The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

The Good:

• Hats off to Head Coach Matt Eberflus. Whatever he said to his team down 17-3 at halftime, it clearly worked — and that message may have just saved the season. Special Teams played with their eyes on fire all game & the defense held the Titans to less than 60 yards of 2nd half offense while generating 3 takeaways and 6 points.
  • If ‘Flus wears the blame when things go wrong, I think he deserves credit for when things go right. Teams in Chicago’s position were 2-306 since 2006 for a reason — kudos to Eberflus for finding a way to be the 3rd team in history to win this kind of game.

Teams trailing by two or more scores at halftime who failed to score an offensive touchdown all game had been 2-306 since 2000. Bears made it 3-306 today.

— Bill Barnwell (@billbarnwell) September 8, 2024

• I could list nearly every defensive starter, but instead I’ll write a burb about a few. Tremaine Edmunds made the game’s most important 3rd down stop, Andrew Billings looked unblockable at times, Darrell Taylor looked like he was shot out of a cannon when racing around the edge, Gervon Dexter Sr held strong throughout most of the run game, Jaylon Johnson played the part of a shutdown corner, and Tyrique Stevenson caught the game’s most important shovel pass.
  • Next week’s matchup against Houston should test the back-7 much more than yesterday did, but every great defense has to first put away weaker opponents. This unit did so emphatically yesterday.

• Special Teams were special. Tory Taylor made punting look easy, DeAndre Carter nearly outgained the offense via return yardage, and Cairo Santos didn’t miss on a day where he couldn’t afford a mistake. Daniel Hardy’s punt block catalyzed the 2nd half’s furious rally. The 3rd phase made an impact all throughout the day, and the Bears needed every bit of it.

The Bad

• Coleman Shelton, have a (bad) day! Chicago’s Center woes continued as Coleman Shelton looked overmatched against T’vondre Sweat almost immediately. He failed to pick up stunts, he allowed near-constant pressure, and struggled to create run lanes when asked to reach a spot.
  • I’m not panicking yet — his matchup has nearly 70lbs of extra weight on his frame — but this was an alarming performance. If play like this continues, Shelton won’t start for long.
• Read down for more on Caleb, but I felt like I had to list him here too. Rookie QBs almost always struggle in their first start (no matter how badly we want them not to), but if I didn’t expressly label Caleb’s day as “bad” I fear I’d get emails about it. He didn’t play well and the box score shows it. More on that later.
• Rough day for the run game. Chicago oscillated between positive 6-yard gains on the ground and gut-punching 3 yard losses so often that I’m not surprised Shane Waldron tried to go away from the run game early… only for Caleb to lead him back to it. For a part of the offense that’s supposed to feel reliable yardage, yesterday’s ground game felt like anything but. Going forward, Chicago will need better solutions to bad matchups on the interior to mitigate their dependencies on outside sweeps — once Waldron got predictable with those, Tennessee punished them.
• Keenan Allen. Catch the ball in the endzone. That’s all.

The Ugly

• Why are we putting Velus anywhere near Kickoffs? Look, I like Velus. I might be the only one that does. I think his speed is valuable and his instincts as a ball-carrier are easy to rally behind. But if there’s two things I’d have thought we’d have learned by now, it’s that the man cannot track the ball as it flies through the air over his head and that the poor man is incapable of making a mistake that’s not totally catastrophic.
  • How he managed to not only muff the kickoff, but also kick it straight to a Tennessee gunner is beyond me… but he managed it! I liked what we saw from him as an RB, but I expect to never see him on the field returning kickoffs again — for him to do so would be coaching malpractice. It’s that bad.
• Caleb found almost every way possible to mess up without turning the ball over. At times he played too fast, at times he hung onto his read too long. He miscommunicated with his WRs on option routes, put way too much mustard on most 2nd half passes, and clearly had little feel of when he should “be dynamic” and when he should “play point guard”. If you ask me, he looked so irregularly out of sorts that I can’t help but chalk this up to nervousness and the stress of reading his first NFL gameday defense while his IOL got continuously mauled — but that doesn’t make the day pretty.
  • Ultimately it’s easier to fix these kinds of issues while reviewing the tape from a win, so I hope to see a nice step forward from Caleb against Houston. Based on yesterday’s statline, that may not mean much. Life with a rookie QB is complicated and never easy, so strap in and enjoy the ride as best you can.

Postgame Podcast:

Nick and I recorded a podcast where we talked through the ups, the downs, the ins, and the outs of Chicago’s big win here: