Chicago Bears: Matt Nagy’s differing schemes in 2020

Matt Nagy reverted back to his 2019 offense

Now that Foles was in, Nagy was finally able to trash the offense that was actually working and go back to his inefficient, high-passing volume offense that made people want to pull their hairs out and scream at their T.V.s. That sounds like a good idea, right?

Now let’s compare the beginning of the season to Week 4 and on shall we? Well for starters, the Bears lined up under center back to the exact same rate as they did in 2019 at 24% from Week 4 and on. Their rush success rate dropped from 52.6% in the first three weeks to 33.7% in the remaining weeks.

In Nagy’s defense, injuries to their offensive line have lowered the rate, but they should not have lowered it by almost 20%.

Finally, the personnel groupings. The Chicago Bears have lowered their heavy tight end sets — more protection for Foles and more blockers on run plays — from 39% to 27.8%. Now, why would we want to have more help on the run or protect our quarterback?

What is the result of this? Well, as the Bears ran for over 130 yards in each of the first three games, they now have never run for over 100 yards in a game since. Even against the porous Carolina Panthers (63 yards) and the weak Minnesota Vikings and Tennessee Titans (41 and 56 respectively), the Bears couldn’t muster over 65 yards of rushing.

So what does this mean? This means Nagy is not truly looking at the analytics, and these are just the basic ones. He truly would rather die running his system than stay alive running what works and it’s worse than unfortunate to see that. On top of that, it is just selfish.

If the Bears want to even have a chance at the playoffs, the Bears need to revert back to this. They need Trubisky back in at quarterback running the heavy under-center offense that the Bears succeeded in running. Will it happen? Likely no. But we can dream, can’t we?