I usually try to publish my impressions of the Bears at the end of preseason. But here we are, in week 5, the Bears are taking an early bye week, and I'm just now getting around to writing the first blog post about them this season. This is mostly due to the fact that I really haven't been able to tell what to make of the Bears yet, under first-year head coach Ben Johnson. It's been a wild, up-and-down start to the season.
The Bears looked unstoppable offensively, in the 2nd preseason game. They cruised up and down the field, everything seemed to work, and they crushed the Buffalo Bills. But the Bills weren't playing many (if any) of their starters. So ... good for you ... I guess? Your first-string unit playing a heavily-scripted gameplan steamrolled the Bills' 2nd team unit running basic coverages. It was really hard to judge the Bears after that game.
Perhaps, if the first unit played similarly well against the Chiefs' defensive starters in the following week, then I could get excited. But that didn't happen. The Bears looked sloppy and had trouble moving the ball against a Chiefs team that was playing most of its defensive starters. So that was worrisome...
The Bears did manage to win both of those games (and tie their preseason opener against the Dolphins, in which neither team played any starters). So I guess the preseason at least showed that the Bears' backups can likely be counted on in a pinch. That's something.
Photo credit: Ashlee Rezin, Sun-Times.
Ben Johnson and Caleb Williams have had a rough start to their first year together.
Then the regular season started, and the first 2 weeks did not look good. The Bears got off to an early lead against the Vikings on Monday Night in the opening week, only to melt down in the second half and loose the game. Then week 2 happened. The Lions absolutely crushed their former offensive coordinator's new team, 52-21. The offense looked bad, and the defense looked worse. Could it be that Johnson and his staff did not know how to coach and call a defensive game? If so, that's really bad, because the offense wasn't looking very good either. You would hope that an offensive-minded coach would at least move the ball and score a lot of points, even if their defense is giving up a lot of points. But you aren't going to win many games if you give up 52, no matter how good your offense is.
At this point, I was already starting to see headlines suggesting that Johnson should be fired, Ryan Poles should be fired, and that Caleb Williams should be benched in favor of Tyson Bagent. I'm pretty sure these headlines were just click-bait trolling, so I didn't bother reading any of the actual posts. Yes, the week 2 defensive performance was catastrophically bad, but one blowout 2 games into a new administration is not the end of the world.
Week 3, however, would be very telling. Would the Bears throw in the towel? Would Johnson and defensive coordinator Dennis Allen clean things up? The Cowboys had just traded away their best defensive player (to the Packers, no less), and so they weren't expected to be as good as they had been in the past couple years.
Well, the Bears ended up smoking the Cowboys 38-14 in a game that was never competitive. The Bears were all over Dak Prescott, sacking him and picking him off multiple times. This defensive momentum carried into week 4 against the Raiders. The defense picked off Geno Smith 3 more times, and also recovered a fumble. The defense was playing with a chip on its shoulder.
The offense, however, was still struggling. The Bears had 3 turnovers in the first half against the Raiders, that each gave the Bears the ball in or near the red zone. Yet the Bears were only able to muster 6 points, while the Raiders had put up 14 (including one score off of their own turnover). This was not looking good. Once again, the offense was really struggling and could barely move the ball.
Worse yet, the Bears showcased some frustratingly familiar mental mistakes. There were multiple problems with the snap exchange from center to quarterback -- this was despite the Bears signing a veteran center in free agency. I've been watching the Bears regularly for 20 years now, and I do not understand how they keep having problems with simple shit like snapping the ball! From Rex Grossman, to Kyle Orton, to Jay Cutler, to Mitch Trubisky, to Justin Fields, and all the other QBs in between, I've been seeing fumbled snaps happening every season. This stuff keeps happening. New QBs, new centers, new coaches, new general manager, it does not matter who is coaching or playing, the Bears cannot reliably snap the ball to the QB.
I attended the Bears game in Las Vegas, and saw some frustratingly familiar snafus...
Maybe this is more common than I think, but I just don't see it happen to other teams because I don't watch enough of the other teams' games. But of the games that I do watch, I rarely see these sort of basic football activities fail so spectacularly for other teams. I mean, yeah, there's the occasional "butt fumble", but that was a once-in-a-generation gaffe. The Bears, on the other hand, are fumbling snaps almost every time they're on TV.
This is the sort of shit that I was really expecting Ben Johnson to clean up and fix. I just did not expect these sorts of breakdowns to happen under his coaching. But here it is!
Once again, the Raiders game was a tale of 2 halves, with the offense coming alive and taking a lead in the 4th quarter. The defense and special teams still had to bail the offense out by stopping a Raiders' game-winning drive and blocking what would have been a game-winning field goal.
The Bear's 2nd half success has been largely credited to the decision by the coaching staff to make changes to the lineup of the offensive line. Rookie Theo Benedet replaced Braxton Jones in the 2nd half. The other rookie lineman, Ozzy Trapillo, started the game in the place of injured Darnell Wright.
Benedet played better than Jones in the 2nd half against the Raiders, and is now expected to be promoted to the starter after the Bears' bye. This means that coach Johnson has 2 weeks to get Benedet up to speed, and to build chemistry between him and the rest of the offensive line. Hopefully, this helps improve the Bears' running game, which has really struggled. All the attention is going to Caleb Williams, and the protection that the offensive line is (or isn't) giving him. But I'm honestly more concerned with the running game. Offenses just tend to work better when you can reliably get 4 or more yards on a run.
I hope this lineup change works out, and that the ship gets righted. I would hate for the Bears to have to start looking to draft another first-round QB in the last year of a lame-duck coach's tenure, only to scuttle that QB's confidence and potential. Surely, that won't happen a fourth time in a row! At the very least, GM Ryan Pace should have learned a lesson, and should know to fire Johnson if we end up needing to look for a new QB in a year or 2 because Caleb just hasn't worked out. I don't think it will come to that, but I'm still not going to hold my breath for this to all work out.