Bears Blitz

Published by James on October 19, 2009
Article Source: Bleacher Report - Chicago Bears

As Ron Turner, Jay Cutler, and the Bears‘ offense go back to the drawing board to figure out how to get the giant Red-Zone monkey off of their collective backs, the entire team has to sit back and wonder how they managed to utterly collapse at the most crucial point in the game.

Despite outplaying the Falcons in almost every major statistical category, the Bears fell to Atlanta in a heartbreaking loss for the second consecutive year.

With five games in the books, the defense seems to have held up its end of the bargain, and the special teams unit has been good much more than they’ve been bad this season. The wide receivers have answered most of their preseason critics and Jay Cutler is on pace to set a franchise record for passing yards in a single season. So what’s missing?

I’ll give you one guess.

It might be that the offensive linemen thought that by signing Jay Cutler last April, the coaches had let them off the hook a little bit. After all, who needs a running game when you’ve got a quarterback can throw the ball a country mile?

Hopefully the loss to Atlanta will serve as a huge wake-up call to the Bears’ front five. In the next few weeks they’ll face some very good defensive fronts, and if this team is going to have any prayer of making the playoffs, they’re going to have to dig down and win games the hard way.

The Bears can’t do anything about the difficulty of their schedule. All they can do is turn on the game film, fix the mistakes, strap up their helmets and hope for the best. But as anyone who watched Sunday night’s game or the Packers, Seahawks, and Steelers‘ games can surely tell you, the biggest problem with this team is their complete inability to effectively and consistently move the football on the ground.

Unfortunately for the Bears, at this stage in the season, that’s a problem that no amount of film study can correct.

Make no mistake, the offensive collapses we’ve seen from the Bears in the Red Zone so far this season are merely a microcosm of a much bigger problem with the offensive line, and unfortunately there is no simple solution; no miracle medicine or free agent they can sign to come in and make things all better.

Despite Lovie Smith’s commitment to the philosophy of running the football, Matt Forte has had nowhere to run throughout this season, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the reason why is the lack of room afforded him by the big guys paid to move people out of his way.

Heading into the Week Three game in Seattle, the Bears were optimistic that Forte and the offensive line would enjoy a breakout performance against an injury-plagued Seattle defense that let Frank Gore rush for over 200 yards a week earlier.

Forte finished that game with 66 yards on 21 carries.

Jumping ahead to last night’s matchup with the Falcons, the Bears should have been happy to be facing a team whose defense was allowing over five yards per rushing attempt.

Once again, the Bears’ offensive line made a fairly ordinary front seven look like Chuck Noll’s Steel Curtain defense.

For fans, perhaps the most frustrating truth about the Bears’ inability to get the running game going so far is that by rights, this season’s offensive line should have been vastly upgraded from last year’s, with Chris Williams, Frank Omiyale and Orlando Pace replacing John Tait, Josh Beekman, and John St. Clair respectively.

But six weeks in, I can’t help but think that if this is Jerry Angelo’s idea of an upgrade, it’s a wonder the Bears didn’t open their season sporting throwback leather helmets from the 1950’s.

Call me a cynic, but I’m guessing the Bears will dismiss these concerns by either internally blaming Matt Forte himself for his lack of productivity, or possibly tell the Chicago media that the offensive line just needs more time to “jell” and come together as a group. Maybe, just maybe, they’ll place some of the blame on the shoulders of offensive line coach Harry Hiestand.

After all, it’s much easier to cop out and do any of those things than to admit that your offensive linemen just simply aren’t any good, despite how well they might have played in years past. If you want evidence, just turn on the tape.

The truth is that Orlando Pace and Frank Omiyale have been getting blown off the ball on nearly every running play, Olin Kreutz hasn’t looked like his old self at all this season, and first round pick Chris Williams certainly hasn’t played up to the lofty expectations the Bears had for him when they drafted him in 2008.

I can break down your average 2009 Bears possession as follows:

First down: Forte off left guard for no gain.

Second down: Garza’s trap block gets blown up as a mediocre defensive tackle pushes Kreutz back into his path and the handoff to Forte is stuffed in the hole. Forte manages to bounce it outside for a gain of two.

Third Down: Shotgun formation. The defense pins their ears back, sends pressure and Cutler either completes shy of the first down marker and takes a huge hit from a blitzing linebacker, or throws it out of bounds because he had a 325-lb. defensive tackle in his face.

Fourth Down: Punt.

Even when the Bears do convert on third downs, their line continues to ask Cutler and the receivers to carry the load again two plays later.

Last season, Forte could sometimes wait patiently in the backfield for a sliver of space to open somewhere along his line, which often paid dividends with big gains for the rookie running back.

This season the same patience has been rewarded only by swarms of angry opponents slamming him to the ground. No running back can last long in this league under those circumstances.

With the Vikings (6-0) and Packers (3-2) both winning Sunday, the Bears are now tied for second place in the NFC North. Worse still is the fact that they are staring down a gauntlet of tough games starting with a second consecutive road game against a stingy Bengals squad, and ending with murderous November with games against the Cardinals, 49ers, Eagles and Vikings.

If the Bears take this loss for what it is and learn from it, then at some point in the future, they might be able to look back on this game and see it as a turning point in the season like the Giants did after they fell short but went the distance with the undefeated Patriots in Week 17 of the 2007 season.

But if they’re going to learn from this loss and fix it, they’re going to have to first admit to the problem. Hopefully they’ll manage to do both before next Sunday.

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