Bear(ing) the News – A Chicago Bears Blog

Jeff Dickerson at ESPN is reviewing the Bears position-by-position. He starts with the offensive line where he highlights the guard position:

“Two-time Pro Bowl right guard Kyle Long and left tackle Jermon Bushrod should return to their customary spots in the starting lineup, although Long has the ability to eventually move outside to tackle if necessary. Veteran left guard Matt Slauson is completely recovered from a torn pectoral muscle that caused him to miss the final nine games of 2014 — Slauson also missed three games last season due to a high-ankle sprain. When healthy, Slauson is an above-average NFL guard and is a strong contender to retain his starting job.”

The fly in the ointment here is draft pick Hroniss Grasu. Grasu is considered to be the future at center and there’s the remote possibility that he could beat out Will Montgomery for that job. But center is a tough position to learn and most people believe that Grasu will be a guard for at least a year before moving to his natural position. If he moves into the starting lineup there, the assumption that it would be at right guard with Long moving to left tackle and Bushrod replacing Jordan Mills at right tackle. But as Dickerson reviews Slauson’s injury history above, you have to wonder what the Bears are thinking on the left. Is it possible that Grasu could move there in place of Slauson?

Slauson is entering the second year of a 4 year contract with $4.9 million guaranteed. The dead space on the cap would be $1.252 million if he was released which would make it unlikely that he would fail to make the roster. But that doesn’t guarantee a starting job. It’s also possible that Slauson would make a decent right tackle.

A move to left guard for Grasu might be more likely because it is considered to be an easier position to play for a rookie to play.  It generally results in fewer one-on-one blocks than the right guard position. And there’s no guarantee that Long would be as good at left tackle. You could argue that having a Pro Bowl right guard is more beneficial than an average left tackle – which Bushrod already is.

I’ve a sneaking suspicion that if he’s not starting at center, Grasu’s 2015 will be spent as a reserve.  The Bears are undoubtedly going to do more zone blocking but they are still going to mix it up and I doubt that Grasu has the size to play guard on either side of the line as well as the current starters. But if he moves into a starting roll this year you have to wonder if it will be more likely to be in place of Slauson rather than Long.

With the NFL calming down before the start of mandatory mini-camps and then training camp, news has been in short supply. Many outlets are settling down to get an overview issues facing their teams. In that respect, John Mullin at csnchicago.com has been taking a special look at what the Bears are going to do at running back.

The problem is that Bears head coach John Fox and offensive coordinator Adam Gase both have a history of using a running back by committee approach to their offense. Despite spending an inordinate amount of money on back ups to Matt Forte, the players behind Forte have traditionally gotten few carries. That’s partly because they’ve under-performed but that’s not the entire explanation. For instance, we can’t really say whether current backup Ka’Deem Carey was good or bad because he barely got a chance to perform at all last year.  That’s probably largely because Forte hates to be removed from games and the Bears have chosen to accommodate him by leaving him in rather than upsetting him. What Fox and Gase decide to do about this situation will be interesting to watch.

He doesn’t state it out right but as I read it, Mullin seems to be leaning towards the backups seeing more time with Forte just having to live with it. But I’m not so sure. Neither Fox nor Gase has indicated that they’re going to do anything other than play to the strengths of their personnel. Gase, at least, seems to recognize the difference this year:

“‘This is an unusual situation just because Matt has been in such great shape and has been so dynamic as far as staying on the field,’ said offensive coordinator Adam Gase. ‘We’ve just got to see how it plays out.'”

That may mean that if Forte shows no signs of wearing down, they will choose to do what the previous staffs have done – leave the best performer in. The guess here is that the Bears drafted Jemermy Langford with the idea that if he was going to languish behind Forte, he would at least contribute to special teams. That’s a very bad sign for Carey. I personally, like what little I’ve seen of him but he doesn’t contribute to special teams and he was, as it turned out, a waste of space on game day last year. That won’t happen under the current regime, which shows signs of being better able to manage the roster. Carey will likely either learn to contribute on special teams or Langford will win the job. And that may be the only difference in the way that the position is handled this year.

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.

John Mullin at csnchicago.com describes the changes along the defensive line that will accompany the arrival of new nose tackle Eddie Goldman:

“[Jeremiah] Ratliff, who did not attend last week’s voluntary minicamp sessions, is not expected to wind up at nose tackle after all. He can play the position. But because of his age (34 in August), size (305) and standing as the best pass rusher among the current defensive linemen, Ratliff projects to be at end where his rush skills can be put to maximum use, rather than hunkering down inside with a primary assignment of run stuffing.”

Mullin probably has the right of it. Even though he made the Pro Bowl at the position, I don’t think the Bears ever ideally wanted Ratliff as a nose tackle.

There’s a lot of talk about the defense being a hybrid and how it will do fine with linemen playing one gap – which is true. But as we watch the defense come together, the truth comes out. The Bears are going to prefer big two gapping linemen and will likely resort to those who play one gap in the base defense only when personnel makes it a necessary compromise.

Dan Wiederer at the Chicago Tribune documents which Bears veterans are threatened by the arrival of the new rookies:

“Round 5: Penn State safety Adrian Amos.”

“Put on notice: Brock Vereen and Ryan Mundy.

“The details: Sensing a theme here with Emery draft picks potentially being squeezed out by prospects in his successor’s first draft class? Vereen’s versatility, unselfishness and value on special teams gives him a chance to hang around on the 53-man roster when fall arrives. Furthermore, the Bears’ depth at safety remains thin. So Vereen still could win a role as a key reserve.

“Mundy’s case? He was a reliable defensive contributor throughout 2014 and projects to be the opening-day starter again in September opposite Antrel Rolle. But Mundy joined the Bears last year on a two-year contract that will expire in March. So if he’s anything less than superb this season and/or Amos shows a quick ascension, the sands in the hourglass may start to accelerate.”

I have to take mild issue with Wiederer here on Mundy, a strong safety who rates highly in terms of being a sure tackler. Not that the position couldn’t be upgraded but Amos is by all accounts a player who excels in coverage with good range.  As Wiederer suggest, you could argue that good man coverage skills could fit Amos in the lineup as a strong safety.  And he did play close to the line of scrimmage in college.   But I think his range along with the criticism that he’s not as physical as the Bears would like make him to be make him a better free safety.   I’ll be surprised in the Bears don’t start him in that position. This would make him a much bigger threat to Rolle, a player who’s considerably older at 32 and who was visibly slowing down and losing range last year.

Dan Wiederer at the Chicago Tribune interviews new Bears center Hroniss Grasu‘s offensive line coach at Oregon, Steve Greatwood:

“Hroniss first and foremost has been an outstanding teammate and an outstanding leader in this football program. He’s one of those young men who is universally respected by all teammates and not just his position group.”

This interview is great but I’m a bit concerned. Given several opportunities to talk about Grasu’s athleticism, Greatwood took a pass. Grasu is already kind of small and needs to gain weight. I wanted to hear how he was going to adapt physically to the NFL and didn’t get any of that.

Its really nice that Grasu is a high character guy and I think the Bears can’t have too many leaders. But he’s going to have a hard time leading anyone if he’s getting bowled over by bigger nose tackles in the NFL. He’s already got great technique by reputation and that will help. But he’s going to have to use his quickness and ability to move to overcome some of the hurdles he’s going to face. Here’s hoping he has the physical skills to handle the load.