The Bears have to admit they don’t know what they don’t know

Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty ImagesAn NFL regime has to possess a detached arrogance to justify its management. The people making the acquisitions, cuts, and draft picks know that they’re not inherently smarter or more calculating than their competitors. They understand they’re not reinventing the wheel, discovering fire, or inventing language past cave drawings and hieroglyphics. What they believe they’re doing is optimizing the very use of the wheel by placing it on three-ton hunks of steel, but differently. Fire used to cook the meat they no longer have to hunt for themselves burns, but stronger and differently. Epic books, plays, and essays of tragedy, policy and romance are crafted by them, but differently. And in each of these instances, their “different” is not only an unintelligible contrast in style, it’s also “better.”

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