Twenty years ago tonight — October 16, 2006 — the Arizona Cardinals led the unbeaten Chicago Bears 23–3 on Monday Night Football, and somehow lost 24–23. What happened next at the podium became part of American sporting folklore.
“The Bears are who we thought they were. And we let ’em off the hook!”
Dennis Green’s furious, funny, painfully honest rant has been quoted at water coolers, wedding speeches and fantasy drafts ever since. It endures because every fan knows exactly how he felt: the night your team had it won, and let it slip.
Coach Green passed away in 2016, but that 38 seconds of television will outlive us all. It is a reminder of why sport gets under our skin — the comebacks, the collapses, the stories we retell for twenty years.
At Executive Global Tours, those stories are our business. Fans don’t just travel to watch games — they travel to be where the moments happened, and to swap the stories afterwards over dinner with the men who lived them. That’s what our legends tours are built on.
Rest easy, Coach. They were who we thought they were.
— JP Cone, Executive Global Tours