Faking It at the Watercooler: Chicago Bears Primer

Your coworkers and friends will be talking about the big game all week—they mean the Super Bowl, the championship game of American football. You may not know your pigskin from your QB sneak, but we’ll at least get you caught up enough to make small talk.

• Season History – The Chicago Bears are the winners of the National Football Conference, or NFC, making them the “Conference Champs” and one of two teams to go to the Super Bowl. (The other is the Indianapolis Colts, the AFC champs.)

Faking it at the watercooler: The Bears beat the New Orleans Saints in the final game of the play-offs to go on to the Super Bowl. The Saints were a heavily-favored team. If you feel comfortable talking about a team we do not plan to give you any background on, you may be able to prompt a conversation with a football fan by saying, “I sort of wish the Saints would have gone all the way.” Due to recent history of New Orleans, even most Bears fans will grudgingly agree.

• The Numbers – The Bears ended their season with a 13-3 record. (Thirteen wins, three losses.) This is even better than their record last year, which was 11-5, or “eleven and five.”

This is the second time the Bears have made it to the Super Bowl. They won the first time they played—Super Bowl XX—back in 1986, against the Patriots.

Faking it at the watercooler – You don’t need to know too much about the raw numbers. Just remember this is the second time the Bears have made it to a Super Bowl.

Bonus “Faking it”: Don’t say “Da Bears,” even in jest. Yes, other people will be saying it over and over, but don’t be them.

• The Players – Without a doubt, you must know the name of the Bears’ quarterback: It is “Rex Grossman.” (Mad Magazine-style mnemonic: (”Retch! Gross, Man.”) He’s a relatively new player—he was drafted in 2003—and had been injured last year.

Quarterbacks are the central figure of a team’s offense and both throw and hand-off the ball to other players. They very rarely run the football. If they are tackled before they can throw or hand off the ball, it is known as a “sack.”

Fake it at the watercooler: Grossman has had a lot of “turnovers” this season—plays where he made a mistake that gives the ball to the other team. It would be fair to question if “Grossman can keep it together,” implying that he might throw passes that are “intercepted,” or caught by the opposing team. (A Class-A fuck up for a quarterback.)

• The Coach – The Bears’ head coach is Lovie Smith. Smith has never been head coach of an NFL team before, but used to be an assistant coach to Tony Dungy in Tampa Bay (along with Herm Edwards, now head coach of the Kansas City Chiefs). Tony Dungy is now the head coach of the Indianapolis Colts, the team that will be facing off against the Bears in this year’s Super Bowl. That makes this year’s match-up especially friendly. Hugs all around.

Faking it at the watercooler: Dungy and Smith are not only friends—they are the first two black head coaches to head to the Super Bowl. That they’ve done it together is especially cool and is worth mentioning, as long as you aren’t an idiot about it.

Related: Faking it at the Watercooler: Super Bowl XLI Primer [Dethroner]

More data: 2006 Chicago Bears Season [Wikipedia]