How To Be Optimistic Without Puking Up Halas Hall Kool Aid
Hope springs eternal, but when false hope goes bad and you vomit the stuff, it feels a lot longer than merely eternal. So it is with Halas Hall Kool Aid. Year after year, the McCaskeys bring us a new batch of Kool Aid which Ken Kesey himself would think is a pretty wild trip: Optimism where educated voices everywhere see no reason for it.
They don’t do it alone, of course. They get help from Larry Mayer, Jeff Joniak, Tom Thayer, and of course Staley Da Bear. Of course all of those people are required by their job descriptions to be optimistic to a degree that at least suggests hallucinogenic enhancement.
It is easy for fans to feel hateful of that kind of noise. Although many just take it with a grain of salt, many more buy it, hook, line, and sinker, at least once in their time as a fan. The only thing worse than a bad season is a bad season which you thought was going to be great.
The worst recent example of this phenomenon for the Bears was 2019. Even then, there were plenty of fans who had puked enough Halas Hall Kool Aid over the years that they knew what it was from the very first sniff. Some of those fans hate me for drinking the Kool Aid that year, because they think that my optimistic desire to believe is the reason the McCaskey Family did not listen to “them”, the army of arm-chair GMs and other amateurs. I’m flattered by the empowerment they bestow upon me in this laughable fantasy.
Many of those folks will continue to hate me now, because I am not impressed by their “football genius” individually or collectively. I am convinced that very few fans have even a foggy clue as to how complex the jobs of GM and HC really are. Indeed, there are many such jobs, where the casual observer can only see such a tiny sliver of the work the job includes, that it is dangerously easy to think, “I can do that better than he can!”
Not that I’m calling these arm-chair execs lazy! NO! They come armed with statistics and film studies from many hours of research. I don’t care how much of that research was done under the influence of any external substance or force, either. But I do say they pay remarkably little attention to the resource gap between themselves and an actual GM or HC. Even professional pundits, who actually do have staffs, don’t have access to the quantity and quality of information that actual GMs and HCs have.
I’m not calling any of these folks dumb, either, though they often think I am. I know there are millions of guys out there who know a lot more about football than I do. They have played and/or coached high school, college, a few even semi-pro football. They know more about Xs and Os than I ever will, and I freely admit that.
The trouble between us starts when they try to tell me that they not only know what the best choice is in a particular situation, but that they know the motivations, thought processes, and precisely how much “due diligence” was done by the GM or HC in question, in the process of making the “wrong” choice.
So, what you will find here is that I don’t show a lot of stats, unless it is to point out what is wrong with somebody else’s wild claims. You will find reasons to like the players the Bears sign or draft. I won’t be pounding the table for players we shoulda, woulda, coulda signed; I won’t be screaming in terror over the “mistake” we failed to avoid; I will acknowledge the louder screams, but I will argue that more went into the decision than any of us know; and I will be quick to call out premature, foregone “conclusions”.
Most of all, I will give you reasons to hope, while remaining clear on what it might be realistic to hope for, and that cannot always be a Super Bowl win, much to George McCaskey’s dismay. My goal is to see the good in what may take some time to build, without risking the possibility of too much of that hope turning into the emotional vomit of false hope later in the season.
I have suffered greatly from the abuse of Halas Hall Kool Aid, so my goal is making Halas Hall Kool Aid Safe…or at least safer than George McCaskey’s standard flavor. I like my odds. As harshly as I criticize people who think they know more about football than an NFL GM, I’m pretty sure the vast majority of us know more about football than George McCaskey.