Backups are front and center

As his Chicago Bears prepared for a game to be played tonight in the city of the new World Series champions, Lovie Smith pondered a question fundamental to baseball.

Should he go to the bullpen?

Smith’s team is 10-2, already assured the NFC North title and closing in on home-field advantage throughout the playoffs, yet his starter is running on fumes. Quarterback Rex Grossman has thrown passes for six interceptions in his last two games and has seen his in-game passer rating drop from 105.7 to 81.4 to 23.6 to a ridiculous 1.3 over the last four weeks.

At the same time, as every sports columnist, talk show host and screaming football fan in Chicago has reminded him, Smith has a competent veteran standing on the sideline, Brian Griese.

Should Smith stay with Grossman throughout tonight’s game against the St. Louis Rams, and the rest of the season, based on 2-month-old production?

Or does he rock a 10-2 boat and take a flier on Griese, based solely on future speculation?

As he watched Sunday’s Week 14 action, Smith listened to analysts on a variety of networks call his starter a dog, insisting that Smith keep Grossman “on a short leash.” And then, as the day’s results played out around the league, other teams were taunting Bears fans even further by winning, emphatically and dramatically, with relief pitchers.

Five quarterbacks who began the season on the bench found ways to win Sunday -- ranging from Vince Young’s 39-yard overtime dash for Tennessee to Joey Harrington’s efficient handling of Miami’s first shutout victory over New England since Griese’s dad, Bob, was leading the Dolphins.

Less than four minutes into overtime, Young dropped back to pass, pulled the ball down and sprinted virtually untouched for the decisive touchdown in Tennessee’s 26-20 triumph over Houston.

Young outran the Texans inside Reliant Stadium, a losers’ lair six miles from the house in which Young grew up. A Houston hero in high school and a Texas star in college, Young could have come home to play professionally if someone in the Texans’ front office had bothered to watch a quarter of January’s Rose Bowl.

Instead, Houston used the top pick in April’s draft on a defensive lineman, a move with great potential to become the dumbest draft-day decision in NFL history.

When faced with the no-lose proposition of selecting either Young or Reggie Bush, the Texans still found a way to lose.

Young, who has passed and scrambled the Titans to three consecutive come-from-behind victories, underscored the error of the Texans’ ways by scoring from 39 yards only because that’s where the playing field ran out of room.

For all the chance Houston had of catching him, Young could have run all the way back to his childhood home.

Harrington, derided out of Detroit and lucky to grab a lifeline as Daunte Culpepper’s backup in Miami, won for the fifth time in his last six starts -- and slowed down a supposed Super Bowl contender in the process.

Harrington’s defensive teammates carried the day, clamping down on Tom Brady and New England for a 21-0 triumph that was the Dolphins’ first shutout against the Patriots since Miami’s undefeated season of 1972.

But Harrington didn’t do anything to louse it up. He completed 60% of his passes and threw for a touchdown and, most significant, did not throw any passes into the hands of anybody wearing a silver helmet.

In Jacksonville, another reliever, David Garrard, was the pitcher of record in the Jaguars’ 44-17 romp over -- and through -- the Indianapolis Colts.

Now it can be argued that anyone with a hand large enough to grip a football and give it to Fred Taylor or Maurice Jones-Drew could have defeated Indianapolis on a day the Colts’ shuddering run defense was much, much, much worse than anyone in Indiana had feared.

Taylor and Jones-Drew each rushed for more than 100 yards against the Colts -- before halftime.

By the end of the day, Jacksonville had netted 375 yards on the ground -- equaling the second-highest single-game rushing total since the 1970 merger.

Only a 407-yard effort by Cincinnati against Denver in 2000 was a better post-merger performance.

So Garrard didn’t have to do much besides high-five his running backs. Still, the victory was his fifth in seven starts this season as a replacement for Byron Leftwich, moving the Jaguars into position for the last AFC wild card.

Matt Leinart, evidently really riled by USC’s 13-9 loss to UCLA, did something for the Arizona Cardinals that he hadn’t done since his days as a Trojan: Win two games in a row.

This one was a 27-21 victory over Seattle, which could have clinched the championship of the sad-sack NFC West by beating the Cardinals. But Leinart threw for 232 yards and two touchdowns to keep the Seahawks waiting.

With only two NFC teams owning as many as nine victories -- Chicago and 9-4 New Orleans -- anybody in the conference with seven victories is entrenched in the playoff hunt. That includes a couple of disappointments, the what-are-they-doing-at-7-6 New York Giants and Atlanta Falcons, and one genuine surprise, the done-with-Donovan-but-still-kicking Philadelphia Eagles.

McNabb’s emergency replacement, Jeff Garcia, passed for 164 yards and two touchdowns in Philadelphia’s 21-19 triumph over Washington. That improved Garcia’s record as a 2006 starter to 2-1 and left him with some season stats that should stop the booing in Philly at least until Wednesday: eight touchdown passes, zero interceptions.

Young and Leinart are promising rookies.

Garrard is a proven plug-in.

Harrington and Garcia are journeymen who combined to go 5-11 for the Detroit Lions last season and were jeered by local fans throughout the process -- fans who now consider those five victories glory days when compared to the 2-11 Lions of 2006.

The point is, bullpen help can come from a variety of sources. Young, old, washed up, unwashed. There is no one rule chiseled in stone, except this: No new quarterback can save the day until an old one is benched.

Lovie Smith must bear that in mind as he waits to see tonight whether Grossman wrecks again.

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mike.penner@latimes.com