Monday Night Football: Vikings at Bears Open Thread
FOCO is giving away the product above (full description available HERE) to the winner of tonight’s contest. It’s going to be a super cold winter across the country and having a hoodie that doubles as a mask will help.
So what is tonight’s contest? Guess the total yards COMBINED for Allen Robinson, Anthony Miller and Darnell Mooney receiving. (Receiving only.) For context, their totals over the last three games are 183, 229 and 130. So a wide range is possible.
As always the rules:
Good luck! On to the remainder of the game preview!
As was broken in the comments section last week, Matt Nagy won’t be calling the plays tonight. It was the only move for him to make and it’s overdue.
Will this move fix the offense? Of course not. But when your offense is performing at a level this low, you have to empty the trunk and bring out the gimp. No move is too dramatic. If changing the play-caller means even two or three extra first downs a game, you do it.
Nagy didn’t want to . I get it. “I love it” he said repeatedly about calling plays. We take this game so seriously sometimes that we forget it’s a game and it’s supposed to be fun for EVERYBODY involved. Nagy just relinquished the part of the game he loves most. That ain’t easy.
And as much as I fell this move was belated, it should still be applauded. A mature head coach is benching his stubborn offensive coordinator.
Calling plays no more,
Nagy paces the sideline.
His headset, on mute.
Offense. Allen Robinson. There’s no doubting that Robinson is this club’s number one receiver but he is looking for Michael Thomas money. Is it too much to ask for him to win 50/50 balls? Is it too much to ask for him dominate an inferior opponent? The Bears don’t need 4-for-70 from ARob tonight. They need 11-for-140. And they need that production to occur while the game is still being contested, not in garbage time. You can blame the quarterback play all you want but great receivers elevate mediocre quarterbacks. Is Robinson a great receiver?
It’s gonna be a rough winter across the country, as we find ourselves once again in the throes of Covid-19. So when FOCO reached out to me about partnering, I wanted to find a way to incorporate their stuff into DBB and try and have some fun with these crazy times.
Above is the gaiter scarf. They sent me one. It’s warm as hell and it can serve as a mask. And it ain’t that expensive. (Like $15.) Here’s the link to the product. Christmas is coming, folks, even if we’re not spending the day with our families. (We’ll have a giveaway from FOCO in Monday’s Volume II post.)
I always like the Chicago Bears.
But this is a unique time. I have reached the point with this offense where I no longer believe they’re capable of first downs. And when they do manage a few first downs, or make a splash play, I just assume the penalties and sideline mistakes that follow will sabotage the progress and keep the offense from scoring points. There can’t be a less fun unit in the NFL, especially considering their talent on the outside.
Me, London, 2019. (Back when I could go to London.)
The Rodgers Award-winning musical Rosa Parks, which I wrote with my collaborator and friend Scott Ethier, has been presented by non-profit theatres all over the country. Different spaces. Different directors. Different casts. Different everything. It’s taught me some of of my greatest lessons in the theatre. And I think some of them are relevant to what’s currently happening to Matt Nagy and the Chicago Bears.
Years ago, when the show was first written, we held auditions in NYC.
Will Harper – who has become a star on The Good Place – walked in with his script rolled up in his hand and “sang” Oscar Brown Jr.’s Signifying Monkey into those pages like they were a microphone. He was magnetic. There was no chance we weren’t putting him in this show in some capacity but he really couldn’t sing and Scott’s music is particularly difficult on non-singers.
I turned to the composer, affectionately known as “Half Pint” for his propensity to nurse half pints of Guinness once he feels he’s had too much to drink. “Let’s hear him read. No music.” Scott agreed. I had the casting director grab Will in the hallway and hand him a Martin Luther King Jr. side. (Sides are a brief passage of dialogue from the show used in the audition process.)
The side was a King sermon. But not a real sermon. King’s actual words are heavily protected by the family and they are a litigious bunch. I mapped out one of his sermons syllabically and wrote a knock off so good you could sell it on Canal Street.
He read it. He was brilliant. We had intended to write two songs for King. We scrapped that plan. We had our guy. We played to our strength. To this date, the show is better for those decisions. The songs were never written and they never needed to be.
We took the show to Palo Alto the next year and the company generously offered to pay for us to bring five performers. Having a show with 16 African American musical theatre roles is a lot of fun but it’s near-impossible to cast in most markets around the country. If you’re an African American musical theatre actor, you don’t stay in Palo Alto. You move to LA or Chicago or New York.
We didn’t ask Will. King, since it’s basically a non-singing role, felt easier to cast and teaching speeches is far less time-consuming than teaching songs when you have a limited rehearsal schedule. We weren’t there to cast so we didn’t meet our King until we arrived.
Guess what? Fucker couldn’t act. Like…he couldn’t act, at all. He was a straight-up singer. (I’m leaving his name out of this because I don’t want him to Google himself and find this criticism. He doesn’t know this story, and doesn’t need to know it.)
Whether Matt Nagy should be fired following the 2020 season is being hammered to death by fans on Twitter. The question does not come with an easy answer.
Down six offensive linemen against Tennessee, and with a quarterback requiring protection, one could argue Nagy did an adequate job on Sunday. This coming after the Saints game in which it now seems inarguable that the offense was somewhat adequate. The 2020 Chicago Bears offense is not going to be good and that is not Nagy’s sole fault. The coach just doesn’t have the horses to put a high-octane offense on the field. Adequate is the ceiling.
The Bears are 20th in the league in amount of salary cap space spent on offense. They entered last week 27th in DVOA. That’s a slight underachievement. But when you consider their most explosive player went down for the season in Week Three and their best offensive lineman was gone two weeks later, it’s more of a shoulder shrug than cause for alarm.
But it’s also evidence that Nagy certainly isn’t doing the job. The great offensive coaches elevate the talent on the roster. Does anyone on the Bears offense outplay their talent level?
A coach not putting up points without talent to work with shouldn’t be a surprise. Kyle Shanahan couldn’t do anything against Green Bay’s bad defense last Thursday night, as he was forced to shuffle his lineup. If Shanahan were in Chicago, you can bet people would be calling for his job, especially considering he is just 27-30 as a head coach. His 49ers were 27th in DVOA in 2018 and 19th in 2017. They jumped up to seventh last year.
What changed? Well, they’ve spent four top-70 picks on wide receivers and a top-10 pick at right tackle. They’ve invested a ton in the running back position and, perhaps most importantly, the offense has just been different when Jimmy Garoppolo — as average as he may be — is on the field.
The Super Bowl champions for the 2019 season were 5th in the league in points scored.
The Super Bowl champions for the 2018 season were 4th in the league in points scored.
The Super Bowl champions for the 2017 season were 3rd in the league in points scored.
The Super Bowl champions for the 2016 season were 3rd in the league in points scored.
The Super Bowl champions for the 2015 season were 19th in the league in points scored. (The had the game’s most dominant defense and the team they beat in Super Bowl was 5th in the league in points scored.)
The Super Bowl champions for the 2014 season were 4th in the league in points scored.
The Super Bowl champions for the 2013 season were 9th in the league in points scored.
The Super Bowl champions for the 2012 season were 10th in the league in points scored.
The Super Bowl champions for the 2011 season were 9th in the league in points scored.
The Super Bowl champions for the 2010 season were 10th in the league in points scored.
The Super Bowl champions for the 2009 season were 1st in the league in points scored.
The Super Bowl champions for the 2008 season were 20th in the league in points scored. (They had the game’s most dominant defense and the team they beat in the Super Bowl was 4th in the league in points scored.)
Three thoughts.
(1) Twice in the last twelve years was the Super Bowl champions not in the top ten in points scored. And both of those teams – the 2015 Broncos and the 2008 Steelers – were the best defenses in the league by a wide margin.
(2) The average points-scored ranking of the other ten teams is 5.8. The 2020 Bears are 28th. The 2019 Bears were 28th. The 2018 Bears were 9th, because their defense scored points. Then the defense stopped scoring them.
(3) Do you think the Bears are even close to being one of the ten best scoring teams in the league? Like…even close?
I always like the Chicago Bears.
Even when they are laden with Covid.
But let’s not bury the lede. It’s Arlington Hambright Week!
The Titans are a pretty easy team to understand.
First, they are not good defensively. They give up nearly 400 yards and 26.3 points per game. They might have the least impressive pass rush in the sport. They do manage to take the ball away and their +8 turnover margin is a big reason they’re 5-2 and tied atop the AFC South.
But with the Bears starting this collection of misfit toys on the offensive line, will they even be able to exploit obvious deficiencies?
Second, and not surprisingly, their offense is all about Derrick Henry. In the era of running back committees, Henry is averaging 23 carries a game and he’s the most productive back around. If Henry is running well, that opens the play action game for Ryan Tannehill. (Hell, even if he’s not running well, he’s always one carry away from an 70-yard touchdowns.) Two things the Bears should be concerned about:
(5) Islands in the Stream
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(4) I Will Always Love You
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(3) Hard Candy Christmas
