we can’t not have a Morrissey release on the list somewhere); and finally, the most divisive disc of the year: U2’s Songs of Innocence. One would think that a huge U2 fan like me would rank any release higher, but other then “The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)” which has grown on me, the rest of the CD is indistinguishable from the mid-tempo songs on the last two or three U2 discs. And while I’m glad I didn’t have to spend money on this, getting it free does devalue U2’s music and that of other artists.
OK – now here are the top 10 discs of original music, listed by how much I played/enjoyed them this year:

10. Weird Al Yankovic – Mandatory Fun. It is amazing that for someone who has a lot of comedy albums/CDs, I have never purchased a Weird Al CD before this one. Maybe it’s because he was always more of a video satirist to me, or maybe because the songs he parodied were so omnipresent to me that I didn’t want another version, even a parody. However, since the parodies on Mandatory Fun are songs that I only hear sporadically from shared time in the car with the Indignant Daughters, I wasn’t as inundated by the songs. Plus, Al’s version of Pharrell’s “Happy” (“Tacky”) is very funny and his take on Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” – “Word Crimes” has been called Schoolhouse Rock for the 21st Century as Yankovic puts down bad grammer. He also does an original called “Sports Song” that is the ultimate sports fan’s song, complete with marching band.
9. Charming Axe – Gathering Days. Charming Axe is a delightful collection of folk tastes of Americana from an old friend and former guitar teacher Rob Newhouse. I always knew he was a tremendous musician and singer, but Eugenia Elliot and Hannah Hill’s marvelous voices have melded with Rob’s for a wonderful CD of music. I highly recommend you check it out.
8. Bryan Ferry – Avonmore. Many people will complain about several picks on my list as being the same old sound from an artist, which is fair, except what happens if their sound is so distinctive that each new CD is delightful? That is the case with Avonmore, another smooth sonic journey by former Roxy Music front man Bryan Ferry. Cool to the point of icy, but with emotion underneath each song, this is a return to form after a weak attempt to do his greatest hits in the form of 1920s era jazz. The true keeper is the last song, a cover of Sondheim’s “Send In The Clowns;” a song so overplayed over the years that it had become cliché, but here it was like I had never heard it before.
7. Pink Floyd – The Endless River. Speaking of bringing back old sounds, this collection of updated outtakes from “the Division Bell” sounds like Pink Floyd, which, if you like Pink Floyd, is a very welcome thing. The CD is mostly instrumental with some lovely melodies that evoke Floyd’s greatest hits. There are touches of “The Wall” here, and “Dark Side of the Moon” and even “Animals” and “Wish You Were Here.” What this also does is act as a reminder of how important the late keyboardist Richard Wright was to the Floyd sound. Fired by then-bassist Roger Waters for not pulling his weight then hired as a side man for the last Waters inclusive “The Final Cut,” he was brought back when David Gilmour restarted Floyd with drummer Nick Mason after an acrimonious litigation with Waters. The Division Bell was not one of my favorite Floyd albums, but did include a a gorgeous instrumental – “Marooned.” I love that song, and I did really like the music here as well. Which probably means I will never be on Roger Waters’ Christmas card list.
6. Interpol – El Pintor. I have always liked Interpol and while the latest collection doesn’t exactly break new ground, it is new enough amid the old drone of the earlier music that I played it a great deal. That’s all I can say…
5. Tie – Prince – Plectrumelectrum/Art Official Age. The Royal Purple one released not one, but two discs this year in celebration of his return to Warner Bros., the company about whom he used to write “Slave” on his face. Plectrumelectrum is a release with Prince’s new protégés, 3rdeyegirl which lays down a rhythm to allow Prince’s most spirited guitar playing in some time. I enjoyed it, but most critics will choose Art Official Age, which is more of a “Prince record.” Both of them marked a welcome return of Prince.
4. Tweedy – Sukierae. The King of Wilco, Jeff Tweedy and his 19-year-old drummer son Spencer released a disc of songs spawned by the cancer diagnosis of Jeff’s wife and Spencer’s mother Sue Miller. As one would expect, there are quirky musical numbers but with more personal lyrics than one could identify in a regular Wilco record. Since I do love Wilco, and Jeff Tweedy can really write excellent songs, again, it’s probably no surprise that this disc would end up at or near the top of my list.
3. Bruce Springsteen – High Hopes. The Boss has been surprisingly prolific over the past few years. Perhaps he has lightened up on his ultra-perfectionist ways. This was a selection of b-sides and unreleased songs, but not in original versions – but with varying accompaniments; very little of the E-Street Band, but with a lot of Rage Against The Machine/Audioslave guitarist Tom Morello. The mix was sometimes disconcerting, but it does show the 65 year-old rock icon willing to stretch his music.
2. Bob Mould – Beauty & Ruin. Once again, the former Husker Du/Sugar/solo artist released a set of songs that rocked hard but also had some emotional punch to them. Only Mould’s attempt to do electronic music several years ago failed to stay on my iPod for weeks. This one certainly has.
1. Jack White – Lazaretto. I admit to being a casual Jack White/White Stripes/Raconteurs fan. Like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, I really like the CDs by White and/or his bands, but like cotton candy, the pleasure goes away and I wonder what the fuss was all about. Not so with Lazaretto, headed by the title track, that was my favorite single song of the year. Yes, like White’s other solo outing, this CD rambles among styles, and tempos, but I was never bored, and it got the most play from me this year.

So, that’s my list; I hope you enjoy it and as always, feel free to comment and add your thoughts and favorites.