The interweb is aflutter with the buzz of Lovie Smith officially naming Kyle Orton as the Bears starting quarterback. I’m not sure whether it’s more amazing that the Bears didn’t bother looking at any other viable options at the QB position during the offseason or that the sports blogging community now follows the travails of such a mediocre player with a Rachel Nichols-on-Brett Favre-like zeal. This is in direct contrast to the Chicago media, where the general attitude is “Caleb Hanie: Why the fuck not?”

It’s interesting to look back on this post from this blog’s infancy, written at a time when the respective places of Rex Grossman and Kyle Orton in Bears fans’ hearts were completely reversed from where they are today. Of course, it’s maddening that I wrote that post nearly three years ago and barely a thing has changed with the Bears offense. I sent this message to Minneapolis Red Sox a couple of weeks ago: “I’m about 90% sure that I am going to end up writing a rant about the Bears offense after week one and then could copy and paste it for all of the other games for the rest of the season (which would cause me to drive full speed into Lake Michigan by the end of December).” Thinking about this further, the fact of the matter is that I’ve been writing the same rant about the Bears offense for three straight seasons.

As bad as the Bears offense might be with either the Neckbeard or Sexy Rexy, I’ll give Jerry Angelo credit for not heeding to the misguided calls to bring in the recently released Chad Pennington. Any Bears fan that advocated going down that path has obviously not seen him play. I had the unfortunate circumstance of following Pennington as a member of one of my fantasy teams a couple of years ago, where he achieved the dubious feat of scoring fewer points than both my kicker and tight end combined. It would have been more financially prudent for me to take a couple of Benjamins and use them as kindling to make some S’mores than to have paid my league entry fee that year. Essentially, Pennington is a higher rent and more fragile version of Orton, which is to say that Chad is nothing more than Brian Griese’s redneck twin.

So, it’s back to the Neckbeard again. With the Bears offensive line suffering from more pockmarks than Edward James Olmos and Orton having looked a bit more polished at the end of last season compared to his rookie year (which is kind of like saying that Ford just put some airbags into a Pinto to make it safer – that’s nice and all, but airbags don’t do much to prevent you from burning to death), the Jack Daniels-guzzling game manager might not be much of a quarterback, but he’s definitely our quarterback.

(Image from Deadspin)