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Baffoe: Good To Know Now The Bears Season Is Gone

By Tim Baffoe--

(CBS) (Homer and Bart Simpson are chasing after a roasted pig on a grill that has gone mobile and goes through a bush.)

Homer: It's just a little dirty. It's still good, it's still good…
(The grill wheels across a street, hits a wall; the pig flies off the grill and into the river.)
Homer: It's just a little slimy. It's still good, it's still good…
(The pig floats down river and gets stuck in a dam before water pressure shoots it into the sky.)
Homer: It's just a little airborne. It's still good, it's still good…
Bart: It's gone.
Homer: I know.

Were you chasing this pig of a Chicago Bears season? Clinging to some vain hope that somehow, some way it could be mildly entertaining and numb some of the dread on Sundays of the coming work week?

You have accepted that it's all for naught now, right? Dead barely hatched from its shell. Don't cry because it's over; smile because you've been saved the farce for any more weeks.

The delicious irony of it all — well, for me anyway, because I'm a sadist like that — is that it's an injury to quarterback Jay Cutler that did the year in. There's a special sort of satisfaction to take in knowing how confounding it must be for the significant faction of Bears zealots who hate that man so much yet whose favorite team can't function without him in any respectable fashion.

Watching Cutler head to the locker room Sunday against the Arizona Cardinals with what the team claims is a hamstring injury, it was impossible not to think that this was a good thing (though not with an absence of humanity of seeing a player being injured, which nobody should want). Good in that a) the rabid anti-Cutlerites get their reckoning in the form of Cheddar Bob Clausen and b) the tank, intentional or not, is on.

Without Cutler for at least the next two weeks as he is reportedly set to miss, the Bears stand little chance of covering a double-digit point spread, let alone winning an actual game during that time. Clausen's arguably unfit for an NFL roster, yet he's starting at the game's most important position now, and it appears for now he'll probably be backed up by David Fales, which will get some of the rabble clamoring to see the practice squad promotion out there on the next-to-zero chance he's a diamond in the rough. Maybe a veteran free agent gets signed. Rex Grossman would be a great choice for humor purposes, but there's nobody out there who can salvage any of Cutler's missed time.

And that time may be more than two weeks, for all we know with the way this coaching staff divulges information. Conspiracy theories are already out there, and it's hard to blame them after seeing the play Cutler was injured on in which nothing leg-intensive seemed to occur coupled with coach John Fox and company's penchant for fibbing on injury statuses.

But the flatlining goes beyond the quarterback position with this team. The most recent first-round pick may not dress this year. In a secondary corps that's one of the league's worst, last year's first-round pick, cornerback Kyle Fuller, was benched on Sunday in favor of a seventh-rounder from a year ago. Shea McClellin is still out there trying his darnedest, that poor, poorly drafted fella. The defense has one interception, and it's by Jared Allen.

Alshon Jeffery's health seems like it will be iffy at best all season. Matt Forte will need to be more heavily relied on, increasing the chances of something bad happening to his body. And Cutler and his wife, Kristin Cavallari, are naming their third child after a dog.

Remember that Week 1 glass-half-full feeling we had based entirely on a loss that at least seemed competent? Good times. Week 2 is over, and Yahoo has the Bears dead last in its power rankings, which is better than almost last. Go whole hog, full runaway rotisserie pig.

Now's the time to accept and move on. Maybe play a fun little game called "Find Three Bears Wins On Their Schedule." But otherwise be thankful the tire fire is blatant now and not a gradual disaster realized around midseason. This team is beyond dirty, slimy and airborne.

It's gone. And that's good to know now instead of later.

Tim Baffoe is a columnist for CBSChicago.com. Follow Tim on Twitter @TimBaffoe. The views expressed on this page are those of the author, not CBS Local Chicago or our affiliated television and radio stations.

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