30 Day Challenge: What’s the worst Bears hot take you’ve ever heard?

Chicago really is a hot take city.

Sure, sports brings out the worst (or dumbest) of us but I think Chicago is really up there with other cities for just most garbage and meatball fans out there.

Over the years I’ve heard plenty of terrible takes. Whether it’s a Bob calling in to the Score or an idiot on ESPN1000, there’s always fan takes out there that are straight trash.

I had a former co-worker of mine tell me in 2018, with a straight face, that the Bears should try Tyler Bray because he looked good in the preseason.

I remember when there was periodic discussion of Jay Cutler’s diabetes effecting his vision during night games and leading to more interceptions.

And there’s been no shortage of hot takes related to Mitchell Trubisky and the ill-fated 2017 NFL Draft. Some day, hopefully soon, we can reflect on some of the hot takes about Justin Fields that led to his falling in the draft, but that’s another time.

Jay Cutler really brought out all the hot takes in his tenure. Coming in to the city bringing hopes of Super Bowls but it just never seemed to work out.

But to me, the worst hot takes came after the 2010 NFC Championship game, when Cutler tore his MCL and couldn’t finish the game. Much of it was self-inflicted by the Bears for not clearly communicating what happened to Jay, and there was no immediately obvious moment where audiences knew when he had gotten hurt in the first place.

Maurice Jones-Drew started things off with his infamous “when the going gets tough..QUIT” tweet.

But I always remember Greg Couch.

Couch was writing for the Fox Sports at the time and he wrote a doozie of a piece “Cutler must win back the locker room.”

It was these three grafs that really did it for me:

Cutler has to win the locker room back. To be honest, I talked to several Bears Wednesday, and every one of them disagreed. They all said, dutifully, that they were OK with Cutler sitting out most of the second half of the championship game with a sore knee. They said that football players are warriors who see a game to the end if they can.

But be honest. Some of the locker room doesn’t feel that way at all about Cutler. Players are expected to give life and limb for The Big Game, and Cutler couldn’t play with a minor tear in the MCL in his knee? It didn’t even require surgery.

Even if Cutler did have to tap out physically, did he have to do it emotionally, too? His body language was awful. And he wasn’t even there to guide backup Caleb Hanie.

It’s got a hot take trifecta: blind speculation that players aren’t being truthful, “body language” and downplaying a player’s injury. Woof.

This was so bad that in my first few months of writing for WCG I wrote a (very long) piece rebuking it.

Here we are 10 years later and I still haven’t forgotten it or changed my stance that it’s the worst Bears take I’ve ever read.

The quick postscript on this is: I’ve actually met Greg Couch, a couple of times and I have to say he’s a super nice guy and very cool to talk to. I ran into him once in the Notre Dame press box probably two or three years after this piece and my column about it, and I told him that I wrote an article criticizing his, and not only did he remember it but we argued about it right there waiting for the Fighting Irish to kick off. It was all cordial and we agreed to disagree, and I actually thought his reasoning was sound, if I ultimately thought he was making a couple presumptions.

So there it is, the worst Bears take I’ve ever read and getting a chance to actually spar with the person who wrote it.

Now share yours below: What’s the worst Bears take you’ve ever read or heard?