Many people noted after the Bears game that they liked the “adjustments” that the Bears made at halftime of the Bengals game last Sunday. I actually couldn’t put my finger on anything that could be identified as different (other than they moved the ball a lot better). Indeed, when I pressed people to tell me something more specific, freely confessing that I’d missed the boat, they also struggled to tell me exactly what changed.
As far as I can tell, it turns out that the biggest adjustment was fairly simple. Head coach Marc Trestman explains via Adam L. Jahns at the Chicago Sun-Times:
“We’ve got to get our pads down on both sides of the ball. It’s not unusual to see players playing high in the first game and the team that has the lower pad level is usually the team that moves the line of scrimmage. Our pads got much lower in the second half and we played better.”
That was undoubtedly not the only adjustment. But it’s good to know that the game still comes down to fundamentals when its all said and done.