Why Do I Like the Chicago Bears This Week?

I always like the Chicago Bears…

…but 2020 is starting to inch towards 2014. That year, the antics of Marc Trestman and Aaron Kromer off-field fueled my disdain for that disgraceful bunch. This year, the broken offense has broken me. I don’t want to watch it anymore. And I certainly don’t want to WAIT ALL DAY FOR SUNDAY NIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT.

What the Packers Numbers Tell Us

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

The Packers are vulnerable at every level of their defense but the Bears don’t have an offense capable of exploiting any of those vulnerabilities.

The Bears have scored 63 total points in their four games against Green Bay under Matt Nagy.

The Bears have scored 63 total points in their last four games this season.

Why would anyone think the Bears are going to find a way to score more than that average – 15.75 points – Sunday night? And why would anyone think that will be enough to beat Aaron Rodgers?

Does the Quarterback Matter?

If Nick Foles starts, the offense will look exactly as it has over the last month.

If Mitch Trubisky starts, he’ll probably avoid pressure a few times, extending plays, but then he’ll miss open receivers down the field when he does. For those expecting Mitch to suddenly start running for multiple first downs after ANOTHER shoulder injury…why?

If Tyler Bray starts, it’s Jonathan Quinn. Craig Krenzel. Henry Burris. (It’s probably not good when your “hype video” has several bad throws in it.)

Listing My Favorite Bar in the States I Have Visited

I have never been to Wisconsin. I have never been to many states. So I decided to list my favorite bar in each of the states I have been to because I don’t want to write an in-depth breakdown of Bears/Packers.

• Mobile, Alabama. Veets.
• Scottsdale, Arizona. Rusty Spur Saloon.
• Arkansas. NBV (No bar visited).
• Groveland, California. Iron Door Saloon.
• Aspen, Colorado. The J Bar.
• Westport, Connecticut. Black Duck Cafe.
• Newark, Delaware. Klondike Kate’s.
• Ponta Vedra Beach, Florida. Clubhouse Bar at TPC Sawgrass.
• Atlanta, Georgia. Manuel’s Tavern.
• Chicago, Illinois. The Original Billy Goat Tavern.

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You hear coaches saying it, and it is so true: except for the occasional turnover, defenses don’t stop offenses late in these games anymore. Offense wins almost all the time.

— Mike Francesa (@MikeFrancesa) November 23, 2020

(1) Colts came into the week as the league’s top-ranked defense. Chiefs came into the week as the favorite to win the Super Bowl. Both teams allowed 31 points. Both teams won. The above Tweet from Mike Francesa mirrors something Gil Brandt Tweeted not so long ago and something I’ve been harping on this season. The days of building a team around the defense are over. You have to build a team that can score seven points with a minute remaining. Explosive players. Speed. Oh and someone who can accurately throw the football to explosive players with speed.

Monday Night Football’s game between two top 5 defenses should have cemented this idea.

(2) Just marvel at what the Steelers have done. This was a team defined by running the ball and playing defense for fifty years. They still do the latter well, drafting consistently good players on that side of the ball. But they saw how the league was changing and completely shifted their offensive philosophy. And year-after-year they’ve added more weapons, and more speed on the outside. Smith-Schuster. Washington. Diontae. Ray-Ray. Claypool. They’ve adapted to the modern game. And they have the quarterback.

(3) Carson Wentz is broken. His mechanics have gotten shaky. His internal clock is way off. Sometimes he rushes throws because of phantom pressure. Sometimes he holds onto the ball for an eternity. Is it fixable? Probably. But one has to believe Doug Pederson is considering more than just a Jalen Hurts package. Can Hurts possibly be worse than this?

(4) Everyone needs to stop with their anti-NFC East nonsense. We have divisions. You win the division, you get into the tournament. That’s the sport. And for those who don’t know, the NFC East carried the league’s ratings water for about twenty years. This was the best division in the sport for a long, long time. They’re having a down year. But I’m going to seriously enjoy watching this play out. (And I think it may be decided on the field, Week 17, when the Giants and Cowboys meet.)

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There’s no evidence that Matt Nagy can fix the Chicago Bears offense. But if he’s going to keep his job, he has no choice.

The Bears have six games against mostly bad defenses. (The Vikings are actually the best defense left on their schedule and they’re not very good.) Six games in which they have to score points. Six games in which Nagy has to show that he can do something, ANYTHING, schematically that will put the team in a position to win.

All of the arguments about a lack of talent are correct, but an offensive head coach can’t be this bad. Just can’t be. His job is to get the most out of the talent he has. That isn’t happening. The idea of hiring one of his buddies – namely Louis Riddick – to take over for Ryan Pace loses steam with every stinker Nagy’s unit puts up. Why would the Bears keep a coach who struggles so much just to get first downs, let alone actual points?

As I wrote last week, every coach needs at least some talent to succeed, but every good coach finds a way to at least do something well. Kyle Shanahan’s 49ers didn’t light the scoreboard up prior to the 2019 season, but they ran the ball and threatened defenses even with pathetic quarterback play. While yardage is generally useless when it comes to determining which teams are good, it does give you insight about which coaches are good. Shanahan has had one year in the bottom 10, Andy Reid 3 and Sean McVay zero. Nagy’s best finish was 21^st.

The most important project of the 2021 offseason is going to be finding a quarterback and having a young signal caller with a lame duck head coach is nothing more than a waste of time.

The first step is immediately firing Bill Lazor from play-calling. It didn’t work and it’s pretty telling that the worst game of the Nagy era came with someone else calling the shots. If Nagy is going to get out of this season with his job, he has to be the one doing the heavy lifting.

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Florida (5-1) at Vanderbilt (0-6)

12:00 PM ET

Trask has thrust himself into the Heisman conversation with brilliant play early this season. His position in mock drafts is being hotly-debated but he could be a name the Bears are considering next April.

From Josh Edwards at CBS:

Trask has thrown for at least 268 yards in each of his team’s six games. Saturday against Arkansas was no different. He finished with as many touchdowns as incompletions. The pocket passer from Texas finished completing 23-of-29 passes for 356 yards and six touchdowns. The consummate teammate, Trask overcame the absence of star tight end Kyle Pitts by throwing two touchdowns to the backup — Keon Zipperer. 

The senior is tough and poised in the pocket. Teams will never be afraid of his ability to get yardage on the ground because he lacks speed but he has the ability to manipulate defenses. Trask held the safety with his eyes on one play before tossing it over the top for an easy touchdown to Zipperer. On another touchdown, he motioned forward as if orchestrating a quarterback draw before zipping it out to wide receiver Trevon Grimes on the boundary. Trask throws with elite ball placement and gets the ball out quickly. His understanding of the opposition has allowed him to play at a much faster pace in 2020. 

As of today, Lawrence, Fields, Wilson and Lance appear to be the four best quarterback prospects available in the 2021 NFL Draft. Trask has forced himself into that second tier quarterback conversation along with Alabama’s Mac Jones and a few others. 

Yet again in 2020, we see that the Bears have one of the best defenses in the NF,L coupled with one of the worst offenses. This combines to give them a team that is not good enough. It’s Groundhog Day all over again, a continuation of 2018-19, all of the Lovie years, and the 1980s after Jim McMahon got hurt.

Normally I’d use the bye week to do an in-depth look at the numbers for Chicago’s offense and defense, but honestly I don’t see the point. Their defense is really good, their offense is really bad, and you don’t need advanced stats to tell you more than that. I’m sure I’ll still do some of that analysis in the offseason but for right now I want to focus on a bigger question: WHY is the defense so much better than their offense?

The answer here is really not that surprising: the Bears are investing more in the defense. The table below shows how much money they have invested in the defense compared to the offense, as measured in 3 ways:

• 2020 cap dollars. How much current money is being spent.
• Average yearly salary. This accounts for the fact that contracts don’t have even distribution of cap hits every year. For instance, Robert Quinn has an average salary of $14M per year in his contract, but only has a 2020 cap hit of $6M. This will give a better picture of true spending.
• % of salary. This looks at how much of your total spending is focused on one side of the ball, based on the average annual salary of players. It’s a good measure of how lopsided your investment is on offense vs. defense.

The table below shows the Bears’ values for offense and defense in each category, as well as the NFL average and where the Bears rank. All data is from Spotrac.

A few thoughts:

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Another Great Inside Linebacker.

It should come as no surprise that in this painfully-typical Bears season, a season defined by terrific defensive play and non-professional offensive output, it has been a middle linebacker, the franchise’s most-storied position, that has proven to be the revelation. And Roquan Smith has been nothing short of that in 2020.

There’s a bit of Brian Urlacher in Roquan. His ability to play in space, cover sideline-to-sideline, and track the sport’s best backs in the screen game have been hallmarks of his campaign. This is not just about speed, which Roquan has in abundance. It is about awareness. It is about football intelligence. And Smith displays both weekly.

There’s also a bit of Lance Briggs in 58. Roquan sheds blockers and attacks the line of scrimmage in the run game. (This is something Urlacher struggled with once the Bears changed to Lovie Smith’s system took the big bodies out from in front of him.) If there’s a criticism to be made of his season, it’s that Roquan has several times blown up runs behind the line of scrimmage and failed to finish the play. He finishes those 2-3 plays and his statistics land him as a no-brainer All-Pro in 2020. As it is, he should still be in the discussion for that prize. Per Kevin Fishbain’s Twitter feed from Monday night: “The stop behind the line on Dalvin Cook on the screen was TFL No. 13 for Roquan Smith this season, one behind T.J. Watt and Vince Williams for the NFL lead.”

When reaching out to a scout friend who had to prepare for the Bears this season, I asked him what he saw when looking at Smith on tape. His answer: “He might be the most talented, versatile inside backer in the league right now. And he’s not reached his potential yet.”

Thayer Breaks Him Down.

There are many reasons to be dejected about the Chicago Bears. But even as higher-priced veterans leave this defense in the years to come, there is still a young core that can anchor this unit and keep them near the top of the league. Eddie Jackson. Jaylon Johnson. Eddie Goldman. But no player on this defense will be more important moving forward that Roquan Smith.

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It was January 2005. The production was As You Like It, in the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. There were seats on the stage, literally on the boards themselves, just feet from actors. That’s where I sat, on a small cushion, surrounded by a bunch of other 20-somethings who could also only afford the $25 it cost to sit there.

Directed by Sir Peter Hall and starring his daughter Rebecca, this production had created quite a buzz around the NYC theatre scene and – being my favorite Shakespearean comedy –  there I sat, legs crossed, like a child in kindergarten waiting to hear “goose” after being tapped on the head.

The production started and I was taken to places I had never gone before. I was swept away, ravished by the colors and textures and nuance in each moment. I fell madly in love with Rebecca Hall, glaring into her eyes as if this wasn’t an audience member/actor thing but two young people at opposite ends of a crowded bar, never to speak but never needing to.

When the play ended, I walked out out onto Atlantic Avenue and it was snowing. Heavy, too. I skipped through it. I frolicked. I danced between snowflakes because that’s what theatre can do to those willing to succumb.

Those experiences are few and far between, however. True rarities. They are like the Bears games you tell stories about for years to come. “They are who we thought they were”. Mike Brown interception returns in overtime. 46-10.

I’m not asking for the 2020 Chicago Bears to provide one of these experiences. I don’t demand that from any piece of theatre, either. I ask that plays be entertaining. I ask that plays be interesting. But more than anything else, I ask that plays NOT be boring. Boring is the cardinal sin of any piece of art. Bad I can forgive if the badness is achieved in an attempt to do something unique. Boring is unforgivable.

And the 2020 Chicago Bears are the most boring fucking football team of my lifetime. I know exactly what I’m going to see before every single game and they don’t even slightly deviate from those expectations. They are a terrific defense. They are solid on specials. And they are the worst offense in the entirety of the NFL, Jets excluded.

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Offensive ranks this season:

Pts/game
31. Bears
32. Jets

Pts/drive
31. Bears
32. Jets

Yds/game
31. Bears
32. Jets

Yds/play
31. Bears
32. Jets

1st downs/game
31. Bears
32. Jets

3rd down pct
31. Bears
32. Jets

Avg drive dist
31. Bears
32. Jets

Efficiency
31. Bears
32. Jets

— Paul Hembekides (@PaulHembo) November 17, 2020

The Vikings were allowing 412 yards per game this season.

The Bears had 149.

The Vikings were allowing 29.3 points per game.

The Bears offense scored 6.

Pathetic.