On this short pod, Jeff discusses Ryan Pace’s inability to get the tight end position right in his first years on the job. Shaheen’s expectations should be low, if existent at all.
Short Pod: Shaheen Injury Disconcerting [AUDIO]
On this short pod, Jeff discusses Ryan Pace’s inability to get the tight end position right in his first years on the job. Shaheen’s expectations should be low, if existent at all.
The rankings continue. To read part one of this three-part exercise, CLICK HERE.
Some of these guys will be battling for the final few roster spots, but none — outside specialists — are competing for starting spots.
There really isn’t a lot to say about Bray. He knows the offense and is good for the QB room. He’s just not good on the field. He’ll get some playing time during preseason, but won’t make the roster.
The preseason hero of 2017 has made it on the team the last two years, but this is likely his last stand. Gentry has potential and should get another shot elsewhere should he fail to make the squad.
The UDFA tight end who everybody seems to like. A good athlete who looks like a natural receiver. He just could make the final cut as the fourth tight end.
Huge dude (6’9″, 328), who has played some in the league. Not an ideal third tackle, but he can play in a pinch.
I recently looked at the history of teams to make a significant improvement from one year to the next and found that many of them win fewer games the year after their breakthrough season. This suggests that the Bears might be due for a bit of a letdown from their 12-4 record in 2018 (though they do match the profile of teams that generally stay good after making the jump.)
Today, I want to look more closely at Chicago’s underlying performance in 2018 to see if there’s anything there to suggest they are a team poised for a fall. This is closely modeled after work Bill Barnwell does every off-season, where he uses three factors to identify teams who are likely to improve and likely to regress.
The first factor is called the Pythagorean expectation, and it is a measure of how many games a team is expected to win based on how many points they scored compared to how many points they allowed. The exact formula can be seen here, but the general idea is that truly good teams score a lot more points than they give up. Teams that win a lot of games without a large difference in points scored/allowed were considered more lucky than good and are likely due for a fall.
The Bears didn’t significantly outperform their Pythagorean expectation, which means they won a lot of games because they were legitimately good, not lucky. So far, there is no reason to think that significant regression is coming.
The 2nd factor looks at how well teams performed in close games, which Barnwell defines as having a final scoring margin within 7 points. I think 8 points makes a lot more sense given that’s still a one possession game, but in this case it doesn’t change anything for the Bears, so we’ll stick with 7.
I made it out to Bears training camp for their first open practice today, so I wanted to share a few observations. This was the 2nd day of camp and there were no pads, so I’m not going to focus too much on specific plays. I’m more interested in what the depth chart roughly looks like now and what guys look like they do or don’t belong, athletically speaking.
It’s starting to get real.
The Sun-Times scribe wrote an excellent “five questions” preview for Bears camp. It was so good I scrapped the idea of writing of my own. (I shouldn’t have been alone.) Finley takes on the big, obvious questions (Trubisky improvement, health, kicker…etc.) but it was his focus on the backfield that caught my attention. I urge you to go and read the entire piece HERE.
4. How much did they upgrade at RB?
In his three NFL seasons, Jordan Howard posted more rushing yards than all but two players: Ezekiel Elliott and Todd Gurley. Still, he wasn’t a fit in Nagy’s offense.
“When you have a running back that doesn’t excel at running routes and creating mismatches on the perimeter in the passing game, it makes you predictable,” Bears player personnel director Josh Lucas said in June. “One of the reasons we moved on from Jordan.
The Bears got little back when they dealt him to the Eagles in March: a sixth-round 2020 pick that could improve to a fifth-rounder. They believe their two new running backs — third-round pick David Montgomery and signee Mike Davis — can fare better than Howard.
The Bears will search for the right timeshare in the preseason. Tarik Cohen will continue to be the Bears’ dynamic, do-everything weapon. Nagy and Pace praised Davis’ offseason work, but the well-rounded Montgomery is the likely favorite to lead the team in rushes.
“It’s hard to always predict the number of carries in this offense by a running back,” Nagy said. “Who knows? Maybe one guy is hot and he gets 20 carries in this offense. It really hasn’t happened yet, but it can happen.”
My theory: Montgomery is going to be the horse running back in this offense by October.
One of the most surprising developments in my Bears news consumption over the years has been how little time I spend with anything coming out of the Tribune. But this excellent piece from Tim Bannon deserves your attention. It’s just…amazing. Here’s the first few paragraphs of the article.
George Halas was late.
The 20-year-old had a summer job with Western Electric, and on Saturday, July 24, 1915, he planned to join his coworkers aboard the SS Eastland to cross Lake Michigan for the telephone company’s picnic in Michigan City, Ind.
But by the time Halas reached the Chicago River dock, the Eastland was overturned.
Roughly 2,500 employees and their families had boarded the ship, and at 7:25 a.m. it began listing and swaying from side to side.
A large crowd of horrified spectators watched as the Eastland — a few feet from the bank of the Chicago River between LaSalle Drive and Clark Street — turned on its side. It was in 20 feet of water, deep enough to drown 844 people trapped or trampled below decks.
It is the deadliest day ever in Chicago and the greatest peacetime inland waterways disaster in American history.
In his quarterback tiers story, @SandoNFL got more favorable reviews than Mitch Trubisky’s ranking would suggest. A must-read for NFL fans, see how the QBs are ranked with insight from 55 coaches and execs https://t.co/trcQxP6fYn pic.twitter.com/RJ0uDUc57u
— Kevin Fishbain (@kfishbain) July 22, 2019
On this short pod, Jeff discusses why this training camp opening is different from all over training camp openings.
This is part of a series of collaborations between film guru Robert Schmitz of Windy City Gridiron and stats guy Johnathan Wood of Da Bears Blog. We’re excited to be working together to bring fans of both sites great content by combining our approaches.
Previously, we’ve identified the deep passing game as one area where Mitchell Trubisky struggled in 2018. He missed a lot of throws to open targets, which resulted both in a low completion percentage and too many interceptions.
However, we also showed that deep passing performance is highly variable, and thus Trubisky is likely to improve there in 2019, especially with some tweaks in his throwing mechanics that can be made to help his accuracy.
Today we want to look at what targets would benefit most from that expected deep ball improvement, should it happen. In order to do that, I used Pro Football Reference’s Game Play Finder to look at what players Trubisky targeted deep most frequently in 2018. That information is shown in the table below for all five players who were primary weapons for the Bears in 2018.
Allen Robinson was Trubisky’s most frequently targeted deep threat, but Anthony Miller got – by far – the highest portion of his total targets and yards from Trubisky on deep plays. Despite finishing 5th on the team in targets and yards, both by a healthy margin, he was 3rd in deep targets and 2nd in deep yards.
With training camp getting underway this week, it’s time to get to know the entire roster.
Because I didn’t want you to have to go through the entire roster, I went ahead and did it for you. For the third straight year, I’ve ranked everyone – from the guys who are never going to make it to players who are among the very best in the entire league. What made this year more challenging is the pure depth the Bears have on their roster.
While this list is made up of guys who very likely will never have an impact in the league, there are several who I could easily see surprising.. That just wasn’t the case in years past. The Bears are good and that shows even at the very bottom of the roster.
(Note: If the two kickers continue missing as much as they did throughout the spring, this is a very accurate ranking for them. What good is a kicker who can’t make kicks in practice. Good thing they have time to get better.)
For the first time in a long time, the Chicago Bears were legitimately fun to watch in 2018. Following years of terrible, boring teams, they went 12-4, scored some big man touchdowns, had plenty of awesome celebrations, and started the most exclusive club in the country to celebrate their wins.
But 2018 was last year, and now I’ve seen some worry that it will prove an aberration. They point to the 2017 Jacksonville Jaguars, who made a similar jump from years of awful to a division win and playoff berth before falling back to Earth in 2018, as a sign of what is to come.
While I’ve been on the record going back to 2017 that this is the earliest year when their title window will fully open, I still wanted to take a realistic look and see if there might be reasons to expect regression in 2019 instead. Accordingly, I’m looking at recent NFL history to see how teams similar to the 2018 Bears followed it up the year after. Since the NFL switched to its current 32 team, 8 division format in 2002, that serves as a nice starting point for this study. I looked at wins per year for all teams from then to 2017 (the last year in which we can track how teams did the year after), and identified teams similar to the Bears in a variety of ways. Full data can be seen here.
To start out, I looked at teams that won 12 or more games in a season, as Chicago did in 2018. That data can be briefly highlighted like so:
The average team that won 12+ games decreased by just over 3 wins the following year, which makes a lot of sense. It’s hard to win 12 games in a season, which is why fewer than 5 teams per year, on average, do it. Remaining one of those top 5 or so teams for a 2nd year straight is no small feat.
The best place kicker in movie history?
I. A Tweet from Data.
I found that the average K finished 13th in the NFL in FG % in the Super Bowl season. 6 top 10, 8 11-19, 6 20th or worse.
So it turns out you can win a Super Bowl without a great kicker. But he can’t be too terrible; worst was 23rd in field goal percentage.
— Johnathan Wood (@Johnathan_Wood1) July 17, 2019
Data did a nice thread on Super Bowl kickers and this Tweet was the basic summation.
I agree with his basic conceit that the Bears don’t need a great kicker over the duration of the NFL season to have a great NFL season. But how many times do we need to see kickers make SIGNIFICANT kicks in the postseason to understand that this position makes and breaks postseason runs almost every season. I’m not questioning whether the Bears can win ten games with one of these kids kicking their field goals. They can. I’m questioning whether they can win a title. And that’s the goal now.
II. A Comment from the Comments
From “That Guy”:
