1985 Bears Reign Supreme as NFL's Cultural Icons

Super Sunday will be George Halas' birthday. He was born 125 years ago, in 1895.

During last offseason, Chicago Bears board chairman George McCaskey suggested how great for Bears fans it would be to win the Super Bowl in Miami on his grandfather's birthday to conclude the 100th anniversary season of the team he founded and league he helped create.

The team obviously failed to hold up their end of this dream celebration, yet they can claim one higher honor.

The 1985 Chicago Bears were the greatest team in the first 100 years of the game ending with this Super Bowl.

Sure every city thinks their champion team should be ranked the greatest of all time. In USA Today's list of the greatest NFL teams, the Bears of '85 rank No. 1. On Some of the other celebratory ranking lists from the past year the 1985 Bears came in second behind the only unbeaten team of all time, the 1972 Miami Dolphins.

This isn't even close to being accurate.

The 1972 Dolphins weren't even greater than the 1984 and 1989 49ers, the 1978 Pittsburgh Steelers, the 1993 Dallas Cowboys or the 2003-04 New England Patriots. And the '85 Bears were better than all of those teams.

Just because the Dolphins won every game didn't make them the greatest team of all time.

Those Dolphins teams played two less games than today's teams, and played a slower, inferior level of football overall.

It was better than they played in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, but the game changed greatly from the early 1970s to the mid 1980s. Football progressed, the athletes and training methods were far better from the mid 1970s on when weight training and conditioning became far more sophisticated and pervasive. The linemen were smaller, the rest of players a little slower and the schemes far less complicated.

The Model T was the greatest car of its era, but wasn't better than the worst cars of modern times, except for mine.

Now it would be easy to suggest the same about the 1985 Bears compared to some of today's teams, except the record and a championship alone did not define this team. It wouldn't be true for a few reasons.

One reason is the game hasn't changed as much since 1985 compared with how it changed between 1972 to 1985 because of the change on the field in where hash marks were. It opened up the field and began the flow away from running as a main way to move the ball.

In the 1990s I was collaborating on a syndicated weekly newspaper column with Walter Payton and he suggested he couldn't be as good of a player in the mid- and late 1990s because the defensive linemen were so much bigger. It simply wasn't true.

The year before he said this, I'd done a similar weekly column with Mike Ditka, and he pointed out Payton and many of the athletes on his 1985 team were athletes so good that they'd have been great in any era. He said Payton would have been at the top mainly because of his attitude and commitment. But great athletes are great athletes.

The Bears had great athletes of the era assembled by Jim Finks and Bill Tobin, and were committed after paying their dues with years of losing and a tough playoff loss the previous season.

However, what they also had more than any team before or since was personality and the ability to use this to connect with a greater cross section of society.

People who didn't know a thing about football loved William Perry or Jim McMahon or Payton.

I remember as a younger reporter going to cover Perry making an appearance at an electronics superstore, of course in the appliance department, and talking to people waiting to see him. They waited, waited and waited. The line wrapped around several aisles in this Walmart-style store, went up against the wall, outside the building and then alongside it and behind it into the alley. Not even half of those people who were standing out there in the cold were going to get to see the Fridge. The store was going to close before they could.

The team had the macho end of the sport covered with Dan Hampton and Steve McMichael, or the Bruise Brothers offensive line. McMichael had more personality than many entire teams. They had violent, explosive athletes like Wilber Marshall, Otis Wilson and Richard Dent, a punky QB, a legend in Payton, and a lineman turned running back and receiver like no one had seen before in Perry.

Almost all the players were brash, maybe overconfident, as the Super Bowl Shuffle indicated. And their every day existence seemed like a soap opera, one crisis after the other created and solved by coach Mike Ditka or defensive coordinator Buddy Ryan. It was beyond intriguing.

They understood the connection with fans and what made pro athletes popular to a greater extent than any other team, and they used this popularity to put pro football into the mainstream of public life.

People who had no interest in the NFL, or in football, knew who the Bears were.

Sure the Packers of the 1960s were great teams, as were the 1970s Steelers, but that was all for football. The 1985 Bears went beyond football. They were a cultural phenomenon.

There's no doubt Halas never considered something like that possible when he formed a team in Decatur, Ill. in a fledgling league.

Yet, they accomplished it, and it's their legacy now. It's a lasting legacy.

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