Chicago Bears at Detroit Lions: NFL Week 4 Pre-Party Open Thread

I don't know about you guys, and I have no idea why, but this week has just seemed to drag on and on. Maybe it's just the whole "Seven Days Until NFL Football"-ness of things in between games, but so it goes.

Either way, the Navy and Orange travel to Detroit to take on the 2-1 Lions in a battle to decide the early lead in the NFC North. If the Bears win, they move to 4-0, with the second place team (be it the Lions or Packers) sitting at 2-2. Lose, and the Bears are 3-1 while currently behind the Lions in the tiebreaker.

It's too early to call it a "must-win" but a win here would be huge for the Bears' fortunes in the NFC North as well as their credibility. Although if the Bears win, the Lions merely become a .500 team. Gee, I wonder how they would have gotten there. But that's a rant for another time.

Let's do some linkage and set the stage.

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We'll lead you right off with the Den, because that's how good it is. The Leader in Bears' Coverage (TM) continuing to deliver with greater reliability than a Domino's.

Here are my Six Keys to the Game, from the Lester A. Wiltfong, Jr. School of Self-Promotion. Meanwhile, the actual important people around here offer you...

- The Injury Report (via Dane)

- The TV Info and Other Important Stuff (via Kev)

- And Dane's Five Questions With... Pride of Detroit's Sean Yuille (Obviously via Dane)

- If you were looking for Bears' fantasy football implications, we've got that here (Via Les)

- And the Packers have better Super Bowl odds than the Bears (via the newly honeymooned Sam)

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In other sources of info that aren't the Best Damn Bears Site Period...

This Jay Cutler guy's pretty good against the Lions in his career.

With Henry Melton out for the year, Stephen Paea's got to pick up the slack.

Marc Trestman wants to see the Bears improve. I personally can see "It's another week 1 of the NFL season" turn into "We're X-X in the first (second) (third) quarter of the season..."

And here's how the Sun-Times has the teams matching up.

ESPNChicago's got their 5 things to watch for. Remember, six is greater than five...

Spongie's going to have his usual wrap-up of Sunday additions to the Den briefly, so I'll continue to refer you to the best linkdump monkey in the business.

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Gameday procedure today, as usual, we'll have the first-quarter thread pop at noon central time, and each quarterly thread will pop as the game progresses. Once the game ends, we'll have your recap shortly after with a late thread for the final sets of games, as well as Notes in the morning.

Now with the propers out of the way... Bear Down, my friends.

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And as usual, we'll be doing the Windy City Gridiron Madden Pre-Game Show (completely unofficial title). Today, it'll be myself, Spongie, and I believe we have an appearance from Sam today as well. We'll start that at 9:30 AM CT, so here's the video for that stream. As usual, if you have any questions or comments for us, post them in the comments, or hit me up on Twitter @SJS_illini!

Edit: Here's the archived version of this week's show in full.