I'm surprised there isn't more talk here about the game. I'll throw out a blog entry to start.

http://bloggeddrain.typepad.com/cbff/20 ... s_com.html

Being gone all weekend I had to watch the first preseason game on tape. There are advantages to this. I had briefly looked over the newspaper reports so I knew there was one major story to address and I paid very close attention to it - the QB question. Or more accurately, the QB questions, plural. The one about who should start for the Bears at QB is a complicated one. The one that asks why Brian Griese looked so much better than Rex Grossman Friday night is not.

While I agree that Grossman was relatively wild I must say that it wasn't nearly as bad as I expected. Some passes, particularly early, were in deed way off the mark. But that wasn't the major problem. The major problem was that the coverage was so good. And why was that? Because the recievers, time after time, were standing still waiting for the ball to arrive.

There will be those who will say that say that who the better QB was on Friday is a complicated one because Griese was performing against the 49er second team. This is hogwash. Griese looked good because the offense ran smoothly under him. The offense ran smoothly because he did two things that Grossman failed to do: he hit the recievers coming out of their breaks and he hit them in stride.

More than anything else, NFL offenses depend upon anticipation and timing to succeed. Alex Smith did it well against a very vanilla Bear defense. So did Griese. Grossman failed miserably at it. This was the difference. It's really that simple.

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