I call it The Beige Beast.

It is a beat-up 2005 Chevy Cavalier that belonged to my dead grandfather. It’s got a front right bumper hanging on for dear life. It waived goodbye to 200,000 miles on the Merritt Parkway, bringing me back from a round of golf in Danbury, Connecticut in March. It passes inspection because sometimes miracles do happen and horns do blow.

Earlier this year, before the world put the emergency break on, my theatre company was running an after school program in an Asbury Park, NJ middle school. My uncle lives a few towns over so I decided to swing by there for lunch before heading to A.P. I found myself on a back road and the thing hadn’t been paved since about 1971. When The Beige Beast hits a pot hole, it feels like a crash. The impact is jarring. I know the next pothole hit could be the kill shot so I was swerving to avoid them and that involved a shitload of swerving.

Usually I’d notice if a cop was behind me.

This time I didn’t.

Lights. Siren. Pulled over.

He scuttled up to my passenger side.

The window is broken on that side so I had to open the door to speak to him. It had to look shady.

I gave him an expired insurance card but explained that I could show him the Geico app to prove the insurance wasn’t expired, just the card. That had to SOUND shady. He took my word for it and never asked to see the app.

He asked why I was swerving and I explained my pot hole issue. He joked, “I thought you might be looking at your phone.” I said I wasn’t and was only like five minutes from my destination.

And that was it.

“Keep her straight the rest of the way,” he said. He then walked back to his cruiser and we went about our days. I told my uncle the story and I never thought about it again until the last few days.

Because I’m white.

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“I can’t breathe”, they said.

The officers were not moved.

Now, the earth must be.

.@The_Dream99 talked. We listened. pic.twitter.com/PtmyY7o09S

— Chicago Bears (@ChicagoBears) June 4, 2020

It could be argued that no NFC North team improved as much as the Chicago Bears this off-season. Whether they can reclaim their spot on top of the NFC North is still a major question.

Starting today with the offense, here is how the Bears stack up with the rest of the division.

Quarterback

1. Minnesota

2. Green Bay

3. Detroit

4. Chicago

Analysis: It is impossible to rank Chicago’s quarterback — whether it be Trubisky or Foles — ahead of the others in the NFC North.

The big knock on Cousins has been his performance in big games, but he seemed to disprove that last year with a road playoff win over New Orleans. Rodgers is coming off of one of the worst seasons of his career and is 36 years old. He hasn’t sniffed his career passer rating of 102.4 in three years and has finished with passer ratings below 98 in four of the last five years. (While many have blamed his relative lack of production on a poor supporting cast, Green Bay’s front office clearly doesn’t agree as the only position they invested a major asset into this off-season was quarterback.) And despite Detroit’s constant attempts to ruin him, Stafford is right there with the other two, although a back injury makes him a bit of a question mark heading into the 2020 season.

Bears don’t have quarterbacks of this caliber.

Running Back

1. Minnesota

2. Green Bay

3. Chicago

4. Detroit

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Recently, I’ve found that explosive plays are really important to overall offensive production and explosive plays are extremely inconsistent from year to year on a team level. Today I want to look at explosive plays on an individual level to see if players can be fairly reliable counted on to be more or less explosive than expected.

The Set-Up

Like with the team-level data, I used performance from 2014-19 as my sample size. I used the Pro Football Reference Game Play Finder to identify all players who had at least 200 pass attempts, 50 pass targets, or 100 carries in each season. I chose these numbers as somewhat arbitrary thresholds to get a good mix of a sufficient data sample each year and a big enough sample size within each data point to make the data as reliable as possible.

I then looked up the explosive plays (runs of 15+ yards, passes of 20+ yards) each of those players achieved in those seasons. I used the data in aggregate to get average explosive play rates for each. Full data can be seen here.

• Passing: on average, 8.7% of all passing plays (including sacks) resulted in explosive passes. This data did not seem to change much from 2014-19, with each year fluctuating between 8.3% and 9.1% and no clear year-to-year pattern. I also double checked that smaller sample sizes didn’t skew the data, but the rate stayed the same when I only looked at player seasons with 300+, 400+, or 500+ pass attempts.
• Rushing: on average, 4.8% of all running back carries resulted in explosive runs. I’ll note I excluded QBs with 100+ carries in a season from this, because many of those are scrambles and thus have a much higher explosive rate, and the sample size of QBs with 100+ carries was too small to study independently. Again, this number didn’t change much year-to-year or if I had a larger carry threshold for inclusion (I checked 150+, 200+, and 250+ carries).
• Receiving: I split this one up by position, since WRs, TEs, and RBs are used quite differently in the passing game. Overall, 5.5% of targets to running backs, 11.1% of targets to WRs, and 9.3% of targets to TEs resulted in explosive completions. Again, there was little variation year-to-year.

I then used those rates as a baseline for how many explosive plays an individual should be expected to produce based on their volume for the year. For example, a RB with 100 carries and 100 pass targets should be expected to have 4.8 explosive carries and 5.5 explosive receptions. If they actually produced 6 explosive carries and 4 explosive receptions, they had 1.2 more explosive runs and 1.5 fewer explosive catches than expected.

To save words, from here on out I’m going to refer to that as the explosive differential.

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For the Bears, there is no more important issue looming than which man will be under center receive the shotgun snap when the Bears take the field against Detroit in Week One. Today I want to dig into the stats to see what we can learn about Foles vs. Trubisky, as well as what to expect from whoever wins that derby compared to other QBs around the NFL.

The table below shows basic efficiency statistics for Trubisky and Foles in the Reid offense (so Trubisky in 2018-19 in Chicago and Foles in 2016 in KC and 17-18 in Philadelphia), plus the other three notable recent Reid QBs (Smith 13-17, Mahomes 18-19, Wentz 16-19). I’ll note I included playoff stats for everybody because otherwise Foles’ sample size is just so small (less than 350 with just regular season, just over 500 with playoffs included). I also included the NFL average for 2018-19 as a frame of reference for what’s roughly normal around the league. I split up the data into short and long passes (targeted more than 15 yards past the line of scrimmage) using Pro Football Reference’s game play finder.

That’s a lot of information to digest, so let’s look at short and deep passes separately.

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Years back I decided to give 26 Shirts some prime real estate on DBB. We have always tried to use this platform to raise as much money for charity as possible and I liked the idea of a company whose foundational ethic was to help others. Over the years, we have had a lot of success with various designs and helped a great many people and organizations, especially my lovely friends at the Windy Kitty Cafe.

But we haven’t been successful enough. And the reason is simple.

My friend Del Reid (of #BillsMafia and drinking with me in Buffalo fame) and the folks who run this company have a passion for Buffalo sports and their products reflect that. I don’t even like the teams in Buffalo and I’ve bought three of those designs! The Chicago items tend to be less specific, and subsequently less interesting. To combat this I have built a sort of “ideas team” of artistic-minded friends who share a passion for Chicago sports. But that’s not enough.

Two other things need also to happen. The first is 26 Shirts producing the official DBB shirt for the 2020 season. That design has already been chosen and the shirt is in the works. Unlike they’re other products, that shirt won’t have a limited shelf life. It’ll be available on a rolling basis for the entire 2020 season. (It’ll benefit the kitties.)

The second is your involvement. If you have an idea for a clever Chicago sports tee shirt, please reach out to me via email: jeff@dabearsblog.com. You just need a concept. You don’t have to design it. They have brilliant designers. And if you have a charitable cause you’d like the proceeds to support, that’s even better. I don’t know anything about the Bulls or Blackhawks or Cubs or White Sox. And I don’t care to learn about them. Many of you do. And just one clever pun or inside reference could end up on a tee shirt and end up helping someone who needs it.

I don’t consider 26 Shirts an advertiser. I consider them a partner. And I’m invested in helping them expand their reach in Chicago and break seriously into the market. You can be a huge factor in making that reality.

Have a nice weekend. Stay healthy.

This is the quietest time on the football calendar, the lull between the the NFL Draft and the start of training camps. So here’s some stuff worth reading. Read it, don’t, I don’t care.

• Dan Pompei’s excellent piece detailing the battle scars of Kyle Long is a painful NFL read. One of the things that has often surprised me is the general obliviousness many fans have when it comes to the physical toll football takes on the bodies of these young, strong men. None of those fans will look at the game the same way after reading this staggering work.
• The Bears were very good on defense in 2019. But they weren’t good enough to compensate for a putrid offense. Adam Jahns breaks down the Robert Quinn signing and just how good that unit will need to be to return to the postseason in January.
• Is Cole Kmet a Y? Is he a U? Is he some other letter? Here’s what I know: he’s an impressive young man with whom the coaches are already in love. Adam Hoge at NBC Sports Chicago discusses his early days as a Bear and where he’ll fit in the 2020 offensive structure.
• The Arlington Hambright Section!
  • Kevin Fishbain at The Athletic profiles the young lineman’s rise from obscurity to the NFL.
  • Jared Porter of The Joplin Globe (Missouri) looks at one of Hambright’s coaches, Jeff Sims. “In life and specifically in football, the common thing you’ll hear someone say is that they’re a hard worker and they’re willing to do everything in their power to succeed for their family, their mother or whatever it may be,” Sims said. “I would say Arlington is one of the best at truly believing and living up to that.”
• From Mark Potash’s piece on Roquan Smith in the Sun-Times: “Despite the issues he has had in his first two seasons, Smith has been as good as advertised. His sideline-to-sideline speed, his instincts and his versatility — the ability to rush the quarterback, be a tackling machine and defend in coverage — give him a dangerous skill set for an inside linebacker. So far, he’s clearly general manager Ryan Pace’s best first-round pick. But by the eye test and Smith’s own testimony, he has a lot more to give.”

Juan Castillo.

The question was finally asked.

During Matt Nagy’s presser two weeks ago, Brad Biggs asked it bluntly.

“What makes Juan Castillo better than Harry Hiestand?”

As delicately as the head coach tried to answer, the truth was just as blunt.

“Juan’s biggest strength is his ability to teach and reach his players,” Nagy said. “There’s going to be times when he chews their tails out and there’s going to be other times when he’s giving them nothing but love.”

Castillo has a long history of developing late-round picks in need of polish. Hiestand, while having a long history of taking four/five-star recruits and making them into terrific NFL prospects, never successfully developed a player once they were in the NFL. That lack of developmental prowess stood out particularly with James Daniels in 2019, a high second-round pick who could’ve been a first rounder if the draft weren’t stacked at the position in 2018. He’s long, athletic and, by all accounts, smart. Yet, hasn’t been improving.

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The Bears produced the fewest explosive plays in the NFL last year, and given the importance of explosive plays to overall offensive output, that largely explains their status as one of the worst offenses in the NFL.

So I want to look at how consistent explosive plays are. We’ll start with a team-by-team basis, and then look at it on a player-by-player level in a follow-up article.

The Setup

I used Pro Football Reference’s Game Play Finder to track explosive runs (gained 15+ yards) and passes (gained 20+ yards) for each team season since 2014. I did this to have 5 years to compare season-over-season consistency (2014 vs. 2015, 2015 vs. 2016, etc.), giving a respectable sample size of 160 data points without going too far into the past, since the NFL is a constantly evolving league.

Results

I started by doing a simple comparison of explosive plays a team had in one year compared to explosive plays they gained the following year. As you can see in the chart below, there wasn’t much of a relationship.

As a reminder, correlation (R²) is a measure of how strong the relationship between two variables is. It ranges from 0-1, with 0 meaning there is no relationship whatsoever. So a value of 0.027 tells us there is basically no relationship between how many explosive plays a team has in one year compared to how many they will have the following year.

I’ll note I did similar looks for explosive runs and passes when separated out from each other and got similar results (R² < 0.07 for both). I also looked at all three in terms of explosive rate (explosive plays/total plays), and got similar results. I don’t feel the need to pepper this article with a bunch of similar graphs that show no results, but if you’re curious, the full data set and graphs can be seen here.

This then, would seem to suggest good things for the Bears. Just because they were unexplosive in 2019 does not mean the same will be true in 2020. 

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Memorial Day Haiku

It’s only a mask.

Lift it for each sip of Bud.

You’re American.