The Chicago Bears' loss to the Minnesota Vikings sunk any thought of them turning this season around and competing to get to .500. Sitting at 1-5 the Bears are good for a couple more upsets, but no more than five wins this season. The team built up some momentum in the past two weeks but saw a lot of that revert back to the old against the Minnesota Vikings. What happened?
3. The Chicago Bears went back to 11-personnel
One change the Chicago Bears made after the Chase Claypool trade was increasing their heavy personnel looks. This meant Darnell Mooney and D.J. Moore as the only wideouts and then shuffling in Khari Blasingame, Robert Tonyan, and Marcedes Lewis with the rest of the offensive personnel.
It may have been because of the defenses, but when these three played the most, the offense looked the best. On Sunday, they went back to more three-wide receiver looks.
Robert Tonyan went from 26.4% and 32.8% of the snaps down to 24.2%, while Lewis went from 29.2% and 34.4% to 24.2%. Worse than both of those is Blasingame, who went from 20.8% and 40.6% down to 12.1%.
This could be because of the injury at quarterback as well as the team trailing late. However, the team needed to go heavier to protect the banged-up quarterback, and they sat 6-6 with three minutes to go in the first half, and they were still leaning back into their wide receivers.
Some of the worst plays the Bears made were because of turnovers that started with pressure due to someone being matched up on the running back in pass protection. This is an issue that could have been prevented with a full back on the field. There was a need to get Tyler Scott more snaps, and that makes sense, but the team had to lean on their heavy identity that was working recently, and they did not.