Wildcard Round: Bears at Saints Open Thread
Sunday at 3:40 CT, the Bears will play a playoff game in New Orleans. This is the third in a three-part preview of that contest.
Two things were frustrating about the first meeting between the Bears and the Saints.
(1) The Bears had no answers for Jared Cook. The world knows Drew Brees is not going to try and take the top off the defense. He doesn’t have the arm strength for that anymore. So opponents can’t let the slant route go for big YAC. They must have an answer for Kamara out of the backfield. And they can’t let Cook beat them on third downs. That’s exactly what the Bears did.
(2) Every Taysom Hill run seemed to work. When Sean Payton gets into short yardage or goal line situations, he no longer hesitates to take Brees off the field and put Hill on. A lot of Hill’s success is a product of a tough, physical offensive line but it’s also simply a schematic advantage to run the football at 11-on-11. If Hill is converting every time he comes on the field, the Bears are in for a long day.
Both of these issues will be difficult to correct if Roquan Smith is unavailable, as expected.
The Saints have won their last two games, against Carolina and Minnesota, rushing for 156 and 264 yards respectively.
The Saints lost their two games before that, against Kansas City and Philadelphia, rushing for 60 and 96 yards respectively.
Keeping the New Orleans rushing attack contained doesn’t guarantee you victory but it does guarantee you’ll keep their point total manageable.
Sunday at 3:40 CT, the Bears will play a playoff game in New Orleans. This is the second in a three-part preview of that contest.
Last year, it was Mitch Trubisky’s performance against the New Orleans Saints that soured many – including me – on his prospects as the future quarterback of the Chicago Bears. Now he meets them again, this time in the postseason, this time with his career potentially on the line. Will the results look any different?
Thoughts.
Sunday at 3:40 CT, the Bears will play a playoff game in New Orleans. This is the first in a three-part preview of that contest.
Cairo Santos has been the biggest surprise on the Bears roster this season and is due a contract extension. Santos hasn’t missed a field goal since September, and has missed only one extra point on the season.
Will Lutz has had a down year for the Saints, making only 82.1% of his field goals. But his numbers have been substantially better at home, where he has not missed an extra point and missed only one field goal.
If this game comes down to a big kick late, both teams will be comfortable sending their kicker out there to make it.
Pat O’Donnell has become one of the more consistent punters in the game. But if there’s a flaw in his game it’s the absence of the great punt. He is fourth in the league, leaving 28 punts inside the 20, but in a game where the Bears’ specials need to be special, PO’D needs to pin Brees deep a few times.
Thomas Morstead is having (arguably) his weakest season but the metrics used to judge punters are often yardage-based and those don’t always compute. But Morstead’s punts have been fair caught more than any in the league and returners are averaging 2.3 yards per return against his punt unit, best in the league.
Cordarrelle Patterson is the best kickoff return man in the sport but I don’t imagine a scenario where Sean Payton gives him an opportunity to dramatically alter momentum. And the Bears simply haven’t found a replacement for Tarik Cohen on punt returns. (The playoffs are no time to experiment back there, either.) As a team they rank 10th in kickoff return average and 22nd in punt return average.
Recently, The Athletic‘s Mike Sando published a list of NFL GMs, along with their winning percentages. Of the 18 GMs who have been in the league at least five years, Ryan Pace ranked 14th in terms of winning percentage. Two of the guys behind him have been fired. One owns the Bengals, where winning isn’t that big of a deal. The fourth? Well, how does Jason Licht still have a job?
The truth about what needs to happen with Pace was painfully obvious on Sunday. He was hired largely because of two lopsided losses to the Green Bay Packers in 2014, wherein the Packers outscored the Bears 93-31. He has closed the gap a little, but in 2020 the Packers still outscored the Bears by a combined 35 points that would’ve been more if not for a couple of garbage time scores in October. Pace has had six off-seasons to eliminate the gap between these two rivals. He has failed to do so.
Yes. Pace inherited a tough job, but was it more difficult than what Les Snead was thrown into with the Rams or Steve Keim with the Cardinals? Doubtful. Heck, Jon Robinson inherited a team that just used the second pick on Marcus Mariota and has still managed to turn the Titans into a winner.
The tricky part about Pace is that he clearly has an eye for talent.
(If you know why I chose this picture, I give you much credit.)
In the end, Mitch Trubisky was Sunday what he has been throughout his Bears career: a small player in the big moment. With a chance to change his narrative, a chance to pay off his achievements of the last month against a terrific opponent, Trubisky again failed against the Green Bay Packers. Inaccurate throws all over the field. Another nightmare toss into the end zone that somehow was not intercepted. More poor decisions from the pocket. More refusing to use his legs, this time to the dismay of color analyst Daryl Johnston.
It wasn’t about the play calling. It wasn’t about the limitations of the quarterback.
I love how the narrative changes to “the playcalling was bad.” The reality is they ran the ball 27 times and a good defense took away Mitch’s limited game plan. As we’ve been saying, at some point your QB has to make plays. Today he couldn’t.
— Patrick Sheldon (@P_Shels) January 4, 2021
But folks, this isn’t much of a story.
This was the expectation.
Forget the final score at Soldier Field. The Bears had every opportunity to make this contest with their oldest rivals an old fashioned shootout. They kept the ball. They moved the chains. Their tough-to-tackle weapons were once against tough to tackle. Even the defense did its job in the third quarter, with the help of an awful drop. There was an exciting game waiting to be played. But it required two quarterbacks. And like so many other Sundays in the modern history of Bears vs. Packers, only one showed up.
As has been stated by most of the sane folks writing about this franchise, Trubisky had done nothing recently to prove he was the long-term answer at the quarterback position. Nobody is going to pay starting quarterback money to a player that can’t be trusted to throw the football into the end zone and right now Mitch can’t be trusted to do that.
But Trubisky, with the assistance of his head coach and offensive coordinator, had done enough over the last month to show this offense could be productive with him under center. Even historically productive! Sunday he had a chance to cement himself as the front runner to be the team’s starter in September. If, as was argued in this space last week, he simply played to his mean and pitched that mid-90s quarterback rating, the Bears would have had a chance to beat the Packers late and the Trubisky improvement argument would have had some supporting data. He failed.
The Bears have a playoff game next Sunday in New Orleans. Trubisky will be the starter. Against one of the best rush defenses in the league, and a coaching staff that will do everything they can to stop David Montgomery, the Bears will need their quarterback to make plays down the field if they hope to advance. Does anybody believe he can do that?
