STOP THE PRESSES!!!

Did you know Jay Mariotti thinks the Tribune Company should sell the Cubs?  Well, he does.

In a column he must be able to write in his sleep by now, Jay takes time out of preparing to outwit Woody Paige on “Around the Horn” to remind us that the Cubs haven’t won a World Series in a very long time.

Which is, of course, all the Tribune Company’s fault. Even though their stewardship doesn’t even cover a third of the Cubs reign of terrible.

It’s not that I wouldn’t be open to, or even excited by, a change in ownership.  Any sports fan would prefer an eccentric, free-spending billionaire like Mark Cuban or George Steinbrenner (minus the evil) to a faceless corporate monolith like the Tribune Company.

Still, at least in recent memory, the Cubs have spent like a big market team.  Maybe not enough to keep up with the Yankees and Red Sox, but more than enough to (theoretically, at least) field a competitive team.

Could the Tribune Company spend more considering the cash cow they have in the Cubs?  Absolutely.  I think I paid for the Kerry Wood deal myself strictly with Old Style and nacho cheese. 

But all owners, even the crazy ones, are businesspeople.  As much as we would like owners to spend like drunken sailors, most rational fans accept that it usually won’t happen.

With the Tribune’s well-publicized struggles, maybe Jay will finally get his wish for someone new.  I’ll believe it when I see it.

Although Jay should be careful what he wishes for.  Without his rival paper doubling as ownership and providing him with column fodder, he’ll have one less topic to use for repetitive columns that don’t say anything new.

Now THAT’S a reason to hope for new ownership. 

Jay claims to have actually attended the game last night!  It seems that the secret to getting him to attend a football game is putting it on national television in a major city.  That’s when “Jay Hollywood” blows in.

The strange predictable part is that his attendance at the game didn’t result in any further insight.  Jay is still afraid to go into the locker room, so instead of giving us a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the players, he went with a frighteningly stalker-like attention to Jerry Angelo.

Jay goes out of his way to give us a play-by-play on Mr. Angelo.  When Muhsin fumbled, his eyes were locked on Angelo.  When Muhammad later scored, Jay’s eyes were locked on Angelo.  And when Desmond Clark scored, Jay’s eyes were again trained on the Bears’ GM.

Consider this your warning, Mr. Angelo: Jay’s undying focus on you is either a sign of pent up love or pent up rage.  Either way, it will only end ugly.

But alas, Jay “graced” the press box with his impeccably combed pompadour, pretending that he is the pride of Chicago.  Part of this little charade, I imagine, is convincing himself that Chicagoans actually agree or care about what he has written.  He writes on and on about how we can finally stop worrying about the Bears, when very few of us shared his knee-jerk reaction to last week’s loss.

The people of Chicago are intelligent football fans.  We understand the game and we understand our team.  Jay doesn’t.  This is best exemplified by his pathetic attempt to belittle his readers:

What is he doing? I’m sure you asked that question when Hester, standing in front of the Bears’ goalpost, opted to return the ball instead of downing it when Jay Feely’s field-goal attempt fell short early in the fourth quarter.

Actually, Jay, I am pretty sure that anyone who reads the sports section of a newspaper thought of Nathan Vasher’s return the instant Hester caught that ball.  So, no, unlike you, were weren’t asking, “What is he doing?”

But we’re intelligent sports fans, so we’re at an advantage.

Nice work Jay.

With the Bulls about to face off against potentially the most unstoppable player in the league, you have to go and get him all riled up.

What an unnecessary column.  Mariotti lucks into Lebron James having a minor incident right before he plays the Bulls, allowing Jay to write yet another in and endless series of nonsense contrasting LeBron and Jordan.

This wasn’t Randy Moss heading to the locker room or Pippen’s infamous playoff meltdown.  This was a competitive player expressing some frustration in a game that was clearly over.

I haven’t seen the actual footage, but judging by the relative silence I’ve seen elsewhere, it feels like Jay might be blowing things out of proportion.  How shocking.

Frankly, I don’t understand the media’s whole complex with LeBron (and everybody else) being the next MJ.  They build these players up in an instant, and then when they inevitably fall short of Jordan’s greatness, they whine about how everybody raised expectations too high.  Yet they were the ones who raised expectations in the first place.

It’s a vicious cycle.

As far as I’m concerned, no NBA player can even be mentioned in the same sentence as Jordan until he has multiple rings as the best player on his team.  Sorry Kobe.  Sorry Dwyane.  Sorry Harold Miner.

It’s not LeBron’s fault.  I actually think it’s amazing someone heralded as the next king of the NBA hasn’t fallen woefully short of expectations or cracked under the pressure.

Jay might have you believe he cracked last night.  But that was just to fill column space.

"While you breathe easier, I cuss and snort and demand answers.”

The opening line of Jay’s column this morning actually provides a nice synopsis of his writing style:  cussing and snorting.

The cause of Jay’s latest tirade?  Master of hindsight and second guessing that he is, Jay thinks Brian Urlacher should have been out of the game when he suffered the injury that caused Chicago’s collective heart to skip a beat.

Let’s say Lovie Smith had yanked Urlacher and he hadn’t injured his toe. (Toe jam football, as Mariotti calls it, in reference to the Beatles’ “Come Together” ... am I crazy or has Jay been spending a little too much quality time with the old record collection?) Mariotti would probably write a column reaming Lovie for giving up the game.

Sure, with time winding down the game was pretty much over.  But after the Cardinals game, would you really want to call any game out of reach, especially down only two scores?  One big play from Urlacher and suddenly the Bears are an onsides kick away from another miracle comeback.

That sequence probably plays out once out of 1,000 games, but you keep playing for that one.  It can happen, just ask James Allen about his Hail Mary catch in 2001.  Or the Cardinals about Monday Night Football.

Of course, since hope and optimism are about as foreign to Jay as a locker room, his perspective is hardly surprising.

He’s fortunate the Bears are starting to hit some adversity. He was really running out of subject matter there for a while.  Now he has a hop back in his tiny steps.  He’ll probably write a Bears column every day this week just to release all that repressed, pent up negativity.

In all honesty, everyone knew the Bears early schedule was soft.  Seven out of eight wins is a nice cushion to start with.  Now the real season starts and I couldn’t be more excited.

So is Jay, but for different reasons.  Stay tuned for more cussing and snorting.

Well, friends, the season is over.  The Bears have no shot at a Super Bowl and Rex Grossman has no future in the NFL.  It has finally been revealed that the idea of going undefeated was a bunch of “hokum” and now we must accept the fate of going one-and-out in the playoffs.  Or at least, that’s what the all-knowledgeable Jay Mariotti is trying to tell us.

Jay has a new punching bag on this team, and he has hung the pathetic nickname “Rex the Hex” on him.  Yes, folks, Jay has taken the difficult position of being overly critical of a player who has started less than a season’s worth of games.  He even went so far as to name drop Cade McNown in his bashing of Rex:

I saw Cade McNown at a downtown restaurant recently, but who knew he cloned his No. 8 from six years ago and hung it on Rex’s shoulders?

Wow, Jay!  Cade McNown!  You must be hanging at all the hot spots!  You’re so hip- you really have your finger on the pulse of Chicago, you short little bastard.  And yes.  Rex Grossman is the next Cade McNown.  He obviously has no future in this league.  I say we waive him.  Jay even has a replacement in mind: 

...the calls for a proven Brian Griese will begin.

Wow.  “Proven” is the adjective you go for with Brian Griese?  What exactly has been “proven” about him?  That he is a mediocre quarterback who is over thirty years old and has been passed around the league like a hot potato?  The Bears have a future to think about, Jay.  They aren’t going to overreact after every bad game.

As we all know, Rex wasn’t great yesterday.  He had a bad game.  But we have the ability to look at the bigger picture and see that calls to replace the young quarterback would only be made by, well… short and whiney sports columnists with an inferiority complex.  We understand that his favorite receiver was injured early, leaving Rex to throw to someone who was obviously on a different page.  We understand that a rookie punt returner fumbled the ball inside the ten yard line, making this much more of a blowout than it actually was.  We understand that the Bears are 7-1 and have a stranglehold on their division.  But most of all, we understand that they probably just weren’t pumped up for a game against a crappy team.

Remember last month when Jay wrote a glowing column about Lovie (the same one where he misquoted Rex Grossman)?  The gist of that column was that Lovie would keep this team fired up - even against less than stellar teams.  Once again, Jay was wrong.