Bears head coach Matt Eberflus and rookie QB Caleb Williams chat during May rookie minicamp. As much as Williams and Eberflus appeared to get along in Tuesday’s debut episode of “Hard Knocks,” remember this is just practice.
AP
Curiosity is a cruel sucker, there being no other excuse for “Hard Knocks,” a TV show of sorts that exploits the sausage making part of an NFL season otherwise known as training camp, a phrase made of two lies and, honestly, best left hidden.
Having been to training camps from Boca Raton, Florida to Platteville, Wisconsin to Greeley, Colorado, I can attest that a good time is not had by all as seemed to be the case with the Bears, happy warriors gathered in common purpose.
What we must remember are the words of that tortured realist, Allen Iverson, who pointed out that we are talking about nothing important, or in Iverson’s words, “Practice, man, practice.”
How a TV production has managed to turn practice into programming for most of this century is the kind of genius usually found in politicians and bible salesmen, sometimes the same person.
And yet I must admit I am willingly awaiting another offering from HBO about a team “that transformed the NFL,” not a recent transformation as the lone, orphaned Lombardi Trophy at Halas Hall reminds.
The first show reassured us that Chicago is “the home of the blues, deep dish pizza and lakeside summers,” but then the program had to return to the Bears, the unfortunate reminder of what else Chicago is home to, omitting the White Sox and their private agony.
At some unedited point the Bears will start keeping score and what will have been learned during HBO’s collection of summer moments will matter not. We shall by then have a better idea if Caleb Williams is truly the Michael Jordan of football, as Mr. Knocks has hinted he might very well be, or if he is just another in the long, sad line of Bears quarterbacks, a TV show, by the way, that can be found on another channel.
Conclusion drawing is for later but for now we know this about Williams: he can’t sing, he throws a nice spiral and he listens without squirming to his coach, the newly coiffed and trimmed Matt Eberflus, no better coach now than last season but more camera ready. Everyone pretties up for their close-ups.
One must consider that most of what was offered in the first of five shows was mostly performance, the natural reaction to cameras, and what any of it has to do with the Bears being better is dubious.
Most stagy of the excerpts was the mentor meeting between Eberflus and his old college coach Nick Saban, who happened to drop by to offer wisdom on caring for a rookie quarterback.
Saban, once an NFL coach in the failed tradition of Lou Holtz and Steve Spurrier, is better known for bullying college players than for nursing NFL neophytes, but Ebeflus listened as if he had nothing better to do and seemed to agree that “expectations” are dangerous.
Whoever scripted that MJ comparison for Williams obviously did not clear it with Saban the Sage, so Chicago can safely hang on to the hype for a while longer, my guess until halftime of the Rams game at Soldier Field in September.
Likewise, the greeting of “coach Flus” to Williams on draft day to mark the date as an “iconic day in Bears history,” may find its way into irony as much as into evidence.
Strange that caution against expecting too much is the centerpiece of a TV program that identifies Williams as a “once in a generational jewel” with the talent to match the hype, when it is the very program that is doing the hyping.
Eberflus’ early assessment of Williams is that he is accepting every challenge and rising to the occasion, words last used to evaluate Justin Fields.
Staged or not, Eberflus’ camp opening remarks to the Bears condensed a tortured philosophy of syllogistic gibberish into just how the Bears must think of themselves.
“Winning does not make you a winner,” Eberflus said.“Losing does not make you a loser. Winning habits make you a winner and losing habits make you a loser.”
According to Eberflus, the best thing a football player can be is a “grinder.” Or maybe a habitual grinder.
“You guys are all grinders,” Eberflus told his team.
Once they were Grabowskis.