18 takes the field

in just 79 days,

with 1 goal in mind.

Don’t sleep on Bagent!

The best backup in the sport.

And a damn fine guy.

To all you Bears fans…

Let’s pipe down this off-season.

You’ll be glad you did.

It is called Hard Knocks.

It has not been good in years.

But I guess I’ll watch?

I hope everyone had a wonderful Father’s Day weekend.

There once was a coach called Eberflus.

Whose neck was well in the coaching noose.

Some wins were the suture,

He drafted his future,

And now Matt is rockin’ like Bruce.

Traditionally, the Bear With Us podcast is a grounded, analysis-focused take on the Chicago Bears.

That’s great for the middle of the season, but right now it’s June. Theoretically we could always talk more about OTAs, or maybe talk about the Haason Reddick and Aaron Rodgers drama, but now that we’re into the dead of the offseason I had a better idea — for one week, Nick and I allowed ourselves to be as recklessly positive as we felt like. The episode that resulted is an absolute firecracker.

Tune into this week’s episode for:

• My theory on how the Bears may be coincidentally positioned to catch the NFL in a 2-3 year downswing
• Nick’s theory on Caleb Williams’ potential 2024 season results
• A short discussion on whether Rome Odunze will end his career holding Chicago’s career WR yardage record… as well as whether he’ll be the first current Bear to claim it
• And much, much more…

Your Turn: How are you feeling about the 2024 Chicago Bears?

This is the final installment of a 3-part series looking at Chicago’s 2023 pass rush.

• In part one, we learned that the Bears had one of the worst pass rushes in the NFL, though it improved a bit after trading for Montez Sweat, especially when they were willing to blitz.
• In part two, we saw that Montez Sweat is a good but not great pass rusher, while all of the other defensive ends on the roster are bad at rushing the passer.

Today, we’re going to end the series by exploring Chicago’s defensive tackles.

Overall Efficiency

We’ll start with a season-long look at how Chicago’s main defensive tackles performed when rushing the passer. The table below shows a variety of per-snap metrics, including how they ranked compared to the 98 DTs league-wide who had at least 200 pass rush snaps. A few quick notes:

• All data comes from Pro Football Focus (PFF).
• Win rate is the percentage of snaps where PFF determines that the rusher has beaten the blocker at any point in the snap. This is admittedly subjective, and thus should not be used on its own, but can be a helpful part of a larger picture.
• Pass Rush Productivity is a unique PFF stat that accounts for all sacks, QB hits, and pressures on a per-snap basis, with an added weight given to sacks; a higher value is better.
• True pass sets look only at plays that do not give offensive linemen a built in advantage: no play action, no screens, and the throw time has to be at least 2 seconds. This lets us see how effectively a player rushes the passer when they most likely know they are getting after the QB, and the offense knows they have to block for a while.
• Values in the top 25% are highlighted in green, while those in the bottom 25% are highlighted in red.

Read More …

This is the 2nd installment of a 3-part series looking at Chicago’s pass rush from 2023. In part one, we learned that the overall team pass rush was among the worst in the NFL.

Today, we’ll be examining how effectively Chicago’s defensive ends rushed the passer last year.

Overall Efficiency

We’ll start with a season-long look at how Chicago’s main defensive ends performed when rushing the passer. The table below shows a variety of per-snap metrics, including how they ranked compared to the 95 edge rushers league-wide who had at least 200 pass rush snaps. A few quick notes:

• All data comes from Pro Football Focus (PFF).
• Data for Montez Sweat is only for the 9 games he played in Chicago.
• Win rate is the percentage of snaps where PFF determines that the rusher has beaten the blocker at any point in the snap. This is admittedly subjective, and thus should not be used on its own, but can be a helpful part of a larger picture.
• Pass Rush Productivity is a unique PFF stat that accounts for all sacks, QB hits, and pressures on a per-snap basis, with an added weight given to sacks; a higher value is better.
• True pass sets look only at plays that do not give offensive linemen a built in advantage: no play action, no screens, and the throw time has to be at least 2 seconds. This lets us see how effectively a player rushes the passer when they most likely know they are getting after the QB, and the offense knows they have to block for a while.
• Values in the top 25% are highlighted in green, while those in the bottom 25% are highlighted in red.

Read More …

This is the start of a 3-part series examining Chicago’s pass rush in 2023 and what expectations should be for 2024. The content covered in each part roughly breaks down as follows:

Part 1: Overall team pass rush, and the impact of trading for Montez Sweat.
Part 2: Defensive end individual pass rushing efficiency.
Part 3: Defensive tackle individual pass rushing efficiency, including rookie progression for Gervon Dexter Sr. and Zacch Pickens.

Let’s dive right in!

Overall results

We’ll start by examining Chicago’s overall team performance rushing the passer last year. The table below shows how the Bears ranked out of 32 NFL teams in generating sacks and pressures, as well as how often they blitzed. All values in the top 25% are highlighted in green, while those in the bottom 25% are in red. All data for this article, unless otherwise noted, is from Pro Football Reference.

Side note: sorry if the tables don’t show up well in the article. You can click on them to view in full on a separate page. 

A few thoughts:

Read More …