New Stadium Packed, But Same Old Bears

They’ve been saying in the Windy City that the owners of the Chicago Bears humiliated them twice last Monday.

* Cited first is the made-over $365-million stadium known as new Soldier Field. Though it is comfortable, few Chicagoans -- and there are millions of them -- will ever see the inside of the place. From the outside, architecturally, new Soldier Field has been described as a space ship on stilts wedged onto old Soldier Field.

* Worse are the Bears. The team is a product, Chicago sports fans say, of club owners who don’t understand football, of coaches who don’t understand modern football and of players who can’t play it.

Green Bay won the modern way Monday night, integrating a passer, Brett Favre, with a runner, Ahman Green, on a long series of clever “West Coast offense” plays that brought the Bears forward to rush Favre when Green had the ball -- which was 19 times for 176 yards -- and sent them after Green when Favre was firing 21 passes for 179 yards.

During a 38-23 game that the Packers dominated in the first quarter, 17-0, and for a half, 24-6, the old-fashioned home team scored a few meaningless points in the second half when Green Bay’s defensive players had trouble staying awake. But the Bears are 0-3 now -- and for the last two years they’re 4-15, a number suggesting that nobody in the organization has a clue.

Bad Luck for Reid

The NFL’s most-watched coaches, Steve Spurrier and Bill Parcells, are still winning, still combining their ways with mainstream pro football ways. They’ve thrown the ball when they could, run it when they had to, played solid defense and, surprisingly, the Washington Redskins and Dallas Cowboys rank one-two in the NFC East. .

For Spurrier, the fun-and-gun leader who has revived the Redskins (3-1), it could all blow apart today at Philadelphia (1-2).

For Parcells, the doctor who mended three other teams before he was called to the Cowboys (2-1), the string could run to 3-1 against Arizona today before he too must settle up in Week 6 with Philadelphia, the prize team of the NFC East. The Eagles are still heavily favored in that division.

But as of Week 4, when Dallas, Washington and Philadelphia all won, stormy weather was clearly ahead, this year or next, for Philadelphia’s defending Eastern champions. Indeed, it’s plain bad luck for veteran Eagle Coach Andy Reid that Spurrier chose the NFC East when he came up last year and that Parcells did the same when he came back this year.

Philadelphia Mystery

The Eagles found a team they could beat last Sunday when, in a 23-13 game, their best runner, quarterback Donovan McNabb, outgained the entire Buffalo team. Still, after McNabb’s five years in a well-coached organization, the mystery of Philadelphia is why nobody there can teach him to throw a ball straight.

McNabb is a tremendous athlete with not-bad passing form, meaning that a good teacher could help him, but it hasn’t happened yet.

And so in a tense fourth quarter against Buffalo’s gritty quarterback Drew Bledsoe, it came down to a lucky last run by a swift second-string Eagle, Brian Westbrook, who in the last two minutes slipped through a short-yardage defense and raced past the Bills’ drawn-in secondary to the goal line 62 yards away. Bledsoe deserved better.

Game of the Day

Jake Plummer, the new man in Denver (4-0), is already a better quarterback than Kansas City’s veteran 4-0 passer, Trent Green, and that is the Broncos’ edge in today’s big game at Arrowhead Stadium. Setting the table:

* Nationwide, football fans, sensing that Kansas City Coach Dick Vermeil is on course to win as usual in his third year in a new town, have been climbing on the Chiefs’ bandwagon.

* As luck would have it, this is the season that the Broncos have come on again, after a four-year injury-induced layoff since their consecutive Super Bowl appearances with Coach Mike Shanahan. He finally has a quarterback again along with most of his indispensable pass receivers, which include a bright new one, Ashley Lelie of Hawaii, who is noticeably efficient under a thrown ball.

Because the Chiefs’ running game is so powerful with Priest Holmes, the question of the day is whether Bronco running back Clinton Portis will be there, and if so, for how long.

With an injury diagnosed as a bruised chest, Portis missed Week 4 but needs to return today to keep the Kansas City defense off Plummer. A more electrifying ballcarrier than Holmes, Portis is listed at 205 pounds, which seems a bit small for modern football.

Hence durability is Portis’ problem. His replacement, the 1,000-yard tailback-fullback Mike Anderson, is no Portis.

Officials Right Again

When Kansas City and Denver both won in Week 4 -- the Chiefs at Baltimore, 17-10, and the Broncos over Detroit, 20-16 -- both were saving themselves for today’s event. The Chiefs couldn’t have won without Baltimore’s decision to use a rookie quarterback this year, Kyle Boller, in place of the veteran that Coach Brian Billick could have found, no doubt, but at a cost of much of his time and of much of the owner’s money.

As for the Broncos, they played two games, in effect, against the Lions, a first half in which Plummer threw his two touchdown passes while completing 16 in a row and a second half that they took off.

The Denver-Detroit game will be remembered, if it is remembered at all, as the one that proved to a skeptical football audience that the ground can cause a fumble. When it helped Plummer lose the handle at the end of a scramble for a first down, no opponent had laid a hand on him.

Though few fans completely understood what was going on, the officials instantly enforced a peculiar, obscure rule that a fumbling ballcarrier, when landing on the ground, must have some kind of contact with an opposing player in order to retain possession.

It was another example of the truism that NFL game officials are usually right. They take a lot of heat for perceived mistakes, mainly from sports fans supporting losers -- but considering the difficulty of officiating a fast-moving event contested by so many participants, they’re extremely effective.

Powerful Kicker

The defending AFC champion Raiders are off to a 2-2 start -- leaving them two games behind Denver and Kansas City in the AFC West -- in part because their pass offense isn’t quite as slick as it was a year ago but also because their ballcarriers aren’t as productive. Certainly against San Diego, they weren’t.

So passer Rich Gannon has had to take the Raiders the length of the field with his short stuff just to get even after any opponent scores, and he can’t always do that.

On the other hand, Oakland outpointed the luckless Chargers in overtime because they had a kicker, Sebastian Janikowski, who was able to kick the winning field goal from 46 yards -- off the bare Oakland infield.

Hemmed in on bare ground, Janikowski couldn’t take a chance with the usual leap that helps him plant his cleats firmly in the turf before swinging his foot. On turf, most times, a solid plant is indispensable. This time, the attempt would have taken him sliding along the ground into a flub. Know-how plus talent make him the game’s best kicker.

Coach of Year?

The Minnesota Vikings, 4-0 as they head for Atlanta (1-3) today, are the NFC’s most effective team.

Asked to play without injured 260-pound quarterback Daunte Culpepper last week against San Francisco, the Vikings got four touchdown passes from backup Gus Frerotte, making Coach Mike Tice look like a wonder man.

Actually, Tice is the least qualified of the NFL’s 32 coaches -- if you’re only counting coaching experience. When Minnesota hired him on Jan. 10, 2002, Tice could look back on only six seasons as a coach -- all as an assistant, all with the Vikings -- after ending a 14-year playing career as an NFL tight end with three Viking seasons.

Even considering that he’s a former Maryland quarterback who therefore knows something about both ends of pass offense, he was a strange choice for a head coach unless you’re watching pennies, as owner Red McCombs was.

Yet, you never know about any new coach. And Tice is winning now at least because, among other matters, he’s riding a dominating NFL trend -- monster linemen. He learned what he calls the importance of huge blockers as a line coach for five years at Minnesota.

The Raiders and others are also on the big-line kick, but Tice is taking it to a new high with five linemen who all top 300 pounds and average 326, and who, accordingly, nicely protected Frerotte from the 49er rush. At Denver on Oct. 19, Tice will get another kind of test. The Broncos win with the smallest of offensive linemen.

Frerotte’s Day

Judging by the Minnesota-San Francisco game, the Vikings are better conditioned for backup-quarterback help than most NFC Northern opponents if Frerotte is that good. Is he?

Who knows? During his 10 NFL seasons, Frerotte has played for five teams -- Washington, Detroit, Denver, Cincinnati and Minnesota -- usually as a backup. He has often appeared to be just good enough to be a backup. His history reveals that when upgraded from backup to starter, he doesn’t make it.

Yet, Frerotte is a graceful player and fluid passer who completed all but five of 21 throws against San Francisco. It happened in large part because Tice’s large offensive line helped him unreservedly. There were, in truth, many times when, as Frerotte retreated to read the defense, he was five or 10 yards away from the nearest 49er.

Perhaps Frerotte, to be efficient, needs just what Tice gave him, breathing room. When heavily rushed in other seasons, Frerotte has had his troubles. His new coach may be onto something

Best Game Plan

Tice’s operation at Minnesota is worth any other NFL coach’s scrutiny. It’s different from most in this copycat league.

For example, Tice brought in George O’Leary -- the controversial college coach from Georgia Tech and almost Notre Dame -- as his defensive coordinator. The 49ers could accomplish naught against O’Leary’s defensive designs.

As his pass-defense coach, the Viking leader kept Chuck Knox Jr., who made an impression on Tice after coming to Minnesota in 2000. In the beginning, Knox had coached for his father with the old Los Angeles Rams before diversifying at Green Bay and Philadelphia.

Strangest and most significant of all, Tice picked up, as his most important assistant, an offensive coordinator who had never played or coached pro ball, and who indeed had coached at only one big-time university: Scott Linehan, a former assistant at Washington.

For the 49ers, Linehan put in a simple game plan, one requiring Frerotte to throw the ball whenever the 49ers displayed a run-based defensive design and to hand off for running plays when the 49ers lined up in a pass defense.

It sounds simple but it’s so hard to accomplish, play after play after play, that few NFL signal-callers can stay with it. The temptation to vary one’s game-day approach is plainly so powerful that great play-callers such as Ram Coach Mike Martz often stray, and therefore often lose -- by, for instance, sending their running backs into 8-3 run defenses.

On the occasions when the 49ers presented an eight-man front, Frerotte, following Linehan’s instructions, passed every time, even when his most celebrated receiver, Randy Moss, was closely covered. The Vikings were confident that Moss could beat any single-covering defensive back. But not double coverage.

So when the 49ers shifted into pass defenses, Frerotte regularly handed off to his running backs and gained key yardage, even though injuries have left Minnesota with very ordinary ballcarriers by comparison with San Francisco’s superb pair, Garrison Hearst and Kevan Barlow.

San Francisco’s best pass receiver, Terrell Owens, is probably better than Moss -- though that contradicts what Owens said Sunday. But a difference was that San Francisco didn’t attack opposing defenses with Linehan’s game plan. Nor with Tice’s mighty offensive line.