When the Bears drafted Matt Forte in the second round of the draft, it seemed to signal the start of a competition for the starting running back job. Cedric Benson, despite being handed the job on a platter 12 months earlier, hadn't done enough to ensure he'd stay in the job. When Benson got arrested, it looked like the battle had tilted in Forte's favor.

That case still needs sorting out, though, and Benson's still got one guy who thinks he can do the job. During a Q-and-A with the team's web site, Lovie Smith said that it was Benson's job to lose.

Matt Forte has never played a down for us here. He's like all other rookies, starting from the bottom and working his way up. Cedric was our starter last year, and he's our starter right now. For someone else to be the starter, they're going to have to beat him out.

It would be impractical of Smith to view things any differently. It's bad form to have players lose their jobs without at least a chance to keep them. It's the opposite of what the team's doing at quarterback. The Bears keep saying it's an open competition but if Rex Grossman's healthy, he's starting on opening day.

Running back is less clear but Benson being the starter on May 17th means very little come training camp. That's the real open competition in the Chicago backfield.

Rex Grossman may not be inclined to discuss Brian Urlacher's contract situation but Lance Briggs is. Freed from fathering his brood for a trip to Wrigley where he threw out the first pitch, sang "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" and delivered a plea for his linebacking brother-in-arms.

"I don't think it should be an issue. I think everybody in the city of Chicago knows what Brian Urlacher has meant and continues to mean to the city of Chicago. Whatever is going on, I believe it will be worked out. He is definitely due. He has outlived that contract, and I'm the biggest supporter of my big brother."

Color me shocked. A guy who just signed a contract that he's already unhappy with and, like Urlacher, is skipping workouts thinks that a guy who entered, willingly and alertly, into a nine-year deal should get a new one. I was really expecting Briggs to side with management in this case. Just when I thought I had all the answers, Briggsie, you changed the questions!

And, while we're at it, can we drop the what he means to the city business? If civic pride is going to play a role in these things it has to work both ways. "Well, he means so much to the city, we've got to pay him more" makes no more sense than "He should care so much about the city that he'll play for nothing." Both are silly appeals to something that has nothing to do with the question at hand.

You can't really fault Rex Grossman for not wanting to rock the boat. He was fortunate enough to get a one-year extension, and since he's not guaranteed the starting gig (for once, thankfully), he's wisely choosing to avoid topics that might make his employer sad. Like, say, Brian Urlacher's unhappiness with his current contract.

The Chicago Tribune's Vaughn McClure caught up with Grossman at a charity bowling event and apparently it was a wasted trip:

The quarterback was asked about a guy such as Brian Urlacher holding out of voluntary workouts and likely mini-camp.

"That doesn't affect me at all," he said. "I'm going about my business. I'm doing everything I can to make sure I'm the best football player I can be. In the end, it will all work itself out [for them]. That has nothing to do with me. I'm at Halas Hall working hard."

Wow. That's straight out of the Bill Belichick Guide to Providing Non-Answers to Dumb Media Questions. But like I said, I can't blame Grossman for avoiding the conversation altogether. He's got more important things to worry about -- like finding a way to not lose a quarterback competition to Canton-bound Kyle Orton. The decidedly bleak outlook at wide receiver helps no one, but credit to Grossman for putting on a happy face about the whole thing:

"You can tell that everybody is hungry at the wide receiver position. Devin Hester, Mark Bradley, Rashied Davis, all these guys have become better, and you can see it already. I'm excited about training camp."

And if Grossman keeps repeating it, maybe he'll actually believe it by August. (Crosses fingers)

The University of Texas has had two Heisman Trophy winners, Earl Campbell and Ricky Williams. Both of them expressed opinions recently on the legal situation involving another former Longhorn, Chicago Bears running back Cedric Benson. We'll start with Williams because his comments are funnier.

After Williams told the Austin American-Statesman that Benson invited him to the boat party at which Benson was arrested for boating while intoxicated, Williams said he's sorry he declined the invitation. Williams said that if he had been there, he has a feeling that none of this would have happened:

"I think if I had come down, things might have worked out a little bit differently," Williams said Wednesday. "I find I have a calming influence on people I'm around."

Yes, Ricky, we know all about your calming influence.

Word out of Chicago that portrayed Lance Briggs as upset about his contract with the Bears came as something of a surprise. He just signed a $36 million contract, after all, and did so under his own free will and accord. Getting upset about that is like getting mad at yourself for making a liverwurst sandwich. Shoulda thought of it before but now you've gotta deal with it.

The reason for Briggs's unhappiness may not have anything to do with his market value as a linebacker, though. He's got a lot of mouths to feed and more are coming every day. Briggs's ex-girlfriend was in court yesterday trying to get more support for their daughter. Briggs wasn't there, he was in Arizona with the mother of another daughter, but a third woman, due this summer, was there even though Briggs once denied knowing who Yesenaya Toledo was.

But, Mirabelli charged, Briggs is providing Toledo with cash, and Mirabelli said he wants perjury charges to be considered against Briggs for denying he knows Toledo. Mirabelli said he mispronounced Toledo's first name during the deposition, leading Briggs to say he didn't know that person.

Clever ploy, Mr. Briggs, but actually impregnating the woman will always come back to bite you in the rear. Perhaps his rapidly expanding family helps explain why Briggs has only completed two of 120 hours of court-ordered community service. All that diaper changing doesn't leave much time to pick up trash on the side of the highway.

It shouldn't come as any surprise that the lack of any movement toward a new contract for Brian Urlacher hasn't affected his resolve to secure one for himself. The Bears linebacker told Michael Silver of Yahoo! Sports that he's probably going to skip the team's mandatory minicamp at the end of the month.

He also laid out his reasons for wanting a new contract even though he's got four years left on his current deal. The salary cap's gone up, he argues, and he's done a good job so he should get more money.

"It's easy for people to criticize me for wanting (a new deal), and I understand that it's a contract and I signed it. But this is the NFL, and if I'd signed it and I'd played like (expletive), they'd have cut me or tried to get me to take less. In my mind, there's no difference. If they can 'break' a contract, I have a right to ask for more if I play well enough."

He's right, he's got a right to ask. His issues with the system, though, aren't with the Bears, they're with the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the NFL and the NFLPA. Any inequity is a byproduct of that deal in general, not Urlacher's in particular. It also means a new contract wouldn't offer any more protection against getting cut, just a lump sum in the form of a signing bonus which, I suspect, is his only real concern.

Sure, the Bears have a star middle linebacker who views playing for them with the grim resignation of a man doing life without chance of parole. Yes, their All-World kick returner is so upset about his contract that he's complaining to Deion Sanders. And, once again, the team's preparing to go to battle with quarterbacks better suited for a second-tier Canadian team than the NFL. But they've got a kicker!

A very well-paid kicker, at that! Robbie Gould put pen to paper on a five-year, $15.5 million extension that made him the highest-paid kicker in NFL history. Not bad for a guy who didn't get drafted out of Penn State and was working construction when the Bears signed him to replace Doug Brien in 2005. And he's been very good, hitting 85% of his field goals since then. He's just 26 so, barring injury, should see out the deal without losing much effectiveness as opposed to Adam Vinatieri's failure to make good on his big deal with the Colts.

It will be interesting to see if the Bears follow up this move with new contracts for Brian Urlacher, Devin Hester and Tommie Harris. A big investment in the kicking spot when your offense is, shall we say, mediocre at best would indicate you plan to play a lot of close games. Defense and special teams will help you pull off that approach with the greatest success.

Good news hasn't been all that common in Cedric Benson's inbox of late but he did get a little from general manager Jerry Angelo. The Bears will not cut Benson before training camp, Angelo said, and expect him to battle for the starting job. So he's got that going for him.

What he doesn't have going for him, though, is Angelo's robust support. The GM, while claiming an aversion to rushing to judgment, says that he's disappointed in Benson.

"The thing that I am most disappointed in is the fact that he put himself in a position to be the victim. That's the disappointment. He's done a real fine job in the off-season, (but) obviously this makes big story lines. That's not good for business. Unfortunately we're having to deal with it, and we'll just wait and see how all the facts present themselves."

If you aren't rushing to judgment, Benson did absolutely nothing that would qualify putting himself in position to be a victim. If Benson's telling the truth about what happened on Lake Travis, Angelo is basically saying he was asking for it. That's a little too close to saying that a rape victim was asking for it because of what she wore or how she acted.

If Benson's not telling the truth, however, he wasn't a victim but was, in fact, breaking the law and suffered the consequences. There's no middle ground here and, until the case works itself out, anything else is a rush to judgment.

Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo threw out the first pitch at Wrigley Field Sunday before the Cubs-Diamondbacks game, and he was roundly booed. Then he sang "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" and got booed some more.

The combination of his horrendous singing and the fact that he's not very popular in Chicago after his 329-yard game against the Bears last year got him booed as loudly as any visiting player at Wrigley Field.

Romo grew up in Burlington, Wisconsin, 75 miles from Chicago, and he played at Eastern Illinois, and he's apparently a Cubs fan. But really, it's probably not the best idea to bring in football players for teams other than the Bears. Was there any doubt that they'd boo him?

Also: His singing voice is terrible. Jessica Simpson might want to work with him on that.

A number of you aren't going read this because as Chicago White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen says, the public prefers to follow news of celebs and sports figures who are "[expletived] up." The rise of the sports blog generally hasn't be driven by fans' desire to read do-gooder stories. (Though I have to say, I think that would be an interesting niche sports blog).

In any event, I want to highlight a few stories in the news this week that talk about NFL players doing good in the world.

The New York Times had a great article yesterday about four NFL players with ties to Nigeria visiting the country in March. They must have been an impressive display of defensive linemen big people: NY Giants' Osi Umenyiora, Houston Texans' Amobi Okoye, and Chicago Bears' Adewale Ogunleye and Israel Idonije.

It was Okoye's idea for them to all go to Nigeria as a group, figuring they could do more good works together than separately. They also could get scared together as the bus they were traveling in got broadsided by a truck on the first day of their trip. The article is certainly worth a read.

Another article worth checking out is the continuing help that Tampa Bay running back Warrick Dunn gives to single parents looking to purchase their first homes. He does this to honor his police officer mother who never owned a house. She was shot while working her off-duty security job, and a 17-year-old Dunn along with his grandmother found themselves taking care of his five siblings. To date, his foundation has helped 77 single parents buy their first homes by providing a down payment and home furnishings. (Here's the donation link).

The next time you feel like ragging on athletes for being a bunch of "turds", ask yourself what you are doing to make this world a better place. Athletes are like the rest of us imperfect people. Some do good, some do bad, and some get busted for being a smiling black guy who loves his mom on a boat full of white women in bikinis boating while intoxicated and resisting arrest.

(Photo of Dunn as the first winner of the Home Depot Neighborhood MVP award in January. Photo Credit: Scott Halleran, Getty Images).