Chicago Bears vs. New York Jets: Completely serious Week 8 awards

They won’t send the film of the first half to Canton. Unless it was to burn it.

Deep down, all week you knew what Bears-Jets could turn into. Whether Bears fans like it or not, the connotation of “Chicago Bears” to football fans at large is just about the same as “New York Jets.” Even right down to the signature fan and dumb headwear. No, Bears head guy in the #46 jersey, you’re no better than Fireman Ed.

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Still, you hoped for better. You had to wait through a half of some of the most insipid, useless football to get it.

Even the weather matched the feeling of these two continually balloon-handed franchises meeting on the same field like some modern art installation that’s just a bunch of dangling, empty hangers that you are forced to imprint meaning on. Gray, windy, just generally sorry to be there.

Between the skies and the football on display, it was hard to tell where the grayness began or ended. It all forced us to come to the realization that we are at a place in our lives that we’re watching Bears-Jets and what statements that makes about us. And then to wonder if we’d just always been watching Bears-Jets, and that’s why life was so cold and meaningless.

If you could define “malaise” through an activity, this was it. A feeling of emptiness as we watched Darnold’s controller get unplugged or Mitch Trubisky seeming conviction that all his receivers were nine-feet tall and had been bitten by multi-colored and lab-engineered spiders. Let my friend Jason Goff sum it up: