The only thing that was missing was Brian Urlacher scaring the ball out of Terrell Owens’ hands. It was overtime, the Bears’ defense had the opponent’s offense in a bind and Jeff Garcia was looking to make a game winning TD pass. Just like a day almost four years previous (October 28, 2001 to be exact), the game ended with Garcia hooking up for the score. On that day it was Mike Brown taking a pass off of TO for a TD, on this day it was Charles Tillman jumping in front of Mike Williams to take one in for the game-winner.

The Bears, a team that at times looks like it literally can not get out of its own way (like Gabe Reid causing a Bobby Wade fumble on an overtime punt return), is alone in first place in the NFC North. They may be flawed, they may not be pretty, but first place is first place, and with a defense that good other teams aren’t exactly volunteering to take them on.

One of the joys of the current NFL Sunday Ticket package is the “Short Cuts” broadcasts. They take every NFL game and cut out all the crap–the commercials, the timeouts, the huddles…everything except just before the snap to just after the whistle. It condenses every game into something between 25 and 30 minutes long. It’s tremendous.

You can watch them as they air them, or you can set your TiVo to grab your favorite team’s every week. This week it’ll be worth it just to watch the Bears’ defense pound Garcia into submission.

If nothing else, you had to admire the way Garcia took a pounding and kept getting up. Here’s a guy with a recently broken leg, who is maybe 5’10 and maybe 180 pounds. The Bears defense battered him like a pinata.

If he were Chris Chandler they’d have literally had to pick up the pieces of him off the turf. But he kept getting up. Even if his throws got more and more desperate as the game went on. After all, if you were throwing to the great Scotty Vines and the very disinterested Mike Williams all day, you’d be desperate, too.

The Bears offense started like it always does. 1-2-3 punt. 1-2-3 punt. It would kill them to get a first down before the mid point of any first quarter.

But on this day, when they got rolling, they looked like (gasp!) a real offense.

Consider the plight Bobby Wade put them in at the end of the first quarter. (Has a punt returner ever had a worse day without actually losing a fumble? Wade continually caught the ones he should have let go and let the ones go he needed to get under and fair catch.)

Wade let a catchable punt roll by him and die at the one yard line. Kyle Orton and the fellas huddled up for three straight snaps with the goal posts in the center of their huddle. That’s never a good sign.

But after a false start and a safety saving dive by Thomas Jones, the quarter ended, and during the break Ron Turner called a pass play. Not just a pass play, but one that would require Orton fake to Jones and wait for him to get out into the flat. That play was just asking for one of three things:

1) Orton drops back and steps on the end line
2) Somebody gets called for holding in the end zone, giving the Lions a safety
3) Orton panicking and throwing late over the middle to Desmond Clark and having it picked off and run back for a touchdown

But none of those things happened. In fact, the Lions bit so hard on the run that Clark’s post route was open, meaning Orton actually got to pick which wide open receiver to throw it to. He found Jones, the Bears had a first down and then a long gainer to Mark Bradley and suddenly the Bears were in business.

Bradley played great. Showing the kind of unbelievable speed and athleticism that earned him a second round draft slot, he ran through the Lions unabated for a half. And unlike Bears’ quarterbacks past, Orton is able to do something with a receiver on the move. He’s able to lead them without causing them to dive or lunge, and Bradley was at full speed and stayed that way through the passes. One catch in particular was impressive. It was a simple comeback route, but Bradley attacked the pass so much that by coming back for the ball hard he not only shook the corner, but caught the safety out of position for about seven extra yards.

And then of course late in the second half he leaped over a defender, landed funny and blew out his knee. Great.

Orton has his moments, and the entire second quarter was one big moment for him. He was in rhythm, guys were getting open and the offense was actually working. The Bears scored three times and then caught an early flight back home.

Maybe it was the loss of Bradley (though Justin Gage played well in his absence), maybe it was a too conservative approach, or maybe it was just a couple of horrendously bad throws from Orton to wide open Mushin Muhammad, but the offense let the Lions back into the game. The Bears started their first two second half drives within close proximity to the 50 yard line. Neither time could they get as much as a field goal attempt.

The game certainly had its moments. We were forced to listen to the inane ramblings of Ron Pitts and Tim Ryan, as they constantly searched for and missed, the point. Ryan must have mentioned seven times that a Bears’ win would give them what amounts to a two-game lead in the division (he was right…though he didn’t need to remind us over and over again) and he gave the game to the Bears when it was 13-3. You just knew that was going to be wrong.

Fox also caught him with his dress shirt untucked in the booth. Not coming untucked like when your shirt-tail pops out in the back, all the way untucked. It looked for all the world like he was pantless. Which, he might have been. Just how uncomfortable do you have to be to just pull your shirt out of your pants while you’re on national TV?

The biggest failure by Pitts and Ryan was the weirdest and most ludicrous play of the game. Deep in Lions’ territory, Urlacher lunged over a blocker to grab and sack Garcia. Jeff just fired the ball towards the sidelines and the ball fell just about at the exact same yardline as from which Garcia threw it. Helen Huntermeyer, the Bears’ comely outside linebacker scooped up the “lateral” and ran it in for a touchdown. Given the Lions’ offense and the Bears’ defense you knew that that touchdown was the end of the game.

From what we could tell on the replay, no official blew a whistle. Not to call Garcia down, not to call the pass incomplete. That meant that the worst the Bears should have had to come out of it would be to have the Lions challenge the call and have it ruled an incomplete pass.

Fox changed their time and score graphic to read “Lions: Challenge” and creepy little head referee Bill Carollo huddled up with his referee buddies.

Then he went to talk to Steve Mariucci. For a very long time. Then out of nowhere he threw a flag and gave the intentional grounding signal.

This is where Pitts and Ryan missed the boat. They didn’t wonder how Carollo could call it grounding when they never whistled it an incomplete pass. Isn’t the most incumbent part of the intentional grounding penalty the incomplete pass that avoids the sack? If you throw an interception as you try to the throw the ball away, that’s not grounding and if you miraculously find a receiver you didn’t know was there that’s not grounding. If you fumble the ball, that’s not grounding.

But that’s what the ruling on the field was. It was a “backwards pass”–a fumble. You can’t have grounding on a fumble.

I’m not saying Garcia threw the ball backwards, I couldn’t tell from the replay. What I’m saying is that the act that screwed the Bears was the referee on the field changing a call to something that could not be supported. Nobody blew a whistle, so you can’t have an incomplete pass and without an incomplete pass you can’t have grounding.

I would have had no problem had the Lions called for review and the call been changed to an incomplete pass, and if that incomplete pass resulted in what it would have been–intentional grounding.

The problem was changing the call before the replay challenge.

The explanation that Lovie got was that the play was blown dead meaning that the best the Bears could have gotten was the grounding call. But nobody’s sure who blew the play dead, if anybody. And if a whistle had been blown, why did it take five minutes of referee huddling to come up with that alibi?

It looked for all the world like Mariucci changed Carollo’s mind. Now that’s some fine reffing.

One enjoyable part of the game was the complete and utter abuse that Muhsin Muhammad committed on RW McQuarters. Everybody’s favorite deadbeat tenant got beaten on a touchdown pass, blown by on a big first down pass and had his helmet knocked off by the Moose on a block.

The only decent hit RW put on anybody all day was when he hit Orton two steps out of bounds and earned a personal foul for it. Not only that but Orton got right in his face.

The Bears defensive line impressed again. They only had two sacks but they hit Garcia fifteen times, and that doesn’t include the play where Garcia scrambled up the middle past the line of scrimmage and was levelled by Tommie Harris so thoroughly that it was a surprise Jeff could get up. Alex Brown had a huge sack to knock the Lions out of field goal range in the fourth quarter and Walleye Ogunleye got hosed on a “roughing the quarterback” penalty when he jumped up to block a screen pass and his follow through hit Garcia in the head. That’s not even a foul in the NBA, how can it be an automatic first down in the NFL?

In overtime, two important things occured. First, Cedric Benson came in for an ailing Thomas Jones (which, I’ve been telling you all along is why Benson was picked–Jones has never made it through a season healthy) and ripped off three big runs. Those runs took the sting out of yet another Bobby Wade “fun with punts” moment where he let one go by him and be downed inside the five…again.

All Benson’s run did in the long run was set up a Brad Maynard punt, but Brad knocked it dead o n the 12 and three plays later Garcia was hooking up with Peanut for the game-winner.

I don’t understand why Cedric Benson gets booed at home. I suppose it’s because he held out for a big contract, and honestly, I could care less about that. Here’s a guy who rushed for 5,000 yards in his college career. He’s big, he’s fast and he’s backing up Jones who is having a great year. I’m enjoying the hell out of Thomas Jones, and I’m glad that if he gets hurt the Bears have a guy like Benson to go with Adrian Peterson as a backup.

You can cry and whine all you want about how the Bears should have taken Mike Williams. They certainly are not deep in talent at wide reciever and losing Bradley is going to be very bad for this offense. But if you pick Williams you don’t pick Bradley (in all likelihood). The Bears decided to go offense with their first two picks (at least) and got Benson and Bradley. If they’d taken Williams they’d have taken a different running back in the second round, and Williams probably would have held out meaning you’d be booing him. So get over it.

Besides, after watching Williams in two games now this year, it’s doubtful he’d have made any immediate impact on the offense. Unless you like wide recievers who eat themselves into tight end size and spend half the season trying to diet their way out of their fat pants.

The Bears are 4-3 and have won three in a row. The schedule is kind of them the next several weeks. They have five games left against bad teams (two with the Packers, one with the Culpepper-less Vikings, the Niners and the Saints). There’s also the Buccaneers (and they lost to the Niners yesterday). Ten wins should be a real possibility.

Who knew?

One of the things the Bears will have to worry about though is that the Packers have a unique new play. They tried to use it yesterday in Cincinnati on a late drive deep into Bengals’ territory. It involves dressing a guy up in a pumpkin orange shirt and having him run onto the field to take the Statue of Liberty hand-off from Brett Farvuhruh. The problem was that the guy ran the wrong way yesterday.