It was only one win but it felt like six. Thoughts:

• This was the classic Jay Cutler performance, even without proper usage of his legs. He moved the team up and down the field, behind a makeshift offensive line and without his top wide receiver. He threw one stupid pass. But with the game on the line and the ball in his hands he drove the Bears to their first victory of the season.
• Cutler continues to be a winning quarterback when the Bears play defense. The model isn’t brain surgery, folks. Cutler is not a shootout-type quarterback. There are only about five of those in the league and he isn’t one of them.
• Losing Will Montgomery can’t be overstated. NFL teams have collapsed under the weight of losing their starting center. But the Bears used their third round pick on center Hroniss Grasu this year. If he’s not moved into the starting lineup this week, one wonders how far off the kid is from playing?
• Still not sure I understand Matt Forte picking up 25 carries while Rodgers and Langford total 3.
• Hated how John Fox handled the ends of both halves. In the first half, once the Bears sack Carr on first down, Fox has to use the first timeout. He gave away a clear scoring chance. At the end of the game, who plays for a 49-yard field goal? I don’t care how good Robbie Gould is kicking right now – and he might be at his career best – there was far too much time to get ultra-conservative with the game on the line.

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We wanted to see improvement. We wanted to have hope. No improvement. Hope gone. Season over? Reactions…

• Up until the interception, Jay Cutler may have been playing his best game as a Chicago Bear. He had remarkable awareness in the pocket, made smart decisions and didn’t throw a single inaccurate pass. He also seemed to thrive with the read option concepts Adam Gase installed. Then a poor throw is compounded with the ridiculous decision to try and make a tackle. Now he’s got a “hamstring” injury. Those who hate Jay Cutler can hate him all day long but they should recognize this team this will be non-competitive without him.
• But wasn’t this Jay Cutler’s Bears career in a nutshell: flashes of brilliance, terribly pick-six, injury.
• Jimmy Clausen’s performance reminded me an awful lot of Shane Matthews in the 2001 playoffs. Jim Miller throws a pick. Gets injured trying to make a tackle. Matthews forgets how to play football.
• Clausen’s appearance also brought out the worst in Adam Gase. His play-calling once the backup entered the game fell off a cliff. Abandoning the run, stretch runs when only inches are needed…etc. John Fox has to step in during these sequences.
• Bears may have nothing in David Fales. They KNOW they have nothing in Clausen. Start Fales if Cutler can’t go.
• Kyle Fuller. Not good.

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John Fox has assumed command of the 2015 Chicago Bears without running away from the defensive disasters of the previous two campaigns. He is not taking a “those weren’t my teams, I don’t worry about them” approach. He is now the head coach of this proud franchise and seems to have accepted with that role all of the organization’s history as his own. From Adam Jahns’ piece in the Sun-Times:

The strongest message is on the binders of the defensive players: ‘‘Things must change. Be part of the solution, not the problem.’’

What must change is the passivity that has defined Bears defense for longer than a decade. Lovie Smith, while certainly an able-minded defensive coach, frustrated fans with his soft, Tampa-2 approach. During his tenure the Bears defense always seemed willing to allow the opposing offense to dictate the terms of play, waiting for mistakes instead of creating mayhem. Mel Tucker attempted to execute the same concepts, only with older and oft-injured versions of once great players.

51-23.

55-14.

On two nights in front of the nation, this decade of passivity reached its version of rock bottom. It is from those depths from which Fox must operate. And his acknowledging the existence of those depths is the first step in what will surely be a lengthy recovery.

The final installment of Andrew Dannehy’s optimistic training camp preview.

#2 Vic Fangio.

There has been so much talk about the offense, but it doesn’t matter unless the Bears get their defense figured out. Fangio isn’t a miracle worker. He’s also not Mel Tucker. The difference between the two can’t be overstated.

We’ve seen teams take huge jumps in the standings by adding new defensive coordinators. Just last year, the Vikings went from having the worst scoring defense in the league to the 11th-best because of Mike Zimmer. We’ve seen similar results from the likes of Wade Phillips and Dom Capers and Fangio himself helped the 49ers go from middle of the pack to elite.

The Bears secondary is still a disaster — at least Chris Conte is gone — but their front seven should be pretty good. All the talk about changing schemes is stupid. Fangio is a good coach who will find a way to make it work. He did last year in San Francisco when most of his talented players were on the sideline.

They won’t be elite next year, but don’t be surprised if they jump into the top-20, that really should be enough for them to win more games than they lose.

#1 The Relationship Between the Coach & QB.

The Bears have a good coach and a good quarterback. Teams with both almost always end up being good.

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Andrew Dannehy continues his look at why the Bears will exceed expectations in 2015.

#4 Contract Years. 

Alshon Jeffery and Matt Forte are the team’s two best skill position players and both are looking for a big pay day. The last time Forte was in this position, he was having the best year of his career and was on pace, before injury, to finish with one of the most productive seasons ever from a back. We haven’t seen Jeffery playing for a contract yet, but you can bet he saw the money handed out to Dez Bryant and Demaryius Thomas and wants to get his.

If both players have monster seasons, in addition to the other players they have, the Bears offense is going to move right along. Now, add in the fact that Marty Bennett also wants a new contract and Jay Cutler is essentially playing for his NFL life.

Nobody on the Bears was motivated last year. After a relatively successful offensive showing in 2013, they got arrogant. They can’t afford to do so again this year.

#3 John Fox.

Fox has been through this before. He’s taken over two teams that were disasters the year before, one going 1-15 the other 2-14, a 5-11 team shouldn’t be a problem, right?

In both of the previous instances, the Panthers and Broncos won six more games in Fox’s first year and this Bears team has significantly more talent than those teams did.

The Bears issue wasn’t/isn’t talent, it was all the X-factors that the really good teams don’t even worry about anymore. There was no chemistry and no leadership, Fox has proven he can help with both problems.

There has been a lot of excitement among Bears fans about John Fox this offseason.  They cite his 119-89 career record (0.572 winning %) as a head coach, and think it means similar good results are coming to Chicago.

I don’t mean to rain on anybody’s parade, but Fox’s record as a head coach is a bit overinflated.  He’s not a bad coach by any means, but he’s also not a great one.  Let’s dig in to the numbers to find out why.

Peyton correction

For one thing, Fox’s career winning percentage is skewed by the three years he spent with Peyton Manning.  You’ll pardon me for not crediting Fox when he had the greatest regular season quarterback in NFL history, fully developed, drop into his lap. In 10 years without Peyton, Fox averaged 8.1 wins per year and made the playoffs 40% of the time.  In 9 seasons over the same span (which correlates nicely to Peyton’s prime), Peyton’s teams averaged 12.4 wins and went to the playoffs 100% of the time.  In 3 seasons together, they averaged 12.7 wins and went to the playoffs 100% of the time.

Fox’s presence had basically no change on the outcome of Peyton’s seasons, while Peyton’s presence drastically improved Fox’s outlook.  So let’s look at Fox’s results without having them skewed by the Peyton years.

Who does he beat?

Let’s start by looking at game outcomes.  As I mentioned above, Fox is 81-79 in ten years as a coach without Peyton Manning.  I want to look at who those wins and losses come against.  I split up teams into three loosely defined categories: good (10+ wins, so typically playoff teams), average (7 to 9 wins), and bad (6 or fewer wins) and looked at Fox’s winning percentage against each category.  In order to adjust for the quality of opponent, I compared that winning percentage to what the expected winning percentage would be.  For example, Fox went 11-43 against 54 opponents with 10 or more wins, and those 22 opponents averaged 11.3 wins in the seasons Fox’s team played them.  Thus, opponents posted a winning percentage of 29.5% (4.7 wins in a 16 game season) against them.  Full results can be seen in the table below.

This provides some interesting results.  Fox’s teams did worse than expected against playoff-caliber teams, better than expected against average teams, and about as well as expected against bad teams.  Fox has a reputation for being a conservative manager in-game, and that perhaps plays out in his record against the top teams in the NFL.  You have to be more aggressive to beat good teams, who are not going to make mistakes and beat themselves.

Or this could simply indicate Fox’s teams (outside of the Peyton years) have not had top-level talent to compete with top teams, but they are still disciplined enough to beat everybody else.  Whatever the reason, Fox’s teams have struggled to beat playoff-caliber opponents.

Offensive and defensive production

Now I want to examine how Fox’s teams have fared on both offense and defense.  Like with win percentage, I looked at how many points Fox’s teams scored and gave up compared to what their opponents averaged that year.

Over the 160 game sample, Fox’s offenses scored an average of 19.4 points per game against defenses that gave up an average of 21.7 points per game, meaning Fox’s offenses have performed an average of roughly 2.3 points worse than expected as a whole.  On the defensive side of the ball, things look better.  Fox’s teams have given up an average of 20.6 points per game against teams that scored an average of 21.6 points per game, meaning they have been roughly 1.1 points per game better than expected (rounding error, the actual results are closer to 1.1 than 1.0).

Like with winning %, I broke down the results by quality of opponent, based on their offensive or defensive ranks in points allowed or scored, but this time there wasn’t really a clear pattern for either offense or defense.  The full results are shown below for offense and then defense.

Party like it’s 2004-12

So what have we learned? The Bears have a defensive-minded head coach who couples a below-average offense with an above-average defense, beats the teams he should, loses to the top teams, and ends up right around average.  Sound familiar?

Fox is Lovie.  Lovie is Fox.

In 10 seasons as a head coach, Lovie Smith is 83-77; in 10 seasons without Peyton Manning, John Fox is 81-79.  Fox’s offenses have scored about 2.3 points less than expected, while his defenses have given up 1.1 points fewer than expected.  For Lovie, those numbers are 1.7 and 2.1, indicating that his offenses have been slightly less bad than Fox’s and his defense’s a good bit better.

If there is one noticeable difference between the two, it is who they beat.  Lovie does about as well as expected against 10+ win teams (32% wins vs. 30% expected), worse than expected against average teams (43% wins vs. 51% expected), and better than expected against bad teams (78% wins vs. 72% expected).  Incredibly, Lovie has never lost a game against a team 4-12 or worse (25-0) in his career, and he’s also done a better job than Fox competing against other playoff-caliber teams, although he has been much worse against average teams, where Fox excels.

If Fox has one clear advantage over Lovie, it is that he has assembled a much more complete coaching staff than Lovie ever managed to do in Chicago.  Bears fans can only hope that makes a significant difference.  Otherwise, there are worse fates than simply being respectable, as we saw when Mark Trestman ruined ran the Bears.  If Fox keeps the Bears competitive and around .500 for 4-5 years by beating average and bad teams, then retires and leaves the franchise in solid condition for the next guy, I would consider that a job well done.

Maybe it was just a fist bump. Maybe it didn’t mean anything. But maybe it was a sign that, for the first time in his Bears career, Jay Cutler will have a head coach who can pick him — and the rest of the team — up when things aren’t going well. Maybe it was a sign that the Bears have a coach who understands the ups and downs that happen on game day and knows how to react to them. Maybe it was evidence that Cutler finally has a coach who can bring the best out of him.

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Jared Allen showed in 2014 he is still more than capable of being an every down 4-3 defensive end (when not battling the effects of a debilitating illness). Willie Young was arguably the entire team’s MVP – providing the pass rush that was sorely lacking the year previous. David Bass continued to display his penchant for making the big play. Christian Jones showed he’s a professional linebacker. Jay Ratliff played a few of the best games a Bears tackle has played in twenty-years. Lamarr Houston was the best run defender and most idiotic celebrater for half the season.

The Bears defense has guys who can do some things. But how those things are utilized by John Fox and Vic Fangio will make or break the Bears defense in 2015.

The key word: aggression.

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I had a lot of questions. Adam Jahns always has a lot of answers. On this pod we discuss:

• The fallout of the Ray McDonald signing at Halas Hall.
• Was Cliff Stein demoted with the hiring of Joey Laine? (Sure sounds like he was)
• Where the hell is Martellus Bennett and what does he want?
• Would giving Matt Forte another year tacked on to his deal suffice or is the back looking for a multi-year commitment?
• Shea McClellin. Lots and lots of Shea McClellin.
• The Ultra-Positive: observations from the John Fox practice field.

Perhaps the most unexpected thing to come from the Bears new regime is the consistent praise of annual disappointment Shea McClellin.

When Vic Fangio was asked about returning players who could contribute, McClellin’s name was the second one to come out of his mouth (after Kyle Fuller, of course). John Fox admitted to liking him come out of college and said he “has a bright future.” These are two old school football men. They have done this before. They have nothing invested in Shea McClellin.

Even though they didn’t pick up his fifth-year option (which would’ve made him one of the highest-paid inside linebackers in the league) the Bears have made it clear that they see McClellin as a piece of their defense, somewhere.

They genuinely seem to like him.

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