Meanwhile, the starters for now should still be veteran team leader guy Muhsin Muhammad and last year's big home run threat Bernard Berrian. Moose is old and slow now, he's still a pretty good possession receiver and, depending on who you ask, second only to maybe Hines Ward as far as blocking WR's in the NFL are concerned. Berrian is one of those super-fast deep threats the Bears have loaded up on lately, and had a nice 2006 season, but has had injury problems.
And speaking of injury problems, 2005 second rounder Mark Bradley is back healthy for a change and seems to be everybody's pick for this year's breakout superdudperstar guy. Makes sense, as seemingly every time he's played in an entire game, he's played like a Pro Bowler, but on the other hand, he seems to get injured every time he does something like that. Rashied Davis continues his semi-successful Arena League to NFL journey, returning as the slot guy/backup kick returner, but from there things get interesting.
Basically, there's one more wide receiver spot open, and seemingly a thousand guys going for it. A couple of guys have already blown it, with former AFL guy Timon Marshall and this other guy called Brandon Rideau that I never really saw do anything getting cut literally a few hours before I typed this. There's also Drisan James, a guy who seems to blow it by making one really dumb play in every preseason game my non-cable-having ass has to listen to over the internet, and he's treading water at best. And then, there are the two slow white guys. It's kind of a strange thing about Bears fans having such a soft spot for white guys whose 40 times can be measured with a sundial. I mean, Tom Waddle was great and all, but there's been no one else of note in like the last hundred years that have passed since Harlon Hill drank himself out of the league. But somehow, I can still remember this dude Glen Kozlowski getting a lot of love, despite the fact that he pretty much made no meaningful contributions to the team at all, and a lot of his teammates supposedly hated him for being a scab player during the '87 strike year. But oh yeah, back to 2007. The battle for the last spot and Snail-like Whiteboy Supremacy seems to be between undrafted free agent David Ball and last year's free-agent pickup Mike Hass, who came over from the Saints after having his roster spot taken by some seventh-round scrub named Colston. Ball had some crazy college stats, even breaking some of Jerry Rice's old tiny-college records, and at one point, some of the people on the official Bears message board were already penciling him in as the starter over Muhammad, (whaaaaat?) but in reality, he's just a slow whiteboy who has about as much of a chance of making the 53-man roster as I do becoming the new singer for Kool and the Gang. At this point, barring injury or arrest of bizarre circumstances, the last spot belongs to Hass, (and for the record, that rhymes with "ass," and doesn't sound like "Hoss," as previously thought) who has made a habit of making crazy-ass, Waddle-sized catches and contributing a few special teams tackles, which is a big deal for a guy trying to claw his way onto a team.
Overall, I figure things will remain about the same for Moose and Berrian, Devin Hester will confound and befuddle defenses with his glory, and Mark Bradley will have like one six-thousand yard game before rupturing his eyeball or something else season-ending.
Oh damn. That about sums up the tight end situation. First, there's Desmond Clark, who was like the absolute unsung key to the passing game last year, in that when defenses let him get open, Rex would throw for a million yards and cure cancer on every other play. But when the defense managed to keep him covered, those were the games where Rex Grossman fumbled every snap and gave everyone in the stadium AIDS. Like I don't know how, but he seriously gave like 300,000 people AIDS last year. That's how bad he was. But yeah, Desmond Clark is really good. But now, there's Greg Olsen, too. And he's nowhere near the blocker that Clark is, but he's potentially one of those crazy Antonio Gates Style unstoppable super tight ends that have been popping up in the last few years that are a lot like wide receivers, except they're like 6'5" and 250 pounds. So basically, look for the Bears to use a lot of two tight end sets this year and just completely be awesome and great and stuff. The smart money is on John "two catches all year, both for touchdowns" Gilmore returning as the third guy, unless Fontel Mines does something spectacular this week.
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