You have to hand it to the Bears. Few, if any, teams have ever wadded up the good will and hopes of a fanbase more efficiently than they did on Thursday night. Thirty NFL teams haven’t even played yet and somehow the Bears’ Super Bowl hopes are completely gone.
It wasn’t just that they lost to the Packers, it was how they did it. Their vaunted defense completely dominated Aaron Rodgers’ new offense. The Packers lost 12 yards in the first quarter. They only could mount two scoring drives. Rodgers was completely ordinary, and was harassed on every play. The only touchdown the Packers scored came on a sad little lobbed pass into the end zone that was just begging to be intercepted, but Jimmy Graham boxed out Deon Bush and caught it.
But on offense, the Bears were completely hapless. We all had our questions about Mitch Trubisky. Would he take the next step? He became a pretty good quarterback last year. Not great, not even really good, but good. And if you paired that with a dominant defense, you were going to contend.
It turns out he took another step. A step right into the shitter. He was terrible. He was tentative and confused to go with his usual sustained bouts of inaccuracy. His offensive line did him no favors by being tossed around like rag dolls by the Packers, but even when Mitch did have time, he wasn’t going to do anything with it.
The ceiling for the Bears was lowered considerably in just one game. This isn’t a Super Bowl team. It’s probably not even a playoff team. The Packers are better than they were last year, but they’re not that good, and despite never leading by more than seven points they were never in danger of losing.
Ryan Pace has gotten a lot right in his five years as the Bears’ general manager, but it is indisputable that he got the single most crucial decision disastrously wrong, and his Bears are doomed because of it.
How in the world could you be focused on one position in a draft and get it as wrong as he did? He had the third pick in the 2017 draft and was hell bent on drafting a quarterback. He wasn’t wrong on that count. But when he evaluated the three best ones he somehow picked the worst of the three. You can say, “how was he supposed to know how good Patrick Mahomes or Deshaun Watson were going to be?” But that’s the fucking job. Not only was he tragically wrong in his evaluations of the three, he somehow was paranoid enough to trade to move UP to get Trubisky. The fact is he could have traded down and gotten Mitch. But he gave up EXTRA stuff to make the worst choice.
You can win without a great quarterback. It’s harder, and impossible to sustain, but you can do it. But you can’t win with whatever Mitch is.
But, blaming Mitch is the easy part. It’s not his fault he’s bad. He tries hard. He was over-evaluated.
You know who else was over-evaluated? His coach.
I’m 99% sure that when dainty little Cody Parkey hit the goal post and the crossbar and the game-winning kick bounced helplessly away in the Eagles’ playoff game that Matt Nagy broke. He’s been weird ever since.
The kicking “competition” the Bears concocted was asinine. Most coaches would have laid the blame on everybody in a loss like that1. They would have fired the kicker, found a new one and moved on. Oh, not the Matt Nagy Bears. They wallowed in it. They brought in a cast of a 1,000 awful kickers and turned the whole thing into a paranoid deluded game show.
The weird thing is that they probably picked the right guy. Eddie Pineiro has the talent to be a good NFL kicker. But even after giving him the job, Nagy’s handling of him has been pathological. Pineiro missed an extra point in the final preseason game. Big fucking deal. But Nagy reacted like Pineiro had kicked it into a Chernobyl cooling tower and went in to get it. He refused to let him try a 47-yard kick later in the game. Why wouldn’t you keep testing your kicker and get him more experience kicking in his home stadium. Nagy was clearly afraid Pineiro would miss it and create another kicking controversy, so he didn’t let him try, which created another kicking controversy, Then in a 7-3 game last night he went for it on fourth and 10 instead of letting Eddie try a 50 yarder in perfect weather with little wind. Same reason.
If it was just the handling of the kicker that was troubling it would be OK, but our offensive genius clearly isn’t.
He was severely out-coached in the playoff loss to the Eagles by his old buddy Doug Pedersen. He was out-coached again last night by the Packers. The Bears haven’t been a good offensive team since week 10 last year when they rolled the Lions at home 34-22. In the final seven games of the season they scored 25 points or less six times. The most they scored in that span was 27 in an overtime loss to the Giants and that took a TD pass from Tarik Cohen to get to 27 and force the overtime.
The most yards they passed for in that span in a non-OT game was a pedestrian 235 against the Niners in a game in which they scored a whopping 14 points. They did pass for 291 yards in the playoff loss, but needed 43 passes to do it, oh and they only rushed for 65. After the game, Nagy lamented he didn’t get the ball to Cohen more. Cohen had only one rush and three receptions for a grand total of 32 yards. Well, you’re the coach Matt. You could have done something about it.
The offense in the loss to Green Bay last night was embarrassing. Cohen caught eight passes…for just 49 yards. No running back got more than six carries. Trubisky threw 45 passes. The Packers admitted their game plan was to let Mitch throw. It worked perfectly. Trapped in the pocket, he’s helpless. Nagy said after the game, “That’s not us.” No, it’s exactly you, because you’re the ones who did it.
These Bears are in a rough spot. They are a dominant defensive team whose offense can not pass consistently and refuses to try to run the ball. In both the Eagles and Packers games there appeared to be no game plan. It was just Nagy trying to wow us with creative plays that didn’t build on each other or make any real sense. They aren’t running an offense. They’re just running a bunch of unrelated plays. This is Dowell Loggains shit.
Given Nagy’s aversion to letting Eddie Pineiro fail in low-risk situations, it’s pretty clear that Mitch didn’t sit out the preseason to avoid injury. He sat it out because Nagy didn’t want him to fail publicly.
Well, he sure as hell did last night.
If this game was a one-off you’d just shrug your shoulders, grumble that you lost to Aaron Rodgers again and move on. But by looking back you’ll see that it’s been building. This offense is paralyzed by having the wrong quarterback for sure, and it also looks like it has the wrong coach.
Scoff at doubting a guy right after he won Coach of the Year, but the list of that award’s winners shows it’s not exactly a predictor of sustained excellence. Dick Jauron, Jason Garrett, Marvin Lewis, Ray Rhodes and Wayne Fontes have all won it.
Just as troubling is this list. Mike Smith, Jim Haslett, and Jim Fassel are among the guys who won it in their first season, just like Matt Nagy.
We’re about to find out if Nagy can do more than just win over the press by giving better news conferences than John Fox used to. He needs to prove he’s an actual offensive guru, and not just a guy in a visor with a big laminated sheet of Andy Reid’s plays who doesn’t really know how to string them together now that defenses have all seen him try to do it.
It’s going to be hard to convince us that anybody dumb enough to give the ball to a kick returner on third and one is a genius in anything.