Chicago Bears' Loss Shows Why We Don't Need 18-Game Regular Season

Next weekend, the Chicago Bears will limp across the finish line of their 2011 season when they face the Minnesota Vikings.

The game will be meaningless for both teams. The Minnesota Vikings, thanks to an 0-4 start engineered by first-year Head Coach Leslie Frazier, endured playoff elimination several weeks earlier.

Their divisional rival Bears had a chance at the playoffs heading into Christmas weekend, before Aaron Rodgers went Chuck Norris all over them in last night's Sunday night debacle.

The Bears tried to make it close, they really did. But after suffering injuries in back-to-back weeks to quarterback Jay Cutler and running back Matt Forte, respectively, their cupboard was bare.

Cutler's injury was a significant blow to the team's playoff hopes in a competitive NFC North, but with Forte it was not insurmountable. Without him it was, and the Bears haven't won a game since losing both players.

But what else could have been expected with 90 percent of the Bears offense suddenly on the shelf? The replacement parts employed were unfit for the task—Caleb Hanie was benched and Marion Barber was deactivated due to a calf injury.

Excluding the garbage-time points in last night's game, the Bears have managed only 14 points or less in their last four outings. In this age of salary-capped football, where teams can't afford to invest in depth, teams like the Bears count on their starters to produce throughout the season.

It's a tall order, and one that today's players can't always fulfill.

It's a stark reminder to every NFL fanbase: The team you see starting the season in September will not be the same team you see finishing it in December. Not only do players and teams heat up (hey there, New England) and cool off (what's up, Tampa Bay), but they also will incur Grade Two MCL sprains and fractured ankles, and “concussion-like symptoms”.

Rarely does it happen to two high-profile players in concurrent weeks. But it happens. The perils of a 16-game regular season are unavoidable.

Someone should send a DVD of this game to Roger Goodell's office with a big pink Post-it note that reads “ENOUGH”. Goodell, since the start of the league's CBA negotiations last offseason, has championed the idea of modifying the NFL's current schedule (from four preseason and 16 regular-season games) to two preseason and 18 regular-season games.

And every time he mentions his plan for an “enhanced regular season”, he shrugs his shoulders and claims that he's just carrying out the will of football fans everywhere. That is debatable.

Meanwhile, a recent AP poll claimed that less than half of NFL fans favored such a change. The players vehemently oppose it, and one would guess that the Bears would oppose it as well. Seeing how Cutler and Forte couldn't finish a 16-game season.

The Houston Texans, who lost Mario Williams and spent the last month starting their third-string quarterback, would probably agree. So would the Buffalo Bills, who lost running back Fred Jackson and linebacker Shawne Merriman to midseason injuries.

For a league that finds itself enamored with player safety, an 18-game regular season isn't just a bad idea. It's hypocritical. Even with a crackdown on helmet-to-helmet hits, the wear and tear on players' bodies from making the NFL's season 12 percent longer would be undeniable.

One of the great features of the NFL's schedule is its brevity. Add to that an escalating importance to most games in the first three quartiles of the season, and the league's counterparts in baseball, basketball and hockey are plagued with seemingly endless campaigns.

Even college basketball and its tidy twenty-something-game regular season seems gratuitous (and even meaningless), after the conference and national tournaments are factored in.

So little is left to be decided by the time these seasons end.

We don't need pro football to suffer a similar fate. Instead of gripping divisional finishes in those two extra weeks of football, we'd be stuck with more anti-climatic season-ending games like Bears-Vikings.

We'll also get more prime-time stinkers like Texans-Colts, and games that sounded like great ideas during the spring when we assumed all of a team's stars would be healthy enough to play.

Does Bears-Vikings sound like anything other than a glorified exhibition game to you?

Never mind that even in those other sports, there might be one season-threatening injury for one player on one team in their entire season. In pro football, severe injuries affect every team, and often several players on one team.

Rodgers' offensive line is being held together with duct tape, not dissimilar to the state of Ben Roethlisberger's ankle. The Texans are so shallow at quarterback that they had to sign Jake Delhomme and Jeff Garcia.

The Ravens lost Anquan Boldin. The Chiefs lost so many teammates in midseason, that Todd Haley could have been replaced with Matthew McConaughey.

Personally speaking as a fan, I'm bushed after 17 weeks of football. I've had every Sunday booked from noon to midnight since Labor Day and I'm ready for a break.

So is my wife, who has started answering her own questions with what we're doing after church. She'll start to ask the question, only to stop halfway through while she silently answers herself. Oh. Right. Football.

Not that this is a significant tenet for many of you, but do we really want to see fantasy football extended two more weeks?

Isn't going 1-11 so much better than going 1-13? Does anybody really want to shop Peyton Hillis for another half a month? Isn't cursing Lee Evans for three months plenty?

But kick and scream as we might (I can't see you as you read this, but I assume you're kicking and screaming right along with me), an 18-game regular season will be happening soon enough.

The league will get a little bit richer from it, the fans will get a little more agitated, and the careers of the players we watch every Sunday will get a little bit shorter. If you're the Chicago Bears, then your season might be ending a lot sooner.