Seacrest wrote:
Regular Reader wrote:
Seacrest wrote:
Nardi wrote:
Regular Reader wrote:
Nardi wrote:
Halas would be close. Even Ricketts. He's only owned the previously hapless Cubs for 10 years.
Halas was a horrid owner for the last twenty years of his life. It's laughable that there was a segment of the media and fan base that continually made excuses for his futility, including but not limited to Mugs Halas' death.
Halas stopped being "great" when Sid Luckman got old.
8 championships with him, 1 without him. I was just counting rings. If you' want to count intangibles, how about Veeck?
Halas hired Ditka, so I'm thinking that championship is related to him as well.
If you would have said Jim Finks, it would be more appropriate imo. The game otherwise passed Halas by in the late sixties. Certainly by the late sixties.
And worst of all he left the team to his professionally inept family.
Ditka may be the most overrated Bear in history imo. He was a great coach for three years and a waste thereafter.
And I really wonder how great a player he really was, and how much is meatball nostalgia.
Finks didn't hire a good head coach and had two chances to do so.
He did build an awesome roster, but the Old man got the coach that got the job done.
Finks, for being a quarterback, couldn't find a good one during his tenure with the Bears. If he had found an average quarterback (instead of Avellini/Phipps/Evans) from 1977-1981 the Bears
would have made the playoffs more often than the one and dones in '77 and '79. The Bears finished 7-9 in '78 and the Vikings won the division with a 8-7-1 record. The Bears finished 27th in passing rankings that year. In '80 the Bears were 7-9 and the Vikings won the division with a 9-7 record. Where did the Bears finish in passer rating? 27th. He also traded a first round pick for Phipps, who outside a solid 9 game stretch in '79 contributed nothing to the Bears. The Browns used that first round pick for Ozzie Newsome.
Finks would have also kept Armstrong going in 1982 and given Finks reluctance to draft QBs high in the draft who knows if he would have drafted McMahon in '82 (Ditka was given some influence in the draft more so than the previous head coaches and Ditka wanted McMahon).