Lovie Livid Over Article Disrespecting Urlacher
Do not underrate the potential impact on the Bears of a story in The Sporting News naming Brian Urlacher the NFL's most overrated player.
If Lovie Smith's reaction Monday serves as any indication, the coach who uses the press to press his team's buttons found plenty of motivational fodder against the Houston Texans even with Urlacher likely to miss the game.
Expect Smith to somehow find a way before Sunday to convert a national magazine's disrespect for Urlacher into determination for the players in the locker room who consider the linebacker their leader.
Urlacher was scheduled to undergo an MRI Monday to reveal the extent of the damage to his left hamstring, injured in the final few minutes of Sunday's 22-3 loss to Jacksonville.
Smith stayed away from pronouncing Urlacher out for the final three weeks of the season, but the organization expects him to miss Sunday's game. The Bears want to avoid putting Urlacher on injured reserve in case their microscopically small playoff hopes are realized in the wacky NFC wild-card race.
If the news about Urlacher's injury did not ruin Smith's day, The Sporting News headline, "More Hype Than Hits," might have.
Looking more agitated at the Halas Hall lectern than at any time this season, Smith crumpled a piece of paper and ended his news conference abruptly after offering a passionate defense of Urlacher.
"They don't know what they're talking about," Smith was quoted as saying in the article, written by Dennis Dillon and due on newsstands Wednesday.
It surveyed eight NFL scouts and two television analysts whose identities were not revealed. Of the 10 votes for the NFL's most overrated player, Urlacher received three from scouts whose teams had played the Bears this season and five votes as the league's most overrated linebacker. It was a write-in ballot.
A second poll of 12 more unnamed scouts found that four scouts agreed with Urlacher's dubious designation but five did not.
The scouts cited Urlacher's reliance on defensive tackles to shield him, his tendency to stay on blocks too long and his proportion of big plays to his salary.
"His hype exceeds what he's actually worth," the story said.
Try telling that to Smith. And then duck.
"I heard the article was coming out, and I really shouldn't respond on it an awful lot," Smith said Monday, speaking slowly and calmly.
"It's like anything else that isn't true and you respond to. If you asked the players in the league, he's been to the Pro Bowl for a reason. He's a good football player, a potentially great football player, one of the all-time greats. You're asking the wrong person."
With every sentence that followed, Smith's voice carried more timbre and his disgust became harder to hide.
"I see him every day, and I know what a good linebacker looks like," Smith said. "He's a good linebacker. He'll be one of the all-time greats before all is said and done. A guy like Brian Urlacher doesn't have to defend himself on whether he's a good player or not. So whoever wrote that article doesn't know what they're talking about."
With that, Smith stormed off about five minutes earlier than he usually ends his news conferences.
While the debate over Urlacher being overrated has been ongoing for the past several years, this season was thought to have quieted the critics.
In missing four games with a pulled right hamstring and surgery on his left calf, Urlacher in many ways proved just how valuable he is to the Bears' defense. The Bears, 5-4 with Urlacher and 0-4 without him, have given up an average of 10 more points per game (27) in the four games without Urlacher.
"It does represent what the scouts said, but I'm not going to shy away from taking responsibility," Dillon said Monday night. "If somebody had asked me if Urlacher was the league's most overrated player, I'd probably say no. But that wasn't the story."
Dillon called Smith last Tuesday to inform him about the story, and general manager Jerry Angelo on Wednesday. He was denied an interview with Urlacher. "The Bears didn't try to intimidate me, but they just told me I was wrong," Dillon said.
Urlacher declined comment Monday in the locker room on the story or his health.
Asked how his leg felt, Urlacher replied, "Which one?"
Facebook
Twitter