http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2014/12/11/boers-the-joyless-era-of-marc-trestman/
By Terry Boers-
(CBS) I’d rather be eaten live by an anaconda than watch another Bears game.
Or water-boarded for weeks by CIA operatives or surrounded by a pack of hungry hyenas on the Serengeti or treat Ebola patients while wearing shorts and a T-shirt or clean up toxic spills with a toothbrush.
And that’s because the very scary Dr. Death, Marc Trestman, and his band of hapless boobs have completely and utterly sucked the joy from Bears football in his less than two years on the job.
Now, by all accounts from those who deal with him on a regular basis, Trestman is a nice guy. Whoopee. There are a lot of really nice guys peddling insurance, delivering cookies and baking bread. I don’t want any of them of coaching the Bears, either, although at this point I might have to listen.
Trestman came to us via the Canadian Football League, where he was head coach of the Montreal Alouettes and quite successful at it. But winning in Canada doesn’t count in my football book. I don’t really need much from Canada unless it’s a comedian or a hockey player. There’s a reason that no one in these continental United States thought of Trestman as head coaching timber. Unless you’re talking about yelling “Timberrrrrr.”
It took another guy who appears completely overmatched in his job, Bears general manager Phil Emery, to see the head coaching potential in Trestman. Now, Emery isn’t an unlikable guy, either. But he’s an odd duck on his best day, which apparently makes him more likely to find a birdbrain.
How can you sit across from the guys with the coaching chops of Bruce Arians and Mike Zimmer and Mike McCoy and pick Mr. Peepers? No one ever thought of Trestman as more than an offensive coordinator in the NFL, and even that warranty ran out in just one season when you check the numbers.
I understand the hiring process was screwed up from the beginning because Emery already had some terrible assistant coaches in place that the next guy had to take. That is so Bears.
Arians, who has since said he wanted more than anything to be “coach of the Chicago Bears,” couldn’t live with the stupid parameters Emery set. And I’m betting the mock press conference Emery wanted him to conduct wasn’t exactly a selling point.
And if Trestman was asked to do the same, how in the world did he pass the test?
I mean, this is a guy who either has an imaginary little man sitting on his shoulder or he’s brought back Senor Wences in a little box. He’s actually mastered the art of acting as if someone else is calling plays for the Bears.
And this he’s become frighteningly good at. Trestman did it after he threw the ball 48 times against the Lions on Thanksgiving Day and ran the ball just eight times, including a kneel-down.
He was even doing it days later on the Bears’ coaching show on WBBM, hosted by Jeff Joniak. Before Trestman packs up his slide rulers and toolbox of concepts and heads back to Weirdville, I want to know where this other voice is coming from, and I want it eradicated.
All this from a supposed leader of men who thinks his players are compliant, and he quickly notes that after each thundering loss that the corrections have been made during the film session.
Uh?
I get that a lot of NFL head coaches are guarded and creepy, but Trestman brings everything to a level I’ve never seen before. And I’ve seen plenty of awful Bears’ football going back more than 50 years.
I used to think that Abe Gibron — who was best noted for eating vast amounts of food, including an occasional table and chairs — was the worst Bears’ coach on record. And that even includes the supremely awful Neil Armstrong.
But Trestman is in a class by himself. I simply don’t know what his deal is on any level.
Trestman was brought here to open the puzzle that is Jay Cutler. I believed if nothing else, he was the quarterback whisperer.
What we’ve got here is a big nothing. Cutler was made the league’s highest-paid player by Emery and the Bears during this last offseason, and he’s responded with a pitiful performance. I don’t care that he’s going to throw for more yards than any Bear in history or have the highest quarterback rating in his career.
Cutler’s a careless turnover machine, and he remains the exact same dullard he’s always been after games. I’ll continue to wait for him to come with something, anything interesting.
Same goes for his buddy Brandon Marshall, another guy who got paid more than $20 million in guaranteed money from Santa Emery.
Granted, Marshall has had his share of injury problems this season, but he remains a loudmouth idiot who can apparently hit us with his own special brand of stupidity whenever he so chooses.
He can even have a now famous locker room tantrum that almost led to a fight with Robbie Gould with no fear of recrimination from a cowering Dr. Death.
In fact, Double D knew nothing about it. Nor did he hear anything about Marshall’s strange plan to fight a fan who offended him on Twitter.
Maybe he’s Doctor Deaf.
Whatever he is, he’s no coach.
Gotta run now. I think I hear the anaconda in the kitchen.
A longtime sportswriter for the Chicago Sun-Times, Terry Boers now co-hosts The Boers and Bernstein Show, which can be heard Monday-Friday from 1 p.m.-6 p.m. on 670 The Score.
