Bears
- Brad Biggs at the Chicago Tribune answers your questions:
“Why was Kelvin Hayden re-signed and not offensive line depth given the current situation? Did Phil Emery explain the thought process behind this? — @BDGDEB from Twitter
“Good question. One area I thought the team might go with the roster spot after Marquess Wilson was shifted to IR with the designation to return was on the line. The other area I thought about was special teams. Emery has not publicly weighed in on the move. Perhaps the Bears want insurance in the event Kyle Fuller’s ankle injury crops up again.”
Offensive tackle/guard Ebon Britton might be brought back after the first game. If they bring him back before that, they owe him a year’s salary. If they bring him back after that its week-to-week.
- Quarterback Jay Cutler at the end of a very long article focusing on the dynamics in the quarterbacks room and on some philosophical points in regards to the scheme by Dan Wiederer at the Chicago Tribune:
“A lot of this stuff has worked for one year. We don’t really know if it works. Everybody in the media wants to say that we have all the answers. We don’t have all the answers. We’ve done it for one year. And really for probably eight or nine games. A half-season. So we’ve still got a lot of things to figure out.”
Yes, I think they might have some challenges left. Certainly getting things right in the quarterback room is a good place to start and taking care of protection issues with the offensive line is a good thing to stress up front. But if I had to pick one major challenge that the Bears offense has on its plate its executing as a unit.
The two biggest factors for success in the NFL are health and execution (i.e. 11 guys all doing their jobs correctly with no penalties and no mistakes). I saw very little of the latter during the preseason. Trestman, Cutler and company may well find themselves growing in a new direction as they focus their attentions in this direction in the coming year – executing plays that not just Cutler is comfortable with but that everyone is comfortable with and executing them correctly as back up personnel trot in and out of the starting line up.
Things went pretty smoothly last year but that is very uncommon. The odds are good that the offensive personnel are going to face considerably more adversity this year. How they handle that will define them.
- Rich Campbell at the Chicago Tribune makes a good point:
“Running game will gauge right away whether the Bears’ defense has improved. Athletic quarterback EJ Manuel and shifty running backs [C.J. Spiller] and Fred Jackson will test the Bears’ discipline and tackling with some zone-read runs. ‘Guys like Spiller and Jackson, they’re so quick to be able to just — when you get out of your gap one second — they can jump, stop, cut and be right back in your gap full speed in no time,’ end Jared Allen said. ‘It’s just going to be disciplined football.'”
This was a problem last year. We’ll see if anyone learned anything, especially the linebackers, pretty quick.
One Final Thought
Wiederer along with Campbell makes some good points in this video about the Lance Briggs problem early in the week. Briggs is obviously a child, handling the situation like a 16 year old girl trying to put one over on the doting old father, asking for a “personal day” knowing full well that Bears head coach Marc Trestman would trust him not to ask for it unless it was something on the order of a family problem.
Not any more. The guess here is that Trestman learned something of a lesson about who he could trust.
Patrick Finley at the Chicago Sun-Times reports that the Bears will be naming captains game-to-game this year. Briggs was one last year when they were naming them for the season. It will be interesting to see how often he’s a captain this year.