Chicago Bears Coaches Corner: Week One

Coaching Issues:

This is where I have to give out some of my harshest grades.  There were, in my estimation, two serious mistakes made by Coach Nagy and his staff, and one of them is just astonishing.

Adjustments Are Needed, Coach:

The first is that the coaching staff didn’t adjust as the game went along.  As Green Bay adjusted their offense and defense to counter what the Bears were doing, you could almost watch the frustration on the Bears staff.  It was almost as if they were saying to themselves, “This… should… work…”  It was frustrating watching the Packers staff defend and counter the Bears game plan, and then to not watch the Bears do the same in reverse.

Green Bay realized that Rodgers couldn’t throw down the field on his knee, so they shortened the passes and started playing a West Coast type of game.  Did the Bears respond with Cover-2 or Cover-3 to put defenders in their way?  Not really, they just kept playing man-to-man and rushing different combinations of blitzers.  By the way, changing up blitzers is not changing the defense to match what the offense is doing.  The result?  Green Bay was able to turn short routes into 10-12 yard gains for the rest of the night.  The literally beat the Bears at their own game in the second half.

Green Bay’s defense, by Trubisky’s own confession, switched out of man coverage and into a zone package.  They started to throw the kitchen sink at the Bears, and low and behold, it worked.  Yet when the switch was made, did we counter with more strong runs up the middle?  Did we counter with deep routes along the sideline or in-between the hash marks?  No, we kept trying the screen pass and the intermediate routes.  No adjustment, nothing, and it cost us the game.

The Big Letdown:

However, not adjusting was not the most egregious of the mistakes made by Coach Nagy and his staff.   The worst thing was them watching their team decelerate and start to coast at the end of the first half and not lighting them up for it.  They allowed their team to take their foot off the gas.  They thought the game was over, and the Coaches didn’t make the players play to the whistle.  It showed.

Look, there was a time in the NFL where it was considered bad form to run up the score.  Two touchdowns were an almost insurmountable lead and switching the game to cruise control was normal as not to be a bad sport.  But in today’s NFL, where quarterbacks like Brett Favre, Aaron Rodgers, Tom Brady, Payton Manning, and Drew Brees can light you up in less than a quarter, the only way to play the game is to keep piling it on.  There is no longer such a thing as an insurmountable lead in the NFL, and the moment you start to think that there is, it comes back to bite you as it did Sunday night.

I hope that Coach Nagy was upset.  I hope he was upset with himself.  I hope that he looked in the mirror last night and scolded himself for “quitting” when he should have kept fighting.  I know I would have.  If he did, perhaps last nights loss will serve as a learning lesson for a young head coach who, despite public fervor, is still learning all that that means.  It’s only one game, and if they can turn it around and use this loss, then the rest of the season is easily salvageable, and this loss will simply be a footnote in the rear view mirror.

Conclusion:

The Bears were always pegged to go 8-8 by most, I said 9-7 is the most likely outcome.  Yet despite all of the bad that happened, there was enough good for me to stand by my prediction.  I think the Bears take the lessons from this game, build on what they’ve done and end up 9-7 (+/- 1).  There’s no reason to think that this was the end of the season, thankfully, it was just the beginning.

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