Bear(ing) the News – A Chicago Bears Blog

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.

Bears

• Defensive end Willie Young explains the catch 22 when it comes to generating a disciplined pass rush to keep a quarterback like Russell Wilson in the pocket while generating sufficient pressure. Via Dan Wiederer at the Chicago Tribune:
  

  “‘It’s like, what am I supposed to do?’ Young said. ‘Just sit here and pitty-pat with this tackle and get hung up on the block and let him just sit there in the pocket? Then I’ll come back to the sideline and hear that we’re not getting pressure on the quarterback.'”

  There’s no doubt that its a delicate balance. But teams do it all over the league. In Wilson’s case, its fairly obvious that the priority was to keep him in there and generate what pressure you can. Most of us understand the issue.

• It was good to see some Bears return to practice this week. Ebon Britton needed to get back on the field. Although Kelvin Hayden didn’t exactly look great Friday night it might be too little too late for Isaiah Frey. I’ve got to believe that he’s on the bubble. Time is running out on Chris Williams, too. From Rich Campbell at the Chicago Tribune.
• Brandon Marshall gets a little love from ESPN as he becomes a major part of their Monday Night Football promotion.
• Patrick Finley at the Chicago Sun-Times makes a good point:
  

  “[Quarterback David] Fales’ odds of making the final roster might have increased. If the Bears had hoped for him to join their practice squad, they likely wouldn’t provide other interested teams with four quarters of game film.”

  Of course that still depends upon how well he plays. Probably the Bears aren’t going to let what other teams might think stand in the way of their own evaluation. So I would say that the fact that Fales will play the whole game is more of an indication of the Bears willingness to keep him on the roster by allowing him the opportunity to play his way on to it.

• Mark Potash at the Chicago Sun-Times comments on the Bears special teams:
  

  “Thanks to the luxury of having [Devin] Hester in his prime, longtime coordinator Dave Toub usually had the Bears’ special teams ranked among the best in the NFL. Even when Hester wasn’t at his best, the Bears still found a way to return kicks and to cover them.”

  No doubt Hester was nice to have, especially at his peak. But let’s not overestimate his importance. Those units were a lot more than Hester. I don’t care how many guys you were shuffling in and out to take a look at, there’s no excuse for the Bears special teams to be as bad as they’ve been. For all of the hand-wringing over the defense, this is where the real point of greatest concern lies.

One Final Thought

Speaking of hand-wringing over the defense, I’ve read and listened to a number of media members who have repeatedly referred to this defense as “old and slow” and most have said the defense looks like last year’s disaster. This column from Rick Morrissey at the Chicago Sun-Times is typical.

Let’s get one thing straight. What we saw on Friday did not look like last year’s defense. We saw all kinds of penetration and all kinds of pressure from the defensive line. That alone is a huge difference.

The Bears were victimized by a good, talented offense that was playing at their best. They hit them on a good night. Even given that, I’m disappointed that they didn’t show better but I understand what they were up against and I’ve a feeling it would have been a different story with a little more development, a little more game planning and with a little more time together as a unit later in the season. They wouldn’t have won. But it would have gone better.

I’m not saying the current version of the Bears defense is going to remind us of the ’85 Bears. But lets cut them a little slack. They’re definitively better than last year. It not going to be great. But its not going to be bad, either, and I think if we just relax and keep things in perspective that we’re all going to enjoy watching them.

Bears

• Probably a lot of people were surprised at some of the cuts from Saturday thinking that players like Adrian Wilson and Nate Collins would stick until the final round. But the Bears were doing these guys a favor by letting them go early. They’ll now have plenty of time to seek out another team. Likely that’s part of the reason they were chosen.

• Brad Biggs at the Chicago Tribune wonders if defensive end Austin Lane didn’t make the team with his performance against Seattle. He’s got a point. It’s something to keep an eye on.

• Biggs also had this note:

  “One of the first players the Bears added to revamp special teams this offseason was linebacker Jordan Senn, who signed a one-year deal on March 13. The move came right out of the gates in free agency and came as a surprise to his former team the Panthers. But Senn has been getting little work with the first team and that would be a sign right now that he is a longshot for the roster.”

  I had Senn down as a core special teamer based upon the assumption that this was why the Bears signed him. But the depth chart at linebacker is crowded and obviously I was wrong as Senn was finally cut on Sunday. The Bears special teams are a mess and who those core players are going to be and whether special teams coordinator Joe DeCamillis is the guy to get them to perform are real issues.

• John Mullin at csnchicago.com predicts that the Bears will keep six wide receivers: Alshon Jeffery, Brandon Marshall, Santoio Holmes, Josh Morgan, Chris Williams and Marquess Wilson.

  He might be right but I’ve got my doubts about that group. Holmes hasn’t shown much yet and a lot will depend on the last preseason game for him. I think the Bears have serious doubts about Williams’s hands (both receiving and returning) and it wouldn’t be a surprise to see Wilson end up on IR with the idea that the Bears will bring him back at midseason. There are some interesting decisions that need to be made here.

• Mullin makes a good point in relation to the now settled backup quarterback competition. He believes that one factor was that the Bears could be confident that Jordan Palmer would be available if needed in an emergency but that Jimmy Clausen might well have been picked up by another team.

Elsewhere

• Devin Hester is making things work in Atlanta not only as a returner but also as a receiver. Hester’s had his problems but the biggest was his size and the fact that he just never clicked with quarterback Jay Cutler. Things seem to be going better down south.

One Final Thought

Another season, another pack of injured Packers. This year they are already fighting the loss of nose tackle B.J. Raji and center JC Tretter. The Packers seem to be particularly adept at gathering themselves to overcome these setbacks, needing to lose Aaron Rogers last year before bowing under the weight. It’s already looking another banner year for major injuries up there and its likely they’re going to have to deal with the storm again.

We can only hope the Bears do as well as they are unlikely to be as healthy on offense as they were last year. This is where you find out what your coaching staff and the men under them are made of. Here’s hoping its of sterner stuff than last year where the defense totally collapsed under the pressure.

Bears

• Dan Wiederer at the Chicago Tribune nails perhaps the biggest problem with the defense Friday night right on the head:
  

  “On the Seahawks’ final touchdown of the first half Friday night, quarterback Russell Wilson might as well have been playing against a Pop Warner team in walk-through mode.

  “After faking a handoff to running back Christine Michael, Wilson pivoted to his right and came right back to Michael with a dump pass on the right side of the field that went for an effortless 7-yard touchdown on third-and-1.

  “Michael was never covered out of the backfield and never touched on his way to the end zone. And for the Bears, that was the defense’s night in a nutshell.

  “Another third down, another blown play.”

  This sort of thing happened far too frequently. Fortunately its almost certainly all stuff that’s easily fixed. Let’s just hope that the situation isn’t too much like last year where you’d fix one problem only to have another one pop up in its place. This can’t be the first of an endless string of leaks in the dam or the team isn’t going to be making much progress this year.

• It’s understandable that over 80% of you thought the defense looked the worst of the three phases in the Seattle game. But I think you’re giving the special teams a pass. At least the defense came close to making some plays. From the Tribune.
• Brad Biggs at the Chicago Tribune quotes Bears safety Chris Conte:
  

  “‘I have to get back to playing at a high level,’ he said. ‘There are a lot of people that don’t believe in me and probably are not sure whether I can do it.

  “‘I want people to look at me and respect me and when they see me on the field, they say, ‘That guy is a good player.’ And when my peers play against me, I want them to think about me and respect me.'”

• Many people have been wondering why wide receiver Chris Williams has been given a better shot at being the kick returner. The word has apparently been given to the reporters that ball security problems early in camp may be the issue. Darius Reynaud has also had his share of problems with this. From Biggs.
  

  “‘Every returner has them,’ Reynaud said. ‘Even the great ones. That is the past. My reason for that was not judging the ball right and trying to watch those gunners out there. By the time I got my hands up, it was falling right in my hands and dropping it. It wasn’t me running and fumbling, it was me keeping my eye on the ball. That is something fixable. That’s the past. We’re here now.'”

• Steve Rosenbloom at the Chicago Tribune doesn’t think Bears head coach Marc Trestman was too thrilled with the signing of Santonio Holmes
• Dan Wiederer at the Chicago Tribune quotes defensive coordinator Mel Tucker on learning to tackle without actually being allowed to tackle in practice:
  

  “…oftentimes in practice when you’re allowed to go and form up and fit up a runner without leaving your feet, sometimes that’s even more difficult than making a live tackle. Because you have to gather yourself. You have to have great contact balance. You have to be in excellent body-in-football position to be able to deliver the blow and keep the runner on his feet and you stay on your feet and stay off the ground. We’ve done a lot of that.”

• Adam L. Jahns at the chicagofootball.com quotes Stephen Paea on the way defensive linemen are expected to play this year compared to last year:
  

  “‘We still have our gaps and responsibilities,’ Paea said. ‘But we help the other guys with the other gaps. Everybody has their own gap, but the way we design our defense now, if the running back doesn’t challenge your gap and goes to the other gap, you go to the other one.’

  “The goal is to make the linebackers Pro Bowl players by providing them with the freedom to move.

  “‘I put my hands on the center, and with the guard trying to block me, the linebacker is going to make the play versus last year where we would just go [penetrate] and the center would have a clean shot at the linebackers,’ Paea said.”

One Final Thought

Rich Campbell at the Chicago Tribune at the end of his Seahawks game story:

“In their last action before the games do count, the Bears’ first-stringers found out they didn’t measure up to the champions, and any talk of them possibly making a Super Bowl run of their own this season can stop until further notice.”

Look, I’m sorry to be a downer but anyone who thought this team was going to the Super Bowl before this game needs to get a grip. I’m a little disappointed that the Bears didn’t do better but I’m not surprised that they were out performed. Bears fans better get used to the idea that this group is going to be beaten this season by at least a few teams that are just plain better than they are.