Bears chairman George McCaskey is, in his own words, “just a fan, not a football evaluator.”
Fans are qualified to do many things — heave copious sausages onto a sizzling grill, don blue-and-orange face paint, shout drunken profanity from the stands — but leading a team without a general manager or coach into its football future? That might not be one of them.
In this week’s ”Polling Place,” your home for Sun-Times sports polls on Twitter, we asked how confident you are in McCaskey and the Bears to get this critical offseason right.
“Is this a trick question?” @JeffreyCanalia asked.
“I’m not even confident George McCaskey can find Halas Hall without using his GPS,” @RonaldVoigt4 quipped.
But seriously, folks.
We also asked about last year’s Super Bowl teams, the Buccaneers and Chiefs: Will they be this year’s Super Bowl teams, too? And — with the playoffs starting Saturday — we asked for your wild-card upset picks. There’s got to be at least one of those getting ready to happen, right?
On to the polls:
Poll No. 1: How confident are you in George McCaskey and the Bears to hire the right people this offseason?
Upshot: It’s tempting to look at this and think, hey, at least the Bears have nowhere to go but up from Ryan Pace and Matt Nagy. It’s not true, though; they could do even worse. And — if these results are any indication — there’s a pretty good chance they’ll blow this thing. To some beleaguered fans, the bad news is practically inevitable. As @JBIRD1268 put it, “It’s like shopping for a used car that doesn’t run.”
Poll No. 2: Will the Buccaneers and/or Chiefs make it back to the Super Bowl?
Upshot: A majority sees at last one of these teams — neither of which has a first-round bye — getting back to the big game. The defending-champion Bucs host the Eagles on Sunday afternoon. The Chiefs host retirement-bound Ben Roethlisberger and the Steelers on Sunday night. Any chance Monday morning rolls around and both the Bucs and the Chiefs are walking around with dazed looks in their eyes and wondering how the heck they already managed to get eliminated?
Poll No. 3: Pick a wild-card upset (yes, you have to pick one):
Upshot: The Steelers and Eagles are the biggest underdogs on the board. As for the other four games, well, how ’bout them Cowboys? Are they about to face-plant? Will Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford fail in his attempt to finally win a playoff game? Will Bills fans smash every table in Western New York if Bill Belichick’s Patriots win? Wait, why are respondents so confident in the Bengals?
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