Rivalries

 They'll play a football game in Green Bay tonight, which only proves the NFL didn't do enough flexing in its flex scheduling, or it still thinks it can sell out-of-date merchandise.

The game, see, is the Packers vs. the Bears. The NFL, or someone, still thinks it's a rivalry game, although the NFL doesn't really have any of those. But Packers-Bears gets passed off as one mainly because they've been playing one another since the dawn of time.

Thing is, the Packers, with few exceptions, regularly pound the Bears like a man pounds a railroad spike. Aaron Rodgers is 21-5 lifetime against the Middlings of the Midway, and the smart guys all say he's going to do it again tonight. In fact, the smart guys say this is going to be a wretched Sunday Night Football offering, given that the Packers are probably the best team in the NFC right now, and the Bears, well, are not.

The Bears are the Bears, in other words. They have a possible gem in rookie quarterback Justin Fields and a dead-man-walking coach who refuses to tailor his offense to his possible gem's strengths. Their only win in the last two months came on Thanksgiving, when they wheezed past then-winless Detroit 16-14 -- and then acted as if it was an Everest win instead of a Pyrrhic one.

So, not much of a rivalry these days. And what makes that especially stark is Packers-Bears will follow by 24 hours perhaps football's premier rivalry.

That would be Army-Navy, which the Blob never misses because to the Blob is epitomizes everything college football should be but no longer is. Army and Navy have been playing one another since 1890, when Benjamin Harrison was in the White House and Navy won 24-0. Yesterday the Middies won again, 17-13, even though they came into the game 3-8 while Army came in 8-3.

This happens more often than you'd suppose in their annual tussle, because it's a game awash with emotion and love and desperation and both mutual enmity and mutual respect. And pageantry, of course -- the long gray line of the Corps of Cadets on one side of the field, the white hats of the Brigade of Midshipmen on the other.

The losers sing their alma mater when it's all done, and then the winners, who always go second, belt out theirs. It's a hell of a thing, and one of the great moments in sports television.

Yesterday the cameras kept zeroing in on Navy's defensive captain, Diego Fagot, playing his last game for the Midshipmen and, as if according to some celestial script, leading a pile of his brothers in stopping Army quarterback Christian Anderson two feet short of a first down with 90 seconds or so left. 

It banked the W for Navy, and it was exactly the way you want to see Army-Navy end: With two men who'll soon serve their country colliding at the point of attack with the issue in the balance.

That, boys and girls, is what a rivalry is supposed to look like.

Tonight?

Even if the Bears would miraculously find a way to win (and this being the 2021 NFL season, who knows), it'll just be a football game. Nothin' to see here.