Broken Bears Offense Still Looking For A Fix

With the New York Giants in town last Sunday, the Chicago Bears were set up to get their offense back on track. New York came in with a bottom third defense in every category, but the Bears still only managed one lonely field goal as they entered the half trailing 7 to 3. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong for Chicago’s offense in the first half, with a red zone interception from Mitchell Trubisky, open receivers being missed, more dropped passes, and penalties erasing big plays.

But it wasn’t only a bumbling offense in that first half for Chicago as it was a three phase failure that had Bears fans booing at Soldier Field. There was a kickoff out of bounds to start the day, a shanked punt, and even their stellar defense had some hiccups that nearly led to a couple more scores. Luckily for the Bears, Giants kicker Aldrick Rosas missed a 42 and a 43 yard goal in the second quarter, the second of which set Chicago up with good field position to get three points of their own after a 9 play, 59 yard drive orchestrated by Trubisky in hurry-up mode.

And speaking of hurry-up mode, Trubisky said at his post game presser the he prefers to play with urgency and tempo, so why doesn’t head coach Matt Nagy allow them to do that more often?

I get that it’s not something you can do for a full sixty minutes, your defense would revolt, but it is something that should be worked into the game-plan more often to take advantage of mismatches more often.

Trubisky also mentioned after the Giants game that he likes to get out of the pocket more than what the Bears have done this year. Against N.Y., Nagy called a few more designed play action roll outs than usual and (here’s a shocker) Trubisky had some success with them.

With as much that has been made about Trubisky overthinking things this year and struggling to get out of his own head, Nagy has been just as bad in that department, although his comes from a place of stubbornness. Nagy wants Trubisky to be the QB he wants him to be, but he should look at the “Be You” he has written on his play-sheet let Trubisky be himself.

With another bad defense up for the Bears on Thursday when they face the Detroit Lions in the Thanksgiving opener, Trubisky and the offense will get another chance to get into a rhythm. Nagy finding his rhythm as a play caller will be aided by his ability to put his players in the best possible situation for success, because nothing thwarts the flow of the game like getting caught in third and long situations. So far this season we’ve seen brief snippets from Nagy where he put his ego aside and did what he doesn’t want to do (i.e. run the I-Formation), but now with his QB basically laying out the plan he wants to follow we’ll see if Nagy can accommodate him.

The Lions can’t stop anyone so let’s see if Nagy commits to the run a bit more, allows Trubisky to get out of the pocket with more play action and designed roll outs, game-plans in a few instances (beside at the end of the halves) where they play no huddle, and lessens the constant shuffling in of different personnel. We’ve seen him do these things at times during the team’s first 11 games, but he’s just not consistent enough in doing them.

If Nagy does this the Bears will climb back to .500 and then suddenly the season get’s interesting again.

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By Lester A. Wilftong Jr