I honestly cannot figure out what their plan is. The best I can come up with is "We need to get rid of our aging veterans so we can sign different aging veterans". Almost all moves they make to get rid of an older player eventually has another move that pretty much wipes out getting younger. I can only assume this is some sort of power play by Fox wanting to get rid of anyone who has been there longer than him. I'm guessing they feel the weight of one last run with Jay Cutler but they look to be repeating the same mistakes of the previous guys who got fired chasing the dream of it all finally coming together.

Does anyone have a positive description of what they are trying to do?

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

Best way I can spin it is a veiled rebuild.

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It's the Saints' post title plan, but worse. It's why I laughed at the illusory wonder boy's hiring when it happened.

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There are only two examples of infinity: The universe and human stupidity and I'm not sure about the universe.

I hope their plan is going 0-16.

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I don't know. Maybe they thought they had some players here, but after a full season and two training camps now they figure they don't have much of anything and that this is going to be a 3-4 year rebuild.

Regardless, I really don't care. I do not plan to give them a whole lot of attention on Sundays. I'll find out what I need to from Waddle & Silvy and this site.

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Hang around 6 to 8 wins long enough to keep people interested and ready for the next step forward so that when the next round of Soldier Field renovations is due, no one has the heart to tell them to fuck off. This is what the Buffalo Bills did, more or less.

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At least the Bills had a great QB, great coach, and a long run of sustained dominance in the AFC.

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Hope to become the Chiefs.

Remember that weird couple years where the Chiefs tried to become the Patriots, and, like every team that tries to become the Patriots, made a complete mess of themselves, fired everyone, and went back to the sleepy old go-for-the-bronze Chiefs we know and love? They were bugging all the offices and stuff to spy on their own employees. Todd Haley was making calls from a pay phone on the side of the road like Tony Soprano so that Scott Pioli couldn't listen in.

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Not to make light of how fucked up their organization was but it was so bad a player committed suicide in the team parking lot.

Pretty insane how that's been forgotten.

The Bears beat the Chiefs last year. Coming back on them in the 4th quarter.

That should never happen. Not with those 2 teams.

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Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
- Henry George

Who was so good, the Bears just had to have him on their coaching staff immediately after that debacle.

Oye ve.

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My plan is to ride the Bears in a survivor pool for a few weeks. Lets go Texans!

Well, to be fair, that arose from a domestic dispute, though I'll allow for the possibility that the fear and loathing that Belichickism inculcated led him to decide that when it came time to kill himself, it would be before his coach and general manager. I think even for the violence of football, that whole thing was so beyond the pale that it wasn't forgotten so much as necessarily repressed.

http://www.kansascity.com/news/special- ... ncern.html

This shit is so over-the-top. Football is silly. It's not just that this kind of behavior is toxic, stupid, and possibly illegal in any other industry, it's toxic, stupid, and possibly illegal in this industry when you don't have Tom Brady.

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They figured they might luck into 3-13, so they cut Gould to make sure that wouldn't happen.

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Aren't the Bears playing the NFC East and AFC South this year? This schedule is a life jacket.

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They don't have one. They haven't had one for about 20 years or so.

didn't the greatest QB in franchise history formally have no plan? like he even immortalized it in song?

THE PLAN FOR YOUR CHICAGO BEARS

1) ASSEMBLE SHUFFLIN CREW
2) FIND/DUST-OFF SHUFFLIN SHOES
3) ????
4) SHUFFLE

(no trouble was caused in the typing of this post)

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Plan is obvious ...put a crap product on the field which will give Virginia a heart attack and then sell the team.....pure genius

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I'm going to bounce from the spot for awhile but I will be back at some point to argue with you about this hoops stuff again. Playoffs have been great this season. See ya up the road.

I'm out.

i thought beardown already answered this: let every other team get worse so they don't have to get better.

Not quite. With Lovie it was usually "Good defense, hope for just enough offense to win."

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They had a pretty clear identity and way they wanted to win. The problem is I think when they got Cutler they were so jealous of the Packers they wanted to turn themselves into that and it didn't work for many reasons. They still seem to be chasing that dream too.

They probably need to have it beaten over their head that they aren't good this year for that to change too.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

Yeah. Offensively they had no real plan. Getting Cutler was great. What they did with him and who they put around him (coaches and players) was not so good most of the time.

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Cutler's biggest issue is that he isn't Rodgers or Brady and people WANT him to be. He's just a slightly above avg QB that isn't bad enough to make you bottom out but isn't great enough to overcome adversity and make the guys around him better. If they were ever going to bottom out it would have been last season and they were just good enough not to get a high draft pick.

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Well, the biggest issue is that he was paid like he was Rodgers or Brady even though he wasn't remotely close and not really a QB that wins you games but he doesn't normally lose them for you. It's mostly not his fault that he took the big money that the Bears stupidly gave him but it still matters. There is a reason the Grossman-Orton years were much better. You aren't going to win in this league with a highly paid QB that isn't a difference maker.

Most other franchises would have moved on from Cutler a while ago.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

I don't think the QB pay has been prohibitive to their success. It also coincided with that core group of guys getting old/bad. The Bears still dumped money on FAs after he got the cash. I'm sure they would rather have had a larger pool but they spent money on the wrong guys too. Their talent evaluation is for shit.

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You can't say that. It is undeniable that he has been paid roughly equal to Brady/Rodgers with far less production and results. How could it not hurt them significantly?

Also, they've made a lot of moves for veterans to try and fix him and to try and win now to take advantage of him. They've pretty much signed or traded for aging veterans every year with poor results to take advantage of Cutler being in his prime. They've fired and hired coaches at an alarming rate in order to fix Jay Cutler and it hasn't worked. If you go back to the day of the trade pretty much everything they have done has been effected primarily by having Jay Cutler. Even this year they signed an older offensive lineman cast off to a big deal.

Now, I'm not putting the blame on Cutler for all of this. Plenty of people made poor decisions in trusting him to be good enough to warrant building your whole franchise for nearly a decade around him and everyone they fired was then followed by someone who tried the same thing the previous guy did with similar results.

The worst part is they are setting themselves up to do the exact same thing next year since they "don't have anyone to replace him".

Let me put it another way. If you had a time machine and knew exactly how the Jay Cutler era would happen would you have stopped the Jay Cutler trade? The answer is an obvious yes.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

Looking back of course I would never make the trade. None of this is really Cutler's fault though. He hasn't changed anything about himself or the way he plays. He wasn't going to turn down a big contract and I haven't read much that he was running guys out of town (except for Martz, I guess they really didn't get along).

But taking all of what you said into account, do you trust that those draft picks they traded would have been good, or that the extra cap space would have went to the right players? I don't have any faith they could get it right.

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Well, I don't fault him for making the money. It was dumb to give him all that money but if he can take advantage then I don't expect him to give it back.

It isn't just about running him out of town. They hired Trestman for one reason and that was Jay Cutler. That was a disaster. They hired Fox to "win now" at a time when they clearly should not be trying to win now. They keep on bringing in older veterans virtually every year because they refuse to rebuild mostly because that would not work with an aging quarterback like Cutler. Don't look at it like I'm saying Cutler is at fault for everything. He grossly under performed his contract but many others made mistakes around him.

It is much larger than that. It's not just about the picks they traded. It was all the moves they made which were all about winning now and fixing Jay Cutler.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!