- Brad Biggs at the Chicago Tribune has 10 thoughts after the Bears loss to the Vikings on Monday night. He quotes Vikings pass rusher Jonathan Greenard on the performance of Bears back up tackle Kiran Amegadjie. Amegadjie started in place of the concussed Braxton Jones.
“I caught him a couple times,” Greenard said. “He definitely has potential. Once he gets comfortable within himself and understands how to play this game, it will slow down for him. In this environment, for his first start, it’s kind of tough to judge and gauge it. He had some good run block technique. He ran me by the quarterback a few times when I was too high with long arms, he continued to ride me by the quarterback. He has some stuff in there. You can work with that. Just a rookie.”
Pass blocking is the most visible part of playing the offensive line and unfortunately Amegadjie had a tough night of it. But it’s funny that Greenard mentioned Amegadjie’s run blocking because as I watched him during the game on what was evidently a rough night for the rookie, that run blocking is his strength. He was pushing men around at the line of scrimmage with ease and I loved every minute of that part of his game. I mean he looked capable of pushing guys off of your TV screen.
He’s got some things to work on but you can see why the Bears liked him.
- In an earlier article, Biggs quoted 49ers safety Talanoa Hufanga after the 49ers loss.
“For us, it was making him uncomfortable. I hate to say that because he is a friend of mine, but it was making him uncomfortable back there and our defense — our defensive line especially — stepped up. It was coming up with different disguises to try to get him off the spot. You never want to give a rookie quarterback something easy where what he sees is what he gets.
“And so for us, it was late rotations, it was coming out from depth and getting deep and sometimes just holding a look when he maybe thought we were going to move into something else. You’ve got to change it around and you have to stay on your toes and making him just think made him hold the ball a little bit more. That helped our pass rush get home.”
Not to harp on this but this is why you don’t predict 10 or 11 wins for teams with rookie quarterbacks.
- Adam Jahns at The Athletic while (correctly) predicting a Bears loss against the Vikings.
The Bears have three games in 11 days. That’s a tough task for the most proven head coaches in the NFL. But we’ll all get to see how Brown handles it as he tries to secure the permanent job.
I am so tired of this obsequious garbage from some members of the Chicago media as they make excuses for Thomas Brown. Jahns asked Brown a “question” after the 49ers game that was basically a statement that his shot at proving himself to be a head coach was unfair because of the circumstances. To his credit, Brown was having none of it and gave a generic answer that essentially didn’t acknowledge Jahns’ statement.
I’m positive that Brown would tell you that there are a thousand reasons for failure but not a single excuse. If he didn’t think he could do the job he would have told them to promote special teams coach Richard Hightower instead. He didn’t. He took it and now he’s got to succeed at it.
Brown’s up there making no excuses and I’m sure he expects his players to do the same. So why should we be making them?
- From Kevin FIshbain’s Q&A column last week:
Caleb Williams has the 30th ranked QBR per ESPN, and 29th in completion percentage. … Caleb’s accuracy has been terrible, and so was Mitch Trubisky’s. The eye test tells me to not take much stock in the QBR stat, but I had the same thoughts with Justin [Fields] and Mitch, and was wrong in the end. There are a bevy of valid excuses for Caleb’s struggles, but I’m done making excuses, so I’m going to go off the stats I see, which isn’t good. Please talk me off the ledge if you can. – Eddie K.
Eddie, buddy, there’s no use telling me about the ”eye test” if you can’t see the difference between Williams and Trubisky or Fields. It’s night and day.
Williams has a future as a starter in this league. It might now be with the Bears if they don’t get their act together. But it will eventually be with somebody.
- Biggs answers your questions
For those of us who are mired in despair watching this merry-go-round hit yet another new QB, new coach and possibly a new GM rotation, is there anything legitimately good to hang our optimism on? Or are we just going to be sad forever? — @mabdacuma
When the schedule is released every year, one of the first exercises I perform is looking at the quarterbacks the Bears will face. That’s a pretty good way of judging how things might shake out months ahead.
I reference this because if you’re looking for a reason for hope, that has to be rooted in Caleb Williams. If he’s the guy the Bears believe he can become, things could turn around much faster than anyone probably realizes with the team mired in a seven-game losing streak, tied for the fourth-longest in a single season in franchise history. (The Bears lost 10 consecutive games to close the 2022 season, had eight-game losing streaks in 2002 and 1978 and seven-game skids in 1997 and 1969. That’s it for single-season losing streaks of that length in the team’s deep history.)
If you can remove the emotion from it, the current slide is definitely different than the one to close out Matt Eberflus’ first season in 2022 and even the six-game losing streak in the middle of the 2020 season. Williams offers more hope than the quarterback situations in those seasons did. It’s fair to say there is more talent on the roster now, and of course there have been the frustrating late-game losses that piled up and led to Eberflus’ firing.
Biggs highlights the presence of Caleb Williams and I think that’s legitimate. But everyone (including Biggs) would agree that nothing will change unless the people at the top start making good decisions. And I very much question whether they are capable of that.
Let’s start with Ryan Poles before we get to the big guns here. I’d say that Poles has been a pretty fair GM when it comes to judging and acquiring talent. You can point to the failures here and there (I’m looking at you, Chase Claypool) and you can point out that he’s had one massive trade work out that gave him a bunch of picks. But you still have to take the right guys with those picks. He’s picked up some nice skill position players and he’s picked up a premiere pass rusher in an ordinary year in Montez Sweat.
The question is, of course, can he hire the right coach? History is not being kind to him on that front and I don’t feel the need to review it. But I will point out that he was reportedly with Eberflus every step of the way in those offensive coordinator interviews and he’s almost as culpable as he was when those hirings were made. Every reporter in town likes to point out that there was very little experience developing young quarterbacks on that staff now. But it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to see that back when the hirings were made, either.
- *Shane Waldron, the then offensive coordinator, is a former tight end who coached under Sean McVay, who undoubtedly did much of the quarterback coaching. He was a quarterback coach in name only one year in Los Angeles (2019). He worked with veteran Geno Smith in Seattle as offensive coordinator. Dave Canales was the quarterback coach. He’s now a head coach. Who do you think the rest of the NFL thought was responsible for Smith’s revival with the Seahawks?
- Thomas Brown, the then passing game coordinator, is a former running back who has never been a quarterback coach.
- Kerry Joseph, the quarterbacks coach, was the assistant quarterbacks coach in Seattle. Waldron stated that he will be doing the majority of the coaching in terms of the actual detailed performance and technique required on the field. He had never been an actual NFL position coach until this year.
- Ryan Griffin is an offensive assistant who retired as a player only in 2022 and has little to no NFL coaching experience.
How did Poles not look at this staff before taking perhaps the most valuable prospect the franchise has ever drafted and not say “What the hell?”. How does he actually participate in the process from start to finish and consent to hire them?
And that brings me to Keven Warren who many Bears optimists believe will make the difference in this search.
Warren’s record as an NFL executive isn’t obviously bad. At least teams keep hiring him, including the Rams, Lions, Vikings and now the Bears. But he’s never had a role in hiring personnel of any type.
And then there’s his stint as Big 10 commissioner.
Warren was named Commissioner of the Big Ten Conference in 2019 and, therefore, the Big 10 maneuvered through the COVID-19 pandemic. Badly.
The Big 10 initially canceled the entire 2020 season. At which point the SEC said, “What? You’ve got to be kidding!” and the ACC followed suit. Pretty soon everyone was playing except the Big 10. After a backlash from players, coaches and fans, the football season was eventually reinstated, and the Big Ten put together a nine-game, conference-only schedule for its programs.
Warren later said, “I don’t have any regrets. Quite naturally, we all look back on our lives and other things that we wish we would have maybe done a little bit differently. But if I had the chance to do it all over last year, I would make the same decisions that we made.”
Warren made the wrong decision by virtually every metric. And then doubled down on it. Sound familiar?
OK, that’s one decision. But it was a bad one in probably the biggest spot Warren had ever been in.
And his record with the Bears?
I’m setting aside the stadium issue because it’s not done yet and we don’t know where all of that is going to lead. But Warren was hired to provide oversight over the football program, too.
I get it. He’s not a “football guy”. But I collected that information above about the offensive coaching staff and so could he. It isn’t like you have to be a football coach. 30 minutes looking at Wikipedia pages would have done it. Where was he? The answer is either not doing his job or doing it badly. Either way, Bears fans have a big problem. But that’s nothing new, is it?
The Bears need people from top to bottom who have a history of making good decisions. Ideally that would start with ownership that makes good decisions and, therefore, hires people to oversee the business who also make good decisions. But we all know that is going to come down to hoping a blind squirrel finds a nut.
Have they found even one between Poles and Warren who Bears fans can count to make good decisions for this team and hire a good head coach? You will hardly blame me for having my doubts.