Well thats the great thing about sports, and the thing that I think sometimes you try to negate through statistical analysis. There is absolutely no way to determine who would win between the 85 Bears and 08 Pats, just like there is no way anyone can prove who the better QB is between Montana and Marino, or Brady and Manning. You can come up with stats and/or anecdotes to support whichever side you take, but the bottom line is we will never know. I know without a doubt that in the impossible hypothetical that a game was being played with my life on the line I'd rather have Montana or Brady at QB than any other QB in history. Likewise I wouldnt give the 08 Pats much of a chance against the 85 Bears, although you may have dissenting opinions on both. Its just two schools of thought I guess on how we view sports.

Also Belichick has been reported to be a strict disciplinarian, Seau says the strictest hes played under. While Coughlin isnt as bad as when he was in Jacksonville, he likewise is a strict discplinarian. Its tough to say an attitude a certain coach has is completely irrelevant in how successful he is, although I would agree his mind for the game and in-game coaching are much more important.

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

No, no, no, IB. You are trying to reverse my point. I thought I was clear that I am talking about Ditka's style of Football, not necessarily his personal style - that is tough on the lines, running the football, attacking defense, etc. I am simply allowing for the possibility that his personal style assisted but I don't discount that it may not have.

However, there is no question that he set a tone, he gave that team an identity through his personal style. He came in and established what they would be - a running team, bruising. What's one of the first things he did? Launch Buddha Noah Jackson, longtime guy, as Jiggs might say, "good man, community...". He was saying what this team would be.

He got his O line in order. Hilgenberg? Not highly sought after. Mark Bortz was a DT if I'm not mistaken. He got Covert in. The notion that Ditka just sat there while everything was given to him in a nice prepackaged Super Bowl ready box is BS. He put those lines together.

There's no reason to think his strategies would not work in today's game. I would point to Pittsburgh and say that is a pretty good approximation of what he did. Maybe Baltimore also. That style still can have success.

Don't put so much weight into the personal style. Ditka was a unique individual that could pull that off. Also, Ditka was smart. Don't think that 95% of those "blowups" weren't designed in advance. Later on, he lost control but that was way later. The New Orleans stuff is a joke. But, him breaking his hand on a locker as a curly haired younger guy woke some of those guys up and you can't make me believe it didn't.

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My Maserati does 186.

Agreed on the first paragraph FF.

Re the second: you can be a disiplinarian without being a raving assknob. Also, Coughlin quite famously was on the verge of losing his team last year, when by all accounts he changed his ways (somewhat).

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Fire Phil Emery

Im not sure Kerry Collins and Fat Albert(Who I still believe is a better player than Tommie) will be shufflin anytime soon, but I think the Titans would definitely fit into that category as well.

_________________
Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

Titans, definitely. Probably the best example with Fisher at the helm.

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My Maserati does 186.

He mellowed out some but he still doesnt put with BS according to some of his players and many of the guys on the team from what they have said in the interviews adapted to his expectations as much as vice versa. We arent in that locker room so we wont really know, but nevertheless him and Belichick are known as pretty strict disciplinarians and have had decent success in the past few years. Ditto for Cowher. Dungy I think would be an example of someone who is on the other end of the spectrum who has had tremendous success as a coach.

_________________
Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

Also, Tom Landry, Chuck Noll, Bill Walsh.

There isn't one mold of a successful coach.

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"He is a loathsome, offensive brute
--yet I can't look away."

Exactly. But having a preference of one mold over another doesn't automatically make you a meatball.

It's like saying you are a meatball if you like a coach that presses in basketball and runs a motion offense.

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My Maserati does 186.

Truer words were never written.

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We all have private ails. The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails.- Eric Hoffer

I agree.

_________________
Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

well, you didn't get to watch those 49er teams either did you?

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@audioidkid

Of course, both were Hawkeyes which just made it easier for Ditka to succeed. And yes, Bortz was a defensive lineman at Iowa. I removed Jimbo, but Jimbo's kid is headed to Iowa. It's like 6 degrees to Hayden or something

I've read a lot of things on this board, but man...

For all the discussion that the Bears should have won 11 Super Bowls in the '80s, I would like to know which Super Bowls in particular they should have won. I would contend that there was only 1 year that they had the best talent in the NFC at playoff time and they won the Super Bowl that year. Let's go through it from '84 --

1984 - young team that won 10 games despite having 7 quarterbacks, threw a beating on Washington in the playoffs and lost to a better SF team.

1985 - BEARSSS

1986 - Might have had the best team if McMahon stayed healthy. Ditka made a bad decision on Flutie for the playoffs but was searching for something because he knew without McMahon they were going to have a tough time beating NY. Even with McMahon might not have beat NY. With a backup QB in the playoffs, there was no way the Bears should have been favored to win the Super Bowl that year. Should they have beaten Washington? Possibly. The D let them down in that game but that Washington team also had more wins than any team in the NFL that year besides NY and the Bears themselves.

1987 - A messed up year with the strike and Ditka's handling of the strike hurt the team. Also the team was getting older. An 11 win team lost to an 11 win Washington team that won the Super Bowl. I'd say SF spit the bit that year more than the Bears. This was a game they could have won and possibly a SB but they weren't the best team in football that year. Payton and Fencik were old and about done.

1988 - Ditka took a team that lost Gault, Payton, Fencik, and Marshall. Dent and Covert were hurt most of the year and had the best team in the NFC that year by record. However, they were still playing a backup QB most of the year. Ditka won Coach of the Year that year I think. Ditka probably should have played Tomczak against SF. Maybe if McMahon were healthy all year, the Bears would have been better than SF but I don't think so. I still say SF was the more talented squad.

1989 - Bad year. Ditka lost the team and if they had sucked in 1990, I think Ditka would have been gone.

1990 - New team another solid year but not the best team in the NFC that year. That would be the Giants and Niners. Beat the Saint in the playoffs, lost to the Giants. Giants were better.

1991 - Last good team. 11 win team lost to an 11 win Dallas team. Two team going opposite directions. Dallas was the more talented team.

So, there is my assessment. Could they have won another title? Sure, they could have but their best chances, 1986 and 1988, they were saddled with QB injury problems. The window that opened in 1987, they did not take advantage of.

This underachieving crap is BS though. They won a shit-ton of football games. I'd take that every year. Division championship, 11+ wins, a shot at the Super Bowl.

As for Lovie Smith...

You want to give Lovie a pass because he won 9 games this year? This team wasn't a bad team. Their biggest question mark was supposed to be QB. They have a ? mark there because Lovie has spent the past 3 years telling us "Rex is our quarterback". That's on him. But, hooray, Orton actually was decent and the O scored enough for our great D. What? Where is that great D that is the Lovie Smith trademark? Is it lost in October of 2006? This team was decent but let's not go giving out the roses because he won 9 games.

Lovie has been here five years. They've played .500 ball the past 2 years, won 2 Division titles, and 2 playoff appearances. Ditka in his fifth year had gone 29-3 the previous two years, won a Super Bowl, 3 Division titles, and 3 playoff appearances. The Bears haven't been in the playoffs in two years and, STILL, I don't hear a groundswell to get Lovie out, just make some changes.

If there was a Coach that had underachieved like Ditka we would run him out of town? Nobody's running Lovie out of town.

Also, all this talk about how much talent Ditka had. Maybe the reason all those "talented" players succeeded was because Ditka played a basic style of football. One that you could easily measure how a guy would perform because you had his college career that would indicate how he would do in Ditka's system. Sometimes simplicity is best.

Maybe the reason we can't draft anybody is because it is so damn hard to find somebody that can play Lovie's system. Just a thought.

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My Maserati does 186.

One thing I'm perplexed about is why anyone thinks that "grind it out football" is the optimal solution. Have teams with great defenses won by staying on the ground and running to victory with maybe competent passing attacks? Sure. But there's no reason in the world that just because a team has a good defense doesn't have to mean they run a shitty, grind-it-out offense. The two are completely independent of one another. The perfect football team would have something like the '85 Bears defense and the '08 Patriots offense. But because you can win with a mediocre "ground it out" style, people treat that like something approaching an optimal situation. It's not. It's just a concession that you're not very good on offense.

Great defensive teams have all tended to be running teams, but that's mostly necessity. It's tough enough to assemble one great unit, even in the era prior to the salary cap. Now, you're going to leave holes somewhere, so a team with a dominent defense is almost certainly going to have holes on offense. So they try to run the ball, shorten the game, lower the number of possessions on each side of the ball. But arguing that's the way to go about things is kinda like the Steve Martin bit where he talks about how to become a millionaire and not pay any taxes. "First, get a million dollars..." The road to offensive production shouldn't start with "first have a great defense."

On the defense itself: I've never heard anyone, ever, claim that teams should play a less aggressive defense, so I think there's a natural bias to one side. (Certainly some team somewhere has played to aggressive a defense.) I'm not sure if there's any way to quantify aggressiveness, but maybe blitzing is the best way to do it. But the Bears blitzed as much if not more than any other 4-3 team (I read in week 15 the had blitzed on more downs than any team in the league- I'm not sure if that held up to the end.) That was most certainly not the case in 2005 or 2006. The correlation between aggressiveness and winning, if you define aggressiveness as such, is practically nonexistent.

As an aside: do you know what you call a defense where the linebackers line up only a yard or two from the line of scrimmage, a safety is brought into the box on nearly every play, and you blitz on more than a third of the downs? The Bears weren't playing an honest-to-goodness 46 this year- no team would, because they'd be shreded- but they were playing something as practically close to it as feasible in the NFL today.

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Fire Phil Emery

22 year old who don't know shit.Come back when your Irish "Man"

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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.

The Bears "grind it out" style of the mid-'80s was hardly "a concession that you're not very good on offense". The Bears were the best, the best, running offense in football every year for 4 years straight until 1987 when the team started to decline.

The 1985 Bears led the NFL in scoring I believe. Maybe the Dolphins or Chargers had more but they were top 2 or 3 for sure.

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My Maserati does 186.

Let's give some credit to Ted Marchibroda!

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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.

As for the defense, I mentioned in some other thread. The D is bad. They had to blitz to get pressure but they are not built to be a blitzing team. They are a swarm to the ball team, don't give up the big play, be fast, go for the turnovers. The secondary doesn't press up. The blitzing was necessary because they weren't getting the pressure from the D-line that they need to allow Urlacher to roam. Urlacher and Briggs aren't good blitzers.

The D is not designed to blitz. They were forced into it because they were bad at what they are supposed to be doing. Maybe if their philosophy wasn't so conservative in the first place, they would have personnel that could apply that kind of pressure. But they don't. They are a turnover focused D.

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My Maserati does 186.

Agree 100% with Dr. Ken.

Just a few of my thoughts on this.

Ditka wasn't innovative, but he did bring a change of attitude to a team that definitely needed it (more than any offensive innovation) after the coaching of Neill Armstrong. Fencik mentioned that in their first mini camp under Ditka, the words Super Bowl were mentioned for the first time. Ditka did bring order to a locker room filled with malcontents, he cleaned out the locker of Rickey Watts, a starting wide reciever who if I remember correctly wasn't available during a Monday night game the year before because he was either drinking or on the phone (don't remember the exact details, someone else might know.)

People also will say that Finks or Ryan should receive more of the credit of the Bear success. But remember Finks was the GM of the Bears 6 years before Ditka was hired and the Bears had no division titles or playoff wins in that period. Ryan was the d-coordinator for 4 years prior to Ditka and again, just 1 winning season and no playoff victories.

No one is going to argue that Ditka was on the same level as Gibbs, Walsh or Parcells (Ditka did hand Gibbs his only home playoff loss in his career with Fuller at QB). But he certainly was a good coach who especially in his later years with the Bears got the most out of his talent ('88,'90,'91). An argument could be made that the Vikings had more talent late 80's early '90s then the Bears, yet the Bears had more success.

I think a ditka type could still work in this era, a team like Dallas could use someone like him.

And one last thing regarding the playoff loss after the 87 season to the Redskins. Neal Anderson did not play in that game. Anderson was a better back at that point than Payton, if Anderson was healthy maybe the Bears beat the Redskins and go to the SB.

You're a meatball, enigma.

I had forgotten about Anderson being injured in that playoff game that really would have made a difference but they blew a lead in that game. The funny thing is if the Bears win that game, there's a good chance they win the Super Bowl. Then it's 2-2 for Gibbs-Ditka Super Bowls instead of 3-1.

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My Maserati does 186.

the bears did under acheive with ditka ,they were in the top 5 in personel for a six year period and have one ring to show for it. dont give me the injury b.s. every team has had them and went on to win the superbowl j. hostettler ? giants, doug williams redskins...when you look at the bears losses it came down to getting out coached.the main man behind the bears success was the g.m. JERRY VANISI after m. mcaskey replaced him the bears fortune as a great team went with him.vanisi built the team not a blowhard bully mike ditka. doctor proclaims "they won alot of games" true in a shit division ;gb, det ,minn,tb, 8 wins there and you win half of the other games you have 11 to 12 wins a year .when it counted THE GREAT COACH proved his worth 2 loses to the redskins at home ,one to s.f. at home in the playoffs

The Vikings went to the playoffs 3 times in the late '80s which was pretty good because the Bears gave everyone in the Division a beatdown every year. Starting 0-2 against the Bears means you have to go 10-4 just to make the playoffs more than likely. They took care of the division first which is an emphasis that Lovie has also that I like.

The Bears won 11 games in '90 and '91, long after Vanisi was gone.

Also, I never once said he was the greatest coach in history. So, apparently Ditka sucks because he raised expectations that any year the Bears didn't win the Super Bowl was a disappointment and underachievement, including all those playoff appearance 11, 12 win seasons.

But, we should be happy now because Lovie won 9 games and missed the playoffs with a team that should have only won 6? OK, I can see how this is better.

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My Maserati does 186.

doctor i didnt realize that when a gm left (vanisi) he took his players that he drafted with him in, 84,85, 86, i thought they stayed with the team? so they couldnt play in 90 or 91 on the bears ? i am not a supporter of lovie any way ,he is a terrible game manager ,clock manager . i will agree that i thought the bears would of finished 6-10 or 7-9 this year ,but you have to admit the 0 line played WAY ABOVE anyones expectations this year,everyone thought that was the achilles heel of the offense .did ditka do more than any bear coach in a long time ,no doubt ,but i believe his great standing to all bears fans is overblown just a tad bit.

Fair enough. I'm not saying he should be a God. I'm just saying he won. He won more than anybody before (to the '40s) or since. I see no reason why someone who would like to reestablish the style of play that that team exhibited for a decade and dominated their division with - strong line play, run the ball, control the clock and pressure the quarterback is immediately deemed an idiot just because it is associated with the name Ditka.

I don't think they underachieved as much as they didn't overachieve. He got about what he should out of the talent and didn't really win any games he shouldn't have. I don't think any bad teams beat him in the playoffs and they lost some toss up games due to some key injuries.

But, let's say I'm wrong. I'd even concede that he underachieved ultimately. I personally don't believe it to the degree that others do. But, let's say he did. I'd still rather have that underachieving perennial playoff/elite team than what we've had since. Which, I guess, is my ultimate point.

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My Maserati does 186.

doc ,we both made excellent points...i just wish the bears can turn it around to have a legit chance to really make some noise in the future.......this year in the draft i would love for the bears to draft a middle linebacker ( a true mlb) , and move urlacher to the outside (weakside position )

Yes. Our brilliance is exceeded only by our humility.

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My Maserati does 186.

correct, we are great thinkers and also very humble

ditka believed in his own hype too much. he was his own worst enemy.

I think that was true later.

At the beginning, he was just crazy about winning, like insane and dangerously crazy about winning.

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My Maserati does 186.

yeah i meant after the super bowl season.

did you ever see the "beyond the glory" on him? it was damn good. got a lot of insight.