3 notable changes Chicago Bears defense made in week 5

The Chicago Bears defense has not been performing up to snuff, especially when you consider that they have defensive mind Matt Eberflus as their head coach. Still, many teams and coaches see the first four games as an evaluation stage, and it means that changes may start to come by the fifth week of the NFL season. That is exactly what happened, as we started to see small tweaks and shifts by the Bears defense.

3. Increasing Trevis Gipson playing time

One thing that had been irritating the Chicago Bears fan base is the usage of Trevis Gipson and Al-Quadin Muhammad. Muhammad came from Indianapolis, so he had a jump on the competition because of coaching staff familiarity.

Still, through four weeks of the NFL season, it was not close. Trevis Gipson had more pressures, more run stuff, and about half of the snaps that AQM had.

In week one, the split was 43-26, in week two, it was 39-23, in week three it was 37-24, and in week four it was 35-28. So, the difference in snaps was 17, 16, 13, and 7. You could see it coming, and finally, in week five, they made the switch.

Muhammad played 44 snaps while Gipson played 46 snaps. Of course, it is not the complete switch, but more like two ships slowly passing in the night. Still, from a big split to a small split, to Trevis Gipson now leading the small split, we have seen the shift over the past three weeks.

It is hard to say that this will not continue. Gipson recorded four pressures, and we hardly heard from AQM for another week. If anything, this will continue the trend and we may see an even bigger split next week. Heck, we may even see the starting designation change. It took some time, but the coaches did make the change.