Imrem: Good time for Bears to make a point against Packers
The Packers remain scary despite having played poorly so far this season.
The Pack comes to Soldier Field on Sunday to renew the rivalry with the Bears, and a headline in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel website Monday reflected the situation in Green Bay.
"Packers' Mike McCarthy, Aaron Rodgers have offensive differences," it blared.
McCarthy, the head coach, attributes the Packers' struggles to his players' poor execution. Rodgers, the quarterback, had issues with the coaches' schemes.
Meanwhile, back in Chicago the head coach, Marc Trestman, and quarterback, Jay Cutler, seem to always hum the same tune.
In the past, McCarthy and Rodgers were the ones in harmony while Cutler was at odds with whomever was responsible for designing the Bears' attack.
No wonder the Packers have a 1-2 record as we speak and the Bears are 2-1 with a two-game winning streak built in Santa Clara, Calif., and East Rutherford, N.J., of all places.
A victory Sunday would give the Bears a nifty 2-game cushion on the Packers. So why is Green Bay still scary?
Because the Packers have established themselves as perennial division favorites by being able to fix what's broken. Meanwhile, the Bears too often have had injuries, slumps or some other form of adversity and been unable to overcome them.
But there's a different feel at Halas Hall these days with Trestman preaching, Cutler persevering and everybody else following.
The Bears won those two straight road games despite suffering almost snap to snap injuries on the offensive line, to the receiving corps, throughout the defense, down to special teams.
So now it'll be interesting to see whether the change in the teams' fortunes and moods is an aberration or an omen.
The same question can be asked around the entire NFL, where right now no team is quite sure what it is and where it's going.
Everything is about jockeying for position, as the Bears and Packers will do here Sunday.
With 26 of the league's 32 teams holding records of 2-1, like the Bears, or 1-2, like the Packers. each is heading toward the upside or downside of a huge middle. Nothing is even close to being determined after three games and still won't be as the season reaches the quarter mark in Week 4.
The NFL norm is somewhere between mediocrity and average. By that standard, my freshman grade-point average in college would have qualified me as a candidate for Phi Beta Kappa.
Not even the NFL's three 3-0 teams are legitimate juggernauts yet and not even the three 0-3 teams are certifiable juggernots.
Everybody is striving for an identity and all will find it sometime before the playoffs, for better or worse. Each team is putty in the process of being sculpted … but into what?
Improvement is the goal at this point of the season. As coaches say, clean up stuff and correct the correctable and right the wrong.
Last year Seattle and Denver discovered themselves somewhere along the journey and wound up in the Super Bowl.
Who will be the Seahawks and Broncos this season? Will it be them again? Or will it be a couple of other teams that jell at just the right time?
The Bears still are in that Super Bowl mix as autumn begins, as are 31 other NFL teams, a couple more from the Southeastern Conference and at least one from the Chicago Public League.
History indicates that the Packers - like the Cardinals always do in the NL Central - will regain their balance and NFC North contenders will have to go through Green Bay to win anything significant.
It'll be up to the Bears to prove they are the team to beat the team to beat and in the process remove the scary from the Packers.
Sunday would be a good time to start.
mimrem@dailyherald.com