Day: May 10, 2015

Brad Biggs at the Chicago Tribune answers your questions:

“Will Martellus Bennett still be on the trading block after camp begins? — @huskies714”

“The problem with trading Bennett right now is it would really thin out the depth chart at the position. The Bears have six other tight ends on the roster — Dante Rosario, Blake Annen, Jacob Maxwell, Zach Miller, Bear Pascoe and Brian Vogler, an undrafted rookie free agent from Alabama. Bennett had a career-high 90 receptions last season and the other six have combined for 202 catches in their careers: Rosario (116), Miller (46) and Pascoe (40). Unless the Bears simply don’t want Bennett, I find it hard to believe they can improve their team in 2015 by trading him. I don’t know that they would get a huge return in trade for him either. Remember the Bears got a third-round pick from the Carolina Panthers for Greg Olsen on the eve of training camp in 2011. My guess is Bennett is on the roster and a key cog in the passing attack.”

Though I agree with Biggs that the depth chart is thin at the position, I would question his assertion that the Bears can’t “improve their team in 2015 by trading him”. Biggs, himself was the one that wrote last summer about Bennett’s apparent problem with authority during training camp. His absence from voluntary minicamp because he wants more money two years short of his contract expiring says an awful lot about whether his “me first as an individual” attitude has changed. Bennet’s maturity level is obviously still questionable.

There was a lot of talk after the Brandon Marshall trade about “addition by subtraction”. The Bears may be in a similar position with Bennett now. As was the case with Marshall, its unlikely that they’ll get Bennett’s apparent value in a trade. But improving the Bears locker room has to be a priority as a new regime takes over and tries to reshape the Bears attitude as a team. Getting Bennett out of it may be a key to doing that.

Brad Biggs at the Chicago Tribune answers your questions:

“Too many years ago the Bears professed to coach to the strengths of the players. They also pretended they could improve upon weaknesses and, where they could not improve the players’ skills, they could employ strategy to limit the expression of players’ weaknesses. To the point: We’ve been hearing and reading about the Bears’ intent to convert from a 4-3 defensive front to a 3-4 defensive front. As I look at the roster of the defensive front, I see a treasure trove of talent. I see Jeremiah Ratliff, Will Sutton, Lamarr Houston, Willie Young, David Bass, Jared Allen, Ego Ferguson and Cornelius Washington (forgive me if I’ve forgotten some). And, now the Bears have Eddie Goldman. Given those players as a base, I wonder why the apparent jump from considering a 4-3 defense to a 3-4 defense? — Eugene L., Libertyville,

“You make a fair point but defensive coordinator Vic Fangio has had tremendous success running a 3-4 scheme and being part of 3-4 defenses in the past. There is never going to be a clean slate for a team to make such a change but I think you can make a pretty good case that the Bears were at as good of a point for a switch as a team could be coming off last season. Fangio isn’t going to ask these players to do something they can’t handle. With Pernell McPhee and Houston, I think they’ve got capable starters at outside linebacker. Allen, in my opinion, will probably best fit as a pass-rushing end in the sub packages. The others on the line, Ray McDonald and Jarvis Jenkins incluced, will sort themselves out. A 3-4 front provides more variety when it comes to pressure packages. Some readers have been clamoring for a move to a 3-4 for several years. It’s going to be interesting to see how the defense unfolds.”

Biggs says a lot when he states that the Bears were “at as good of a point for a switch as a team could be.” The decision to make this conversion likely in part has to do with the reader’s assertion that the Bears had a “treasure trove of talent” on defense.

The Bears poor defensive performance last year was for one or both of two reasons: 1) The talent was lacking and/or 2) the coaching was lacking. It’s probable that the Bears front office and coaching staff figures that they can do a better job than last year’s staff and there will be some improvement just because of that. Patrick Finley at the Chicago Sun-Times quotes Fangio who apparently agrees:

“‘We’re going to have to make our own building blocks,’ he said Saturday, his first public comments since his January hiring. ‘But I think any time you come to a new place, the first job is to make the players you already have better. That’s our job, No. 1, before you talk about free agency and the draft and whatnot.

“‘So we need to make the guys that we have here, better.'”

But obviously the Bears also concluded that wasn’t going to be enough to over-come the defensive deficit that the teams faces within the division. Combine that with Fangio’s likely preference for a 3-4 and the decision was made.

I think the Bears were making a staement with this switch. Don’t get your hopes up for the defense to instantly enter the top ten in the league. They obviously opted for a long-term rebuilding because they didn’t think they had the talent to pull such an improvement off. I would concur.

Rich Campbell at the Chicago Tribune relays the text of offensive coordinator Adam Gase‘s responses to questions at the coaches’ press conference yesterday:

“On if he has a sense of how he can help Cutler, particularly when it comes to protecting the ball:

‘Well, I think he’d be the first one to tell you we’ve got to get better in that area. I know this: you don’t want to overemphasize it because then everybody starts thinking about it and the next thing you know, you start turning it over. I learned that lesson in 2013. We kept talking about it and talking about it, and we kept turning the ball over.

“‘So, one of the things we have to do is, you practice it in individual, and you let those drills work for you. And I think more times than not it works out the right way.'”

I’ll believe it when I see it. From what I can see, Cutler’s troubles with turnovers come from poor decision making and, to a lesser extent, from trying to throw with anticipation to the wrong spot, something he rarely tries to do anyway. I question whether you can coach a quarterback into making the right spur of the moment decisions in game action just because there’s a limit to how many of those situations you can (or should have to be able to) anticipate as a coach. Better preparation might help but I can’t imagine that it’s going to solve the issue.

One thing Gase can do is limit Cutler to safer routes. But that, of course, limits the entire offense and the poor progress moving down the field that the offense made seemingly in each possession last year is a testament to what happens when you have to do that too much.

Whether Cutler’s tendency to turn the ball over comes from an innate mental deficit or whether its something that can be coached out of him in his tenth season will be interesting to see. Here’s hoping it’s the latter. But I’m not holding my breath.