Chicago Bears: 3 things we learned about the Giants in Week 1

No. 2: The Giants have the receiving corp to make this game competitive

Perhaps it means I didn’t do my homework hard enough, but hopefully, someone else relates to this sentiment — I did not expect to hear the names “Quintez Cephus” and “T.J. Hockenson” as much as I did in Week One.

This Chicago Bears team was a guarantee for some question marks within the secondary; a group doesn’t go into an offseason with position battles at cornerback and safety without ensuring as much. At some point in Sunday’s game, each of the featured members in Chicago’s secondary had a highlight film-worthy play or two. But there were certainly drive-to-drive hiccups on their end, too.

The turning point of the Bears-Lions game, to me, at least, seemed to come when the Bears’ offense fell short late in the second quarter and gave the Lions the ball with a minute to go. The Lions successfully ran off 17 consecutive points, in an offensive flurry that bled in the third quarter. The key culprits? A lack of pressure on Stafford, and his ability to pick them apart on those intermediate routes.

Daniel Jones’ film and Next Gen Stats chart reads about the same as Stafford’s, albeit much less aggressive. Jones loves attacking the short left side of the field and kept his attack within 20-yards, perhaps knowing how formidable Pittsburgh’s defensive line was. Only five of his 26 passes went beyond the 10-yard mark (Stafford had 9).

That being said, the weapons around him give New York the potential to turn those into big plays in an instant. Darius Slayton has emerged as one of the better young wide receivers in the league. Pair that with Sterling Shepard and Barkley, one of the game’s premier pass-catchers at the RB position, and Jones has a chance to have a decent statistical line in Week 2.

To piggyback on that, if there’s one thing that stood out even without a second look at the film was how much of Detroit’s passing success was contingent on Danny Trevathan being unable to make plays in the pass defense. The 30-year-old nearly gave up the game-winning catch in Detroit, and struggled mightily, his 29.3 PFF coverage grade 67th among 70 linebackers.

Players of his caliber almost always bounce back. Week 2 could present a shaking of the cobwebs, or it could prove to be a sign of things to come.