This has been a brutal Bears season and has the tell-tale Rome-is-burning signs that marked the end of the Wanny and Jauron eras. Lovie's days are almost certainly numbered, if not this year, than next when the Bears fail to make the playoffs for the fourth straight season. The coaching certainly deserves our ire. The sloppiness of the Bears' play, the playcalling, the lack of fundamentals like sound tackling, all of those things point to poor coaching, and I won't disagree with Jerry Angelo if he decides to clean house among the staff.

However, since this Bears season has been throwing fertilizer on the cynical side of my personality, I see Angelo's recent discussion of Lovie's future (or lack thereof) as a crass and shallow attempt to deflect blame from the Bears front office. Because while coaching is a problem, the fundamental problem with this organization is that it has bad personnel.

If NFL general managers had noble titles, Angelo would be Baron von Whiffenstein. Year-after-year, his first-round picks have failed to materialize. In the seasons since he chose David Terrell in 2001, only Tommie Harris has stood out, and his tenure in the spotlight has been very brief. Nearly all of his top picks have been busts for the Bears, with Harris and maybe Greg Olsen being the only two who have made meaningful contributions. Nobody's perfect, and top players often flame out for reasons beyond the control of the general manager. But no organization can go through a first-round drought like that and expect to do well. Indeed, that's what undid the Bears during the 1990s.

Angelo's saving grace is that he does find a lot of diamonds in the rough, especially in the second through fifth rounds. Many of the Bears starters come from those rounds. Therein lies the dilemma, however: do those players become starters because they're good, or because the players who should have been starting are bad? The Bears performance this year seems to suggest the latter in a lot of cases.

In particular, the lines are like McMansions that have been allowed to fall into disrepair: once-flashy structures that degraded quickly, revealing fairly shoddy construction at the core. On the offensive side, since making the big moves to bring John Tait and Fred Miller to the team, Angelo has failed to remodel the line, hitching his wagon to Chris Williams's balky back and failing to strike it rich in the free-agent market again. The foundation finally caved in and now is going to require a Brinks truck worth of money to fix.

The defensive line is even worse. Angelo's two biggest successes are Harris and the trade for (the now-injured) Ogunleye, two players who have never fulfilled their potential consistently. Alex Brown has anchored the right side like a more stable version of Alonzo Spellman, providing solid if unspectacular play. The other defensive tackle position has been an injury- and talent-choked nightmare. And the unit keeps getting older, with youngsters like Mark Anderson and Gaines Adams unable to crack the rotation of a bad unit.

No coach can overcome that kind of rot in the trenches, because offenses and defenses are only as strong as their lines. If Angelo does throw Lovie and the staff under the bus, a blood sacrifice for an enraged fan base, that won't fix what truly ails this team. Unfortunately, nobody seems to be in position to push Angelo out of the way.

--BRANDON TRISSLER