Devin Hester is having a bad year returning kickoffs. Not just a bad year, an awful year, especially when compared to his first two seasons in the NFL, the two best kick-return seasons of all-time. I mean, Hester basically was the Bears offense last year. Now they sort of have an offense (sort of), and Hester disappears. Oh, cruel irony.

It’s hard to figure out what’s exactly wrong with Hester, or why he’s not effortlessly scoring touchdowns every time he touches the football … but Gale Sayers has his theories:

“It looks like he’s afraid to run back kickoffs,” Sayers said. “He’s running everything up the middle. [ The Bears return team] might have a middle return on, but if every [defender] is going to the middle, he has enough speed to go outside. He’s not doing it. “He’s running straight up the field and everybody is tackling him. He looks like he’s afraid to go out on his own. A couple of times the other team would kick to the right and [Hester] would run to the right and run out of bounds. It’s like he doesn’t want to run the kickoffs back. Run to the left … you have the whole field!”

Fred Mitchell, who wrote the Trib piece in question, then discusses speculation that Hester doesn’t want to run kickoffs back because he wants to meet the wide receiver stipulations in his contract. In other words, he cares more about the bread. Sayers “hopes he doesn’t think that way.”

Well guess what, Gale? You can’t ride a Louis Vuitton Caddy four feet off the ground on kick return money, ya dig? In the words of noted cultural scholar Jamie Kennedy: Don’t be hatin’.