Bears’ Williams Broke A Teen Lions Fan’s Heart In 1980

(every Friday during the NFL season, OOB will run a nostalgic feature about the Lions’ upcoming opponents)

There are those things in life that give you that sinking feeling.

Seeing that your keys are in the car as you are slamming the (locked) door. Going to the fridge at work and realizing that your carefully-packed, yummy lunch that you made for yourself is sitting right there — on the kitchen counter, where you left it this morning. That kind of stuff.

For me, as a 17-year-old, still-passionate Lions fan, that sinking feeling was seeing Dave Williams race up the sideline. With the football. With no Lion near him. With the football game on his person, stolen for his Chicago Bears.

Overtime was instituted in the NFL for regular season games in 1974. And in the hundreds of OT games played since, only once has a team lost the game by surrendering a TD return on the kickoff.

Yes, that would be your Detroit Lions.

Of course, the Lions picked a glorious occasion for such nonsense: the annual Thanksgiving Day game, against the Bears in 1980. It was the “Another One Bites the Dust” year, except that the Lions’ brilliant 4-0 start had faded into a desperation Turkey Day game because the record was suddenly 7-5 when the Bears invaded.

But all looked good for three quarters.

The Lions led all game, and were up by 14 heading into the fourth. Then the Bears scored a touchdown to pull within seven. The Lions couldn’t handle RB Walter Payton, nor the Bears running QB, Vince Evans. The Bears got the ball back with under two minutes to play, needing a touchdown to tie.

The game came down, literally, to the last play. Inside the Lions’ ten, Evans dropped back to pass, only I’m not sure if that was his intention. After a cursory look for a receiver, Evans’s feet started dancing again. And the Lions, again, couldn’t get him into their grasp. Evans lunged over the goal line as the clock read 0:00. I cursed and raved. The Lions needed the game badly; 8-5 was tons better than 7-6 during the playoff push.

There was a coin flip, and the Lions lost. Rookie kicker Eddie Murray booted the ball and it was taken by Williams at his five yard line. Williams briefly tried going up the middle, but quickly found that there was no daylight. So he bounced outside, to the near sideline, and it was quite evident that the Lions had over-pursued the middle of the field. Only Murray had a chance, and Williams wasn’t even to midfield yet. But Murray was slow, had no angle, and Williams basically ran the final 50 yards without a Lion in sight. Nor a penalty flag anywhere to be found.

Those final 50 yards broke my teenage heart. The Lions had blown the game by giving up two touchdowns in a matter of 30 seconds or so — Evans’s to tie the game, and Williams’s to win it.

A quick check of Williams’s stats at pro-football-reference.com shows that the kick return for a TD was his third and final one in his four-year career. But it remains the only one in NFL history to occur in overtime.

The Lions finished 9-7 and missed the playoffs. Had they held on against the Bears on Thanksgiving, they would have made the post-season.

Just another cautionary tale in a franchise’s history that is wallpapered with them.

Bears, Lions, Each Boast Two RBs That Thrilled, Chilled

Between them, total, they gave us about ten seasons. Ten seasons filled with oohs and aahs and making cases for why they were the greatest running backs in their respective franchises’ histories.

Gale Sayers, the Kansas Comet — a Chicago Bear from 1965-71 officially, but you can forget the last two seasons, when he gamely tried but failed to come back from a mangled knee.

Billy Sims, the high-stepping runner from Oklahoma. Heisman Trophy winner and a Lion from 1980-84, until a hit applied by the Vikings’ Walker Lee Ashley mangled Sims’ knee, too — in the middle of a fruitful ’84 season. Fitting that Sims’ career-ending injury should come at the hands of the Vikings, a team that’s tormented the Lions more than any other in the Bill Ford Era.

Note the abbreviated careers. Five seasons for Sayers, essentially, and not quite five for Sims. Each exploded onto the scene. In Sayers’s rookie season, he scored six touchdowns — in one game, in just 14 touches, against the 49ers at a rain-soaked Wrigley Field. Among his six scores was a kickoff return for a TD, AND a punt return for a TD. For the season, Sayers scored 22 touchdowns: 14 by ground, six by air, and the kick returns. He was the easiest choice for Rookie of the Year ever, in any sport.

Sims helped lead the Lions out of the gate with a 4-0 start in his rookie season by scoring from all over the field, on long runs and even fly patterns. On Opening Day in Anaheim, he blitzed the heavily-favored Rams with three TDs as the Lions pulled off the upset. His trademark was to leap over the pile at the goal line, somersaulting into the end zone. And the high step, of course.

Sims doesn’t get quite the nod that Sayers does as one of the game’s greatest runners, but for his time, few were better. And Sayers, of course, crammed a 10-year career’s worth of highlights into his five seasons.

Gale Sayers, running away from the Lions’ Alex Karras, ran for 867 yards (5.2/att) and scored 22 TDs in all sorts of ways in his ’65 rookie campaign

Sims rushed for 1,303 yards in his rookie year (1980) and scored 13 rushing TDs

Then the Bears offered up Walter Payton for public consumption, and the Lions would eventually counter with Barry Sanders.

Sayers-Payton versus Sims-Sanders. Which duo would YOU take?

This weekend, the Lions travel to Chicago, and the men running the football for each team — and no disrespect intended — are nowhere near the class of their predecessors. It just so happens that the Lions and Bears were each blessed with two of the most wonderful running backs in their time, or anyone’s time. So no shame in falling short of those players.

And hey — I haven’t even mentioned Bronko Nagurski or Doak Walker.

Bears’ History Not Filled With Pro Bowl QBs, Either

At first glance, it may seem like the Chicago Bears have it all over the Lions. Walter Payton. Mike Singletary. Jim McMahon. Brian Urlacher. Devin Hester. Mike Ditka. Lovie Smith. Even their players’ songs trump the Lions’. “Super Bowl Shuffle” beats “Another One Bites the Dust” hands down.

But since 1957, the year of the Lions’ last championship, Da Bears have but two championships, and none since 1985. They have been largely mediocre in many of the past 50 years, too.

One reason has been the man lining up under center.

We may hoot and holler over the “controversies” between Milt Plum and Karl Sweetan, or Gary Danielson and Eric Hipple, or Erik Kramer and Rodney Peete, etc., but who have the Bears employed at quarterback?

Kent Nix. Gary Huff. Jack Concannon. Bob Avellini. Bobby Douglass. Steve Fuller. Mike Tomczak. Even Kramer himself, who played more like “Kramer” of Seinfeld fame as a Bear.

Not exactly a list of Pro Bowlers. Even McMahon wasn’t all that great of a QB, truthfully. And Rex Grossman, their other Super Bowl quarterback, is a card-carrying member of Trent Dilfers Anonymous.

The Bears quarterback in 1963, the only other title year they’ve had since their glory years of the 1940s, was a guy named Billy Wade. He was a tough-minded, ugly-type passer, but he came from the pass-happy Los Angeles Rams, and he could chuck it well enough to lead a Bears team driven by its defense.

Ahh, defense. Both the Lions and the Bears, even in so-so years, could boast a better-than-average defense. This is where the names get a lot more impressive, for both teams.

The Lions had Joe Schmidt, the Bears had Dick Butkus. The Lions had their Fearsome Foursome of the early-1960s. The Bears were the Monsters of the Midway around the same time. The Lions had Lem Barney, Night Train Lane, and Alex Karras. The Bears had Singletary, Gary Fencik, and Dan Hampton.

Oh, there’s more. Doug Buffone. Mike Lucci. Doug Adkins. Wayne Walker. Doug Plank. Dick LeBeau. Ed O’Bradovich. Doug English.

Lots of Dougs there, huh?

Anyhow, the Bears have used tough, opportunistic defenses and marginal offensive talent to contend, in seasons in which they did so. Besides Payton, the Bears have not truly had a superstar offensive player other than Gale Sayers in the mid-to-late 1960s.

Billy Wade: Gunslinging QB for the ’63 champion Bears

Kind of like the Lions in that regard, wouldn’t you say? The Detroit teams of the early-1980s, who were playoff contenders annually (1980-83), had what they called “The Silver Rush,” a nickname originally given to the talented, sack-happy defensive line, but that was eventually extended to the entire defense. They even wore towels with the words, stuck down their football pants.

The ’85 Bears might have been the best defensive team in Super Bowl history. McMahon led the offense, but more with attitude and color than any pure quarterbacking skills. Certainly he wasn’t a marksman when it came to throwing the football. But he had Payton to hand the ball to — and even William “Refrigerator” Perry, at times. His receivers were adequate, nothing more.

Another #9, McMahon, was colorful, but not a great QB by any means

Today, the Bears hope to return to the Super Bowl with something, anything, to mask their offensive — and I do mean offensive — deficiencies when they hold the football. An Urlacher-led defense, which still creates turnovers and scores the occasional touchdown. A special teams unit, led by return man Hester. A modified, keep-it-simple game plan to help Grossman. Or, in this case, Brian Griese — who’ll start Sunday against the Lions.

The Bears won’t score 56 points against the Lions at Ford Field Sunday. That’s not their game. They probably couldn’t do it, even if you placed them on the field without the annoyance of an opponent. But that’s not how they win. They win — or at least try to — with everything else. This time they’ll trot Griese out there — and Griese’s biggest asset, perhaps, is something he shares with 90+ other QBs in the NFL: he is not Rex Grossman.

Ironically, the decision to bench Grossman, again turnover-prone thru the team’s 1-2 start, comes during Lions week. Grossman was stellar against Detroit in ’06 — tossing five TD passes and throwing zero interceptions. So this would appear to be a long-term fix for coach Smith, not something with which to simply get by the Lions.

Yes, the Bears have those ’63 and ’85 championships since the Lions’ glory year of 1957. And they have the Super Bowl appearance last season. And more playoff games under their belt since the AFL-NFL merger in 1970. But they haven’t been anything to write home about at the quarterback position, either, in that time frame.

So maybe it’s not just that, after all. Do you suppose?