Bears Blitz

Published by Bear Heiser on September 8, 2014
Article Source: Bleacher Report - Chicago Bears

If you’re looking for evidence to support the “money doesn’t buy happiness” theory, all you needed to do was watch the Chicago Bears defense play 57 snaps Sunday against the Buffalo Bills.

Money was supposed to buy a better defense. Not necessarily a great defense, just a better one: a middle-of-the-road defense. We did not see a better defense against the Bills. We saw more of the same—more of the same play that led to the Bears being the worst defense in the league last season.

Fingers will be pointed; that’s unavoidable. But before we go down that road, let’s briefly take a look at the strategy that got us here.

Heading into the 2012 season, Lovie Smith’s last as head coach, we were all asking ourselves if the Bears defense was too old to win. Led by Pro Bowl linebackers Brian Urlacher and Lance Briggs and cornerback Charles Tillman, the Bears defense went out and was No. 3 overall in the league in points allowed. We learned the window was not closed.

Lovie led the Bears to a 10-6 record and then got fired. General manager Phil Emery then hired offensive mastermind Marc Trestman to coach the team. Then Mel Tucker was brought in to coach the defense.

Bears players who were loyal to Lovie, Briggs and Tillman, most notably, weren’t happy with the move. Tucker kept the majority of Lovie’s defense in a move to appease those who weren’t happy Lovie got the boot.

And despite all that change, Emery and the Bears moved forward as if the window was still open. Emery tried to build a defense that centered around Briggs and Tillman, two guys who we just had finished questioning whether they still could play, and a handful of young players, then-defensive end Shea McClellin and linebacker Jon Bostic, who were nowhere near being able to contribute at the level the team needed them to contribute.

Then the 2013 season happened. Briggs and Tillman both got hurt and missed mass amounts of time, and McClellin and Bostic showed very little immediate value. The worst defensive season perception-wise in team history.

What happened next? Emery went out and spent millions upon millions upon millions. He went out and spent money to plug the holes around four guys who were on complete opposite ends of their careers.

While it’s definitely too early to make any definitive statements about the status of this new-look defense, file this away in the back of your mind, and revisit it later if the status quo remains the same.

The Bears defense didn’t need to post a shutout Sunday; all the unit need to do was be average, be mediocre, not be on the wrong side of the headlines.

And what happened against the Bills?

EJ Manuel, a guy who has looked nothing like a franchise quarterback, completed a career-high 72.7 percent of his passes and put his team in position to win when the time came.

The Bills run game recorded 193 yards on 33 attempts for a 5.8 average. C.J. Spiller gained 53 yards on 15 carries. Fred Jackson carried the ball seven times for 61 yards, with 38 of those yards coming on the play that set up Dan Carpenter’s game-winning field goal. Anthony Dixon rushed for 60 yards on five carries, including a 47-yard gain after making it through the line of scrimmage untouched.

The game ended about as badly as it could have for Tucker and his defense.

So what needs to be fixed, and how does it even get fixed?

For starters, the Bills did a great job of using the read-option and misdirection plays. But Chicago’s defensive line and linebackers did not make the necessary adjustments. The line was doing one thing while the linebackers did another. That’s exactly what we saw during the preseason too.

The edges weren’t protected, and the gaps were overplayed. Here’s an example of this in Dixon’s 47-yard run.

Above you are seeing Briggs doing a little bit of freelancing, going outside of what his assignment called for. He was supposed to be plugging the gap. He made the wrong read. The Bears defense as a whole was counting on Briggs being there to make the tackle. That’s how it works. Everyone has an assignment and is expected to carry it out fully so the other assignments can go as planned.

“We didn’t play disciplined football,” defensive lineman Lamarr Houston said, via ChicagoBears.com. “When you play good run teams, you’ve got to play disciplined football.”

Houston is right about not playing disciplined football, but it’s awfully tough to do so when the defense as a whole is playing reactionary football. Tucker allowed Buffalo’s offense to dictate his decision-making in virtually every respect.

The Bills ran the ball 33 times on 57 plays, and they did so out of formations that forced the Bears to use the nickel more frequently than expected. The Bears couldn’t play out of their usual base package that features starters D.J. Williams and McClellin, which put rookie cornerback Kyle Fuller and Bostic into situations where they were more likely to make mistakes.

Tucker and the Bears defense reacted all day. But this has been Tucker’s M.O. since taking over in Chicago. The Bills might not be a great team, but it doesn’t take a football genius or any sort of genius to look at past trends.

Bills coach Doug Marrone, despite the rifts with his front office, knows how to run an offense. He designed a game plan that attacked Chicago’s weaknesses—one that looked similar to what the Seattle Seahawks did in the Bears’ third preseason game.

Anytime the pocket moves, the Bears defense collectively struggles to move with it.

Jared Allen didn’t help the cause either. He might as well have not even been on the field. But sure enough, he was on the field for 54 of the 57 defensive snaps, according to Pro Football Focus (subscription required).

A guy who is not a run-blocker, a guy who barely played in camp and the preseason, a guy who arguably will be slower on grass than he was playing indoors on turn was on the field 95 percent of the time against a team that ran the ball 58 percent of the time.

Allen was signed to play a role, to be a pass-rushing threat. He was not signed to spin his wheels in the run game. Rookie defensive tackles Will Sutton and Ego Ferguson should have been getting their feet wet in the run game against a team that entered the regular season with very, very grim hopes for success.

Willie Young, who had a sack and frequently finds ways to get into the opposition’s backfield, should see more action.

The bottom line here is there is zero upside to having Allen on the field against the run. None whatsoever.

After the game, Allen said, via ESPN Chicago:

When you give up that many rushing yards, it’s embarrassing. What can I say?

It all starts with the run game. I know this league is about sacks and rushing the quarterback, but you do not win unless you stop the run. You don’t get chances to rush the quarterback unless you stop the run.

Obviously, we have to go back and watch the film and figure out where our run fits are, and play our fits. You got to make plays. We have to clean that up. If we stop the run today, it’s a totally different game.

Now there are many takeaways from Allen’s words. For one, it does start with the run game. And Allen clearly hasn’t yet realized he is not a strong run-blocker, despite statistically being one of the Minnesota Vikings’ worst run-blockers in multiple seasons, according to Pro Football Focus.

The second item is how the game would have been different had the Bears stopped the run. If you look at the yardage breakdown, the Bills had gains of 38 and 47 yards, equaling 85 yards. Without those two runs, the Bills only gained 108 yards on 31 carries, a very pedestrian average of 3.5 yards per carry.

You eliminate the big plays, and the game looks vastly different. Chris Conte’s day also would have looked much different.

Conte can’t catch a break. Let’s remember Conte was the best safety the Bears had in 2012, the last season when solid defense was played. Conte’s lackluster 2013 season was a product of his surroundings and so was Sunday’s game against Buffalo.

The safety position is designed to support the rest of the positions on the field. But that mindset goes out the window when those other positions aren’t doing their jobs.

Conte can’t be everywhere. He can’t make every open-field tackle. He’s not like Earl Thomas or T.J. Ward. He’s the all-or-nothing guy. He’s the guy who is going to make a great read and then intercept the pass, but he’s also the guy who now consistently finds himself on the wrong end of just about every outcome. You have to wonder what that has done to his confidence.

Conte wasn’t horrible against the Bills. He was decent. And he’s the most talented safety the Bears have on the roster. There is no player on the roster who can do better than Conte. While it sometimes can be fun to pile on the Conte blamewagon, he’s not the problem.

Conte was put in position to make a game-saving play late Sunday, and he failed miserably. The problem is not his failure; it’s that he’s consistently put in those positions to begin with.

It took the Seahawks a couple seasons to build the defense we’ve seen totally dominate the league. General manager John Schneider did it the right way too. He brought in players who were versatile. Players who could learn how to play within the concepts of a system. As the players grew within the system so did the system itself.

Signing Allen, Houston and Willie Young to big contracts isn’t going to save this defense. We were crazy to think it would. In these next few weeks, we will learn exactly where to point the finger. The building blocks to a better defensive system are in place. Now we just need to know if the organizers of those blocks know what they are doing.

Tucker had to play the politics game last season. He wasn’t able to implement the style of defense that got him the job in the first place. So what does he do?

Former general manager Jerry Angelo was great at finding defensive players and godawful at finding offensive talent. So far, Emery looks to be just the opposite. Let’s hope the powers that be at Halas Hall sit down and put together a plan that best suits this defense for the long term, not just for this season.

Can Emery learn from his failures in trying to build this defense with patchwork solutions?

Do you remember what happened in 2011 when the Philadelphia Eagles handed out huge contracts to guys like Nnamdi Asomugha, Jason Babin and Cullen Jenkins to play under a defensive coordinator who didn’t know how to scheme or make adjustments? Absolutely nothing happened because they stunk.

What we saw Sunday was a repeat of past mistakes. Let’s hope that future mistakes will be made due to trying new things by putting players in positions to test their capabilities within what the system is designed to do.

Let’s just hope this defense figures it out soon. Because pretty soon we’ll run out of fingers to point.

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