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Imrem: Are Bears more embarrassing on, off field?

The real pro football competition in town is whether the Bears are more laughable on or off the field.

The games all seem to giggle for themselves, including Monday night's 31-15 loss to the Saints.

“We can't sugar coat it,” Bears head coach Marc Trestman said.

The Bears committed a holding penalty on the opening kickoff. Jay Cutler threw an interception on the opening drive. Those were their first-half highlights.

Most embarrassing was that this wasn't Green Bay or New England that the Bears were horsing around with. It was New Orleans, for gosh sakes.

The Saints and Bears each came in with a 5-8 record. The game was in Soldier Field. It was a dome team against an outdoor team in December.

Yet the Saints won easily, which actually wasn't surprising considering the slapstick routine that the Bears have been performing the past couple of months.

The Bears' offense was a joke. Cutler was sacked seven times. He was intercepted three times.

“The offense didn't play well … you know that,” Trestman said.

A tidy 10,749 paying customers chose to eat their tickets rather than subject themselves to this silliness.

If the game was vaudeville, fans who did show up would have thrown tomatoes at the Bears. If Soldier Field was a honky tonk, they would have thrown beer cans at the country artists.

Still, the Bears just might have been more hilarious during the days leading up to the game.

Trestman said that he sees none of the circus outside Halas Hall leaking into the building. The clowns, like most things, must be passing him by.

“Monday Night Football” could have been moved to Zanies, sure, but they also could have moved the past few days to Second City.

Let's recap the week that unfortunately was.

On Sunday, CBSSports.com NFL insider Jason La Canfora reported that Cutler privately is angrier at offensive coordinator Aaron Kromer than he lets on publicly … head coach Marc Trestman doesn't hold his players accountable … the wide receiver corps is the slowest in the league …

Meanwhile, Dan Hampton, a former Bears defensive lineman now in the Hall of Fame, said on CSN Chicago that the team's coaches should be waterboarded to find out what they're really thinking.

Rich Gannon, a former league-MVP quarterback, said on WSCR-AM that Cutler's career has flatlined.

All those were preliminaries to the main event Monday night on WBBM-AM: Bears general manager Phil Emery's assessment of how Trestman handled last week's crisis in which Kromer apologized to Bears players for being the NFL Network source of critical remarks about Cutler.

Emery went on and on, word after word, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph … all of it gibberish wrapped in more gibberish.

At one point, Emery brought up then-secretary of state Alexander Haig saying “I'm in control here” after the assassination attempt on President Reagan.

The correct answer about Trestman's management of the Kromer-Cutler mess should have been simple: “It stunk.”

Why? Because everything about the team formerly known as the Monsters of the Midway stinks these days.

Seriously, Emery could have answered in a couple of words but instead rambled on for more than a thousand.

That alone might have given the Bears' off-field funnies the edge over their on-field follies.

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