The Chicago Bears and the Bloody Knee of the SEC

LCB is pleased to announce its first ever keynote speaker. His name is Josh Spilker, and he writes for the music and lit blog Deckfight. He is also a Vanderbilt graduate, which provides him with his vantage point for today's topic:

If the SEC is a body, then Vanderbilt is the bloody knee. Everyone keeps telling the SEC to stop their bleeding, but they can't; they don't see it as an emergency. And so from this beat-up knee the Vandy football program flows. Vandy thinks they belong in the SEC, even though they are staining everyone else's program.

And if Vandy is a bloody knee, then Jay Cutler and Earl Bennett were the thin, overwhelmed gauze that tried to keep everything together.

Most know Jay Cutler because of his own indecisiveness at Denver, saddled with his unique quality of being "a good quarterback coming from Vanderbilt." He grew up about three hours from Nashville, everybody wanted to make him something else--we were just happy that a quarterback wanted to play for us.

Our measure of a "good" quarterback was pretty easy to reach, Cutler somehow made the passes--accurate and on-time and that's all it took for us to swoon. We didn't know how good he was until the scouts told us, because, well, we don't know a lot about football. But it seems more likely with the learning curve and the talent already present, that if the Titans would have selected Cutler instead of Vince Young, he would be an All-Pro several times over and have more wins to his name.

But then we wouldn't have this--five Vanderbilt players on the same roster. The Chicago Bears, of all the teams have five Vanderbilt players, not some expansion pansy like the Texans or Jaguars. A team with history, a team with passionate fans...a team with fans. Something the Vandy guys aren't used to at all.

To find five Vanderbilt players in the league is miraculous, that five are on the same team is a Jesus coming again, rapture-type occurrence. To find five Vanderbilt players in Chicago is like five homeless men getting elected to the City Council...it could happen, but it's not likely.

How Jay Cutler, Earl Bennett and D.J. Moore all ended up on the same Chicago Bears team is more than a coincidence--everyone who put those guys on the same team knew what they were doing. No team, especially not the Bears (or maybe especially the Bears) could be that stupid. So the most overlooked story arc in all of the Jay Cutler saga that unfolded the past 6 months was the fact that Earl Bennet was on the Bears team. It's no joke that Cutler had his best season with Earl Bennett catching the ball. Their learning curve will be light and easy.

While the wound that is the Vandy football program was oozing all around them, these guys were the only bandages--making plays, catching passes, actually bringing excitement to the meager 20,000 or so that usually show up for a Vandy football game. That we went 5-6 with Cutler and Bennett one year is amazing, that we started that year 4-0 has become a mere footnote. With solid wins against Wake Forest and Arkansas on the road, we couldn't pull out two more wins. Losses included a two-point loss to down-the-road mid-conference rival Middle Tennessee State and a 49-42 OT loss to the Florida Gators. Those four glorious weeks were filled with the dreaming and scheming to make a bowl game in Hawaii, forget that we hadn't achieved that in 50 years. The fact that with the two best players ever in Vanderbilt football's history we still couldn't do it shows just how easily this knee bleeds. Bennett went on to finish his career at Vandy as the SEC's all-time leading receiver and was drafted by the Bears in 2008, setting the stage for D.J. Moore.

If Bennett and Cutler were the most accomplished skill players in the history of Vanderbilt, somehow we also grabbed D.J. Moore, perhaps the all-around most exciting player in recent memory. A threat on both sides of the ball and on special teams, D.J. was the ultimate showstopper--we would all stop catching up about law school or med school or macroeconomics to watch him play. Not that I really ever discussed any of that, I just made fun of the people that did and then I stopped and watched also. I couldn't help it. D.J. would catch, intercept and return balls for touchdowns. If the program was all bloody and beat-up, D.J. Moore at least poured out effusively, rather than the slow trickle of fatigue that usually enwraps the whole team in the 4th quarter. Somehow, we made a bowl game last year, our own Nashville Music City Bowl as we finished out the year 7-6. Again, it was ugly, but they made it. God bless 'em.
And now here's a rant: Most say that we don't have enough "athletes" to compete in the SEC, meaning that brains and brawn don't go together. I don't think that's really the case, but I will say that we "give up" on games, quite often as a matter of fact. It's true we may not have the best athletes, but we sure know when to quit. Logically, the football ethos doesn't make sense. The odds are often against comebacks, the mantra to keep going and keep trying rings hollow to the sanest of minds. It's not that Vandy lacks "athletes," it's that the players think about how to use their athleticism...and think that it doesn't make sense to sacrifice their bodies for concussions in the fourth quarter of meaningless games.

The same goes for us, the fans. It's true at a Vanderbilt football game there will be more opposing fans tailgating than home team fans. Once, my wife's parents, die-hard University of Georgia fans asked me the best place to tailgate on campus, and I had no answer. I don't know. Most people go to frat parties, go out to eat, stop playing Halo or just roll out of bed and then head to the game at the end of the first quarter. Then and only then does it depend on whom they're playing. Chances are, most fans are likely to attend a game if a team from their home state is playing. Alabama natives attend the Alabama or Auburn game and so it goes. Or maybe we'll go to catch Tim Tebow, just because we see him on ESPN and hear he was God or something like that. But even then, God gets very few Vandy students away from Halo. We also refuse to sacrifice our bodies or solid Halo time for Vanderbilt football or the Almighty.

"I was told many years ago, by a true giant in this business, that when kids come out of those schools, they also take a quantum step in the league," said Bears general manager Jerry Angelo in a Sports Illustrated article in May about the fact that the Bears had five Vandy players. "They were more prepared to come into the league because they were more grounded, understood how to balance academic load with football load, needed less structure, meaning they could handle time and money better, because they had to balance football and school 50-50, vs. maybe 80-20 at some football-first programs."

In other words, they knew how to balance sense with sensibility compared to the other cheating, lying, no-good stupid lugheads in the SEC (One of our chants involves something with an SAT score in it, but now I forgot what it was). At least that's what us Vandy fans have to tell ourselves about players on other teams, to keep ignoring how we are the bloody knee of the SEC.

But now, Jay Cutler, Earl Bennett, Hunter Hillenmeyer, D.J. Moore and Chris Williams will play harder than they ever thought they could--it now makes sense for them too. They are getting paid to sacrifice their bodies--the risk now makes sense compared to the reward.

I know there are other "academic" schools in the same predicament as Vandy: Wake Forest, Tulane, Georgia Tech, Duke, Northwestern, even BYU. But all of those teams have had some consolation of some sort (except Duke). A solid double digit winning season in recent years. A possible Heisman candidate. High rankings. And Duke, well, Duke has the freakin' basketball program (which is supposed to be Vandy's 'good' sport though they've been sharing it with baseball here lately).

I hope these five Vandy guys find success at Chicago. I think I'm actually, kind of sort of a Bears fan as they are every Vandy fans' one hope at football glory, albeit by proxy. At least there is a rooting interest with a real sense that maybe, yes, maybe the Vandy-led Chicago Bears can find a way to victory. Which is more than I can say for the actual Vanderbilt football team.