Another addition to the long litany of Chicago sports failures happened Sunday when we least expected it, sneaking up on us while we were checking out the Bears’ schedule to identify their next victims.
Where the stunning “Hail Mary” loss to the Washington Commanders ranks among the worst of the worst moments in our town’s history of bad ones is in the eye of the beholder, though recency bias and the revelation of Tyrique Stevenson’s boneheaded play sure made it seem like No. 1.
But after time for reflection, and after the alcohol wore off, it was just another epic fail and not the all-time, all-timer that it seemed like Sunday night.
It obviously was not a season-ending thud like the Cody Parkey double-doink in the Bears’ playoff loss to the Philadelphia Eagles in 2019. These Bears still have the rest of the season to recover, just as the 2003 Cubs had a Game 7 to look forward to following the nightmarish ending of Game 6.
OK, bad example.
The point is the heartbreaking ending wasn’t a dealbreaker for the ’24 Bears, the way Henri Richard skating around Keith Magnuson in the third period to score the go-ahead goal was to the 1971 Blackhawks in their Game 7 loss in the Stanley Cup Finals at old Chicago Stadium. That gut punch was much more severe than a Hail Mary loss in the seventh game of a Bears’ season.
“The Hawks lost this game and the Cup by inches,” Tribune Hawks’ writer Ted Damata wrote, adding it was “the difference between a water shower and a champagne dousing.”
The Bears would not have doused themselves in champagne had they stolen the win in spite of the poor head coaching decisions, the play-calling head-scratchers and the lackluster performance by Caleb Williams.
But like the ’71 Hawks, they also lost by inches, and it changed everything about the way we felt afterward.
If the pass by Jayden Daniels came down a couple of inches lower at the apex of the group leap, Stevenson might have batted it down instead of tipping it straight to the wide-open Noah Brown in the end zone.
Chicago’s collective stomach sank like a stone, but there was no memorable “Oh, No!” call to accompany our pain, like Ron Santo’s guttural convulsion after Brant Brown’s dropped fly ball in the heat of the 1998 wild-card race. ESPN-1000 Bears analyst Tom Thayer yelled “He caught it!” on the play, but lacked the emotional agony of the moment.
If you wanted to hear some real angst, you had to find former Bears coach Dave Wannstedt wailing on the Marquee Sports Network, or former Bears Dan Hampton and Ed O’Bradovich — the Doctors of Doom — taking no prisoners on the WGN-AM 720 postgame show while holding coach Matt Eberflus and offensive coordinator Shane Waldron accountable for everything but the Great Chicago Fire and Mayor Richard M. Daley’s parking meter deal.
“My dear lord, the football gods, where were they?” O’Bradovich lamented after seeing the viral video of Stevenson with his back to the play when Daniels began scrambling, jawing with fans as though he was lost in his own space.
This delayed bit of news, thanks to the viral video an hour after the game, was the cap on the Bears’ iceberg.
It instantly reminded me of Cubs shortstop Starlin Castro with his back to the plate during a pitch in a game against the St. Louis Cardinals in 2011, his mind wandering aimlessly as the game continued. After ESPN analyst Bobby Valentine made a stink during the telecast, Castro was benched for a game by manager Mike Quade, the Eberflus of his time.
What Eberflus will do with Stevenson is unknown, though he said Monday any discipline would be “internal.” If Stevenson starts Sunday at Arizona, Eberflus’s already damaged reputation will take another hit, and I fear “Hamp and O-B” will need some Prozac for next week’s show.
Jayden Daniels held onto the ball for 12.79 seconds on his game-winning 52-yard Hail Mary touchdown to Noah Brown, the first TD pass with a time to throw over 10 seconds in the Next Gen Stats era (since 2016).#CHIvsWAS | #RaiseHail pic.twitter.com/I2mj2wn1hg
— Next Gen Stats (@NextGenStats) October 27, 2024
This was what some in Chicago refer to as a “Scottie Pippen moment,” dedicated to all of our local heroes who’ve put themselves above their team and teammates at the most inopportune time, as Pippen famously did by sitting out the last 1.8 seconds of regulation in Game 3 of a 1994 playoff tilt against the New York Knicks.
Pippen was famously upset that coach Phil Jackson didn’t call a play that would have him taking the final shot of the game in his first season playing without Michael Jordan. Toni Kukoč saved Pippen and the Bulls by hitting with the game-winning shot, and Pippen’s “sitdown” remains a Chicago classic, albeit for all the wrong reasons.
“It was a racial move to give (Kukoč) a rise,” Pippen said in 2021, long after his career ended. “After all I’ve been through with this organization, now you’re gonna tell me to take the ball out and throw it to Toni Kukoč? You’re insulting me. That’s how I felt.”
Stevenson, whose complete lack of focus on the final play Sunday will remain part of his personal story for years, sought to mitigate the situation afterward by apologizing to fans on social media and to his teammates. On Monday he said he “let the moment get too big,” and that it would never happen again. We’ll see.
Whether he learned a lesson, however, is irrelevant. You can’t go un-viral. This will stick to him like a wad of discarded gum on a sidewalk in the summer. Even vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz mocked the Bears’ loss Monday on the campaign trail, piling on by saying the Harris-Walz ticket was “leaving it all on the field, unlike the Chicago Bears, I might add. They earned it, too.”
Kicking Bears fans when they’re down is easy enough, though it should be noted Walz’s Minnesota Vikings self-destructed two weeks ago in a 31-29 loss to the Detroit Lions, then lost to the Los Angeles Rams. Stick to politics, coach.
In the aftermath of the miracle in Maryland, Stevenson’s teammates must now rally around him while acknowledging the seriousness of his mental gaffe in the season’s biggest moment. One teammate, Cole Kmet, tried a little too hard to downplay the play, telling reporters Sunday: “Look, a Hail Mary is a Hail Mary. You’re just tossing up a prayer. To get obsessed with that, with where we are at right now, is probably a little immature, and it’s important that we come back tomorrow and throughout next week and look at the positives, look at the negatives for us offensively.”
Kmet, who went to St. Viator, must not have paid close attention to Chicago sports in high school, or else he’d know fans here are obsessed to begin with. And being obsessed with a wild, game-ending play is part of the NFL’s attraction, even for fans who don’t have any money on it.
For Stevenson and the Bears, the world moves on. Tomorrow is another day, and before too long they’ll be back in action in Glendale, Ariz., where we once were told by a wise man “the Bears are who we thought they were.”
They still are.
