Quick Game Comments: Rams at Bears 12/9/18

Offense

1. The Rams started the game without a spy on Mitch Trubisky. Trubisky ran for 9 yards on the first snap. You had a feeling that the Rams were going to have to do something about that.
2. The Rams were definitely ready for those wide receiver screens that the Bears try to use in place of a running game.
3. Dante Fowler was eating Bobbie Massie alive on the right side.
4. Trubisky’s accuracy problems are back. I guess you could have kindly called him “rusty”.
5. The good news is that the Bears were running the ball OK at the beginning of the game. It looked like the Rams were playing a light box figuring that the Bears couldn’t run on them.
6. It looked to me like the Bears might have been purposely targeting Anthony Miller and maybe Trey Burton early. Both were MIA last week.
7. After finding Miller and Burton in the first half they went immediately to Allen Robinson several times in the first drive of the second half. So apparently someone decided that they weren’t going to get it done without him as well.
8. I thought James Daniels did a good job on Aaron Donald.
9. Interesting little play to Bradley Sowell at the goal line for the Bears touchdown in the third quarter. As Cris Collinsworth very aptly put it, its starting to look like a magic show down there. Look here while the ball goes there…

Defense

1. The Bears did an impressive job of getting pressure on Jared Goff. The Rams aren’t the kind of offense that is going to back off and go to the short passing game out of fear of Khalil Mack. So it was going to be a contest at the line of scrimmage from the word go.
2. They also did a good job on Todd Gurley. They adjusted and started feeding it to him a bit in the fourth quarter. But generally they held him down before that.
3. It will be interesting to see the snap counts for this game. It looked to me like the Bears were rotating Mack out of the game more often than usual, possibly to keep him fresh for the end of the game.
4. I was impressed by how prepared the Bears were for the Rams offense tonight. It was evident that they’d were well prepared for what the Rams were running.

Miscellaneous

1. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth are the best there is.
2. Special Teams
   1. Anthony Miller is your new kick returner. About time. You didn’t know if the switch would help but it was obvious that Taquan Mizzell wasn’t getting it done.
   2. The Rams pulled out a fake punt deep in their own territory and pulled it off. Bears special teams are very concerning. They have to rank in the bottom half of the league in most categories. It seems that they let the team down in some way nearly every week.
   3. Cody Parkey missed another gimme tonight. Very concerning.
3. Drops weren’t a major problem on either side.
4. Penalties
   1. These illegal shift and illegal formation penalties on the Bears are getting annoying. Its worrisome that they haven’t cleaned it up yet.
   2. So Roquon Smith intercepts the ball and gives it to the offense inside the 5 yard line. Two penalties later and its first and goal from the 20. That’s just ridiculous.
   3. There were far too many penalties on both teams tonight. Bears: 6 for 45 yards. Rams: 9 for 57 yards. Very sloppy effort in that regard.
5. Turnovers
   1. Very annoying to see Trubisky severely over throw Miller for an interception on the first possession. You’d hoped that he would be over this tendency by now but the accuracy issues, particularly early in games, evidently continue to plague him. At this point, you wonder if its not going to pester us his whole career.
   2. Roquon Smith intercepted a terrible throw from Goff in the second quarter. Later replays showed that Goff’s foot was stepped on by one of his offensive linemen.
   3. Terrible interception of a Trubisky pass to a very well covered Allen Robinson at the end of the first half. The one thing that they couldn’t allow to happen was to give the Rams the ball close to field goal range. Awful decision.
   4. Crazy exchange of interceptions at the end of the third quarter with the first coming on yet another Trubisky over throw and the first Rams play immediately afterwards being an interception of a Goff pass by Kyle Fuller.
6. An awful lot of this game came down to the running game. The Bears averaged 6.1 yards per rush for 194 yards before wasting some runs to run out the clock at the end. The Rams were held to 2.8 yards per rush for 33 yards.
7. The Bears defense did a good job tonight but the vaunted Rams offense was definitely off for most of this game. Lots of miscommunications between the receivers and Goff. And Goff was less accurate than usual in the cold weather. This was a good game for the Bears against a good team and they hung tough. But if the Bears have to play them again, its safe to say they’ll be a different team in LA. They’re going to need more offense to compete and that means Trubisky is going to have to get a lot better very quickly. Incremental progress with two steps forward and one step back seems to be more his MO. We’ll see if he can change that.