Thread: For Bears, underdog role seems to fit best for now

For Bears, underdog role seems to fit best for now
By Lindsey Willhite |



In the din of the Bears locker room, particularly when the TV mini-cams and the digital recorders roll, there's no room for nuance or poetic waxing about the underdog.
There's only time for a sound bite, a cliché, a reminder that it's Lovie Smith's roster against the rest of the world.

So it went again this week when the Bears, fresh from unexpected victories over Dallas and Green Bay, discovered they opened as 3-point underdogs for Sunday night's nationally broadcast game with the New York Giants.

"That's perfect," said Bears defensive end Israel Idonije, providing the perfectly empty sound bite.

"That's the position we want to be in, so I hope we're underdogs every game for the rest of the season."

It's not Idonije's fault he phrased it that way. He heard the question, knew the role he was being asked to play, and fulfilled it as cleanly and quickly as possible.

Wouldn't it be great if the Bears had the chance to borrow the words of, say, an early 20th-century businesswoman in order to express their underdog longings more fully and beautifully?

Let's take a moment to anoint the late Alice Foote MacDougall, who wrote her "Autobiography of a Business Woman" in 1928 (when George Halas still battled to make the NFL a reality) as the Bears' unofficial poet laureate.

MacDougall framed her years as an impoverished widow with three children before she forged a coffee and tea empire in New York during the Roaring Twenties in a way that just might apply to a frothing roster of Bears:

"But hunger and cold, ill-health and pain are nothing. They pass. The thing that remains is ignorant criticism, well-meaning but futile advice, the contempt of a subordinate, the feelings of the under dog.

"The amazement he feels at the kind of people who kick him. The despair at his helpless inability to resist. Always duality. The life of the under dog, silent and suffering."

Doesn't that sound like something that might come out of Lovie Smith's mouth, provided he had the chance to be exposed to it?

Instead he stuck with the tried-and-true muse this week, perhaps because NFL rules forbid him from being silent and suffering.

"I know we've been underdogs," Smith said. "Most of the year, we've been underdogs. And the guys have really embraced that. But whether we're an underdog or we're the favorite, I don't think that really matters an awful lot."

It's tempting to say the Bears perform better when oddsmakers pick them to lose, seeing as how they just bounced the Dallas Cowboys and Green Bay Packers and took down the Minnesota Vikings in Week 16 last year when they were 8-point underdogs.
That's a three-game winning streak as the underdog.

But look at their six games as the underdog prior before that: Not only did the Bears lose all 6 games (Baltimore, Green Bay, Minnesota, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Atlanta), they failed to beat the spread in all of them.

So maybe it's time to give all the underdog talk a rest, whether it be in sound bite or Foote MacDougall format.

Let's allow veteran safety Chris Harris his say.

"We definitely know we're 3-point underdogs," Harris said Wednesday. "I know that much. I know all the DBs know."

Does that mean he dug into the newspaper or clicked online to find this fodder to fuel his position group? Nah. It's not that important to him.

"My brother's more into it than I am," Harris said. "He texts me or sends an e-mail. That's fine with us. We'll take it. Keep flying under the radar. We like it.

"I like flying under the radar. Eventually we'll start getting some respect, but respect isn't given. It's earned. You've got to keep going out there and earning it."