Well, hopes for sweeping changes on the heels of the firing of abysmally bad offensive coordinator Ron Turner were dashed today. Head Coach Lovie Smith upheld his promise to have a staff in place by the Super Bowl. Hooray! Remember, guys, he told us, “Trust Me.” Trust him to stubbornly maintain the status quo despite three progressively lousier seasons.
Coaching changes are not so sweeping. Really, there’s not much to update from a coaching standpoint. Former defensive line coach Rod Marinelli has been bumped up to Defensive Coordinator, relieving Smith of the extra task. Tsk! We can all recognize that Smith’s best bud Marinelli will simply be the conduit for Smith to continue to run dated ideas on defense. The Chicago Bears web site lauds Marinelli’s 1996-2005 stint with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers as highly respected credentials. Tampa 2 hasn’t really served the Bears defense past 2006. To seal the deal, Smith has hired his son to act as defensive quality control man. Think Mikal will be challenging any of dad’s or dad’s buddy’s calls? The 2010 defense stands to look much like the 2009 defense: 17th ranked in the NFL. Changes in coaching are only in names, not ideology.
On the offensive side, Smith has similarly kept with the horses in his own stable. New offensive coordinator Mike Martz worked with Smith in St. Louis when Smith was the defensive coordinator. Martz does bring with him a history of offensive success. His 1999 “Greatest Show on Turf” with Kurt Warner and the St. Louis Rams made his team Super Bowl Champions. However, his notoriously complicated offenses may prove to be a challenge to a very green Bears wide receiving core. Do we remember all the times we saw teammates pointing out to Devin Hester where he needed to line up?
The new man coaching Jay Cutler is Quarterback’s Coach Shane Day. Andrew Hayes-Stoker jumps into offensive quality control coach. Eric Washington moves up from defensive assistant/defensive line assistant to defensive line coach. Again, changes and improvements seem unlikely. This staff is largely the same, just shuffled around.
What looked as if it might be a slow game—with a score of just 3-3 in the first quarter—wound up being a satisfying, albeit expected, 37-23 Bears win over the now 3-13 Detroit Lions. With the hometown team’s playoffs hopes dashed weeks ago, let’s look at what this game showed in terms of what to keep and what to trim in 2010.
Chicago should find out whether or not Coach Lovie Smith will remain with the Bears in the next week. His team’s record isn’t making a strong case for retention, but the money guaranteed on his remaining contract is talking a good game. If labor negotiations drag out and 2010 is a no-cap year on salaries, money will be valuable in acquiring new talent. Oddly enough, losing record or not, players seem to all really like playing for the man. So perhaps by upgrading his coaching staff and relieving him of defensive coordinator duties, there still might be a way to make Smith work well in Chicago.
Lovie’s offensive right-hand man in Ron Turner should definitely get the boot. Though he also has time left on his contract (just one year to Smith’s two), like Smith, Turner’s play-calling judgments could never save him in a performance-based review. The last two weeks of wins have shown a marked shift in play calling and execution, providing Jay Cutler a moving pocket in which he’s thrived and minimized interceptions. Cutler hasn’t suddenly improved in the last two weeks, Turner is just finally playing to Cutler’s strengths. Wouldn’t a good offensive coordinator have realized that earlier in the season, when wins could have made a difference? Turner had a winning record of just 38% at his 8 years as U of I head coach and was fired from that job before coming to the Bears. How he’s lasted four years in Chicago is unfathomable. The fans have known this for a while. Read more »
Devin Aromashodu #19 at training camp in Bourbonnais Summer 2009 , Photo: Jamie DiVecchio Ramsay
Is Lovie Smith going to respond to the press with his stock answer of “there’s still a lot of football left to play” in addressing the public this week? What could he possibly say after making a colossal fourth-quarter coaching mistake? Smith took a time-out to decide whether or not to risk another time-out with a challenge. When he ultimately made the decision to challenge, he used a critical time-out to review a Greg Olsen catch that was ruled incomplete. In a seven-point-game, clock management was vital in that last quarter, and Smith’s decisions showed an inability to put time on the Bears’ side. Use the time-out you’ve already taken to call the review!
With the Bears’ 13th penalty of the game, a false start by veteran center Olin Kreutz, any hope of a first down, and potential to score, was put out of the Bears’ reach in the last two minutes of the game. Chris Williams doled out more hardship for his teammates with a totally unnecessary and flagrant face mask that negated a big run for Matt Forte late in the fourth quarter. There appears to be no ability to rein this team back in. Thankfully, the defense seemed to pick up some steam in the second half to keep the points respectable.
Further miscues began earlier in the season, with the decision to make Devin Hester and Devom Aromashodu top wide receivers over, say, Aromashodu and Johnny Knox. Only because of sidelining injuries to Aromashodu at the beginning of the season (which gave Knox a shot to prove himself) and injuries to Hester on Sunday (which gave Aromashodu his opportunity), did Chicago fans get a chance to see who has the real potential at the position. Cutler has been begging for the coaches to put Aromashodu in, yet, even when he recovered from injury, he sat on the bench, barely used, behind Hester. Aromashodu received 8 catches for an average of 9.5 yards, including one touchdown. Knox would have spent his rookie season on the practice squad had Aromashodu not been injured. It’s maddening that the coaching staff sat Aromashodu for weeks and almost didn’t play Knox at all.
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Photo: Jamie DiVecchio Ramsay
At 4-7, this is a team in crisis. Lovie Smith’s mantra of “There’s still a lot of football left to play” is a losing cliche. There’s less left to play than has been played, and what has been played has been disastrous. One by one, Chicago Bears hopes were sidelined with injuries. The men fans look to as the diamonds in the rough, when the rest of the team is missing tackles and fumbling balls, Lance Briggs and Charles Tillman, were each carted off the field in the second half. With them, went any chances for a Bears win. Cameras panned the sidelines to show them head in hands and wrapped in ice. The physically beaten players revealed the internal leveling they’d suffered.
Two stats stick out from Sunday night’s 36-10 loss to division rivals the Minnesota Vikings. 518. This was the most yards a Chicago Bears defense has given up since 1982. And 2. This is the number of positive yards the Bears net in the entire second half. Two. TWO!
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In football, a 24-point win should feel great. But the vibe in the Chicago Bears locker room and post-game press conference was just short of “relieved.” Despite Chicago’s own struggles in last week’s 35-point loss to the Cincinnati Bengals, the laughable 1-6 Cleveland Browns were no challenge. But there can’t be much satisfaction in a win against the 32nd ranked defense and 31st ranked offense in the NFL—especially when the underwhelming Bears started out with a trio of field goals.
Jay Cutler didn’t make excuses to the media. “We’ve got a lot of work to do. We have to improve in every respect offensively possible,” he said. Cutler’s candor in today’s press conference actually warmed me up to the guy who’d gotten such a bad rap for being arrogant.
Cutler was sacked four times Sunday. Kamerion Wimbley hit Cutler so hard with a helmet-to-helmet block that Cutler spent much of the game wrapping gauze around his bloody tongue. The Bear’s QB ran five times for 32 yards and his own first downs, because his receivers couldn’t get open. That situation is setting him up to take even more blows. So naturally the media kept asking “How does it feel to get hit so much?” After a pause, Cutler responded, “I don’t know about that, I guess I’ll have to see the tapes.”
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Soldier Field, August 2009 Photo: Jamie DiVecchio Ramsay
I really thought that last week’s loss to Atlanta was about the worst I’d see the Bears play this season. Little did I know that the Cincinnati Bengals had more devastation planned for the Bears this past weekend, as they rolled over each and every Bear for a 45-10 victory. The common response from players when asked about the loss was “embarrassing.” The historically defensive machine gave up the most points in one game that is has in ten years. And to pour salt on the wounds, former first round Bears draft pick Cedric Benson rushed for a career high of 189 yards, catapulting him to the top of the entire NFL in rushing yards…too bad for the Bears that it was in black and orange, rather than navy and orange.
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Sunday night’s loss to Atlanta was about the worst Bears football that I’ve seen in three years. Instead of a bye-week-re-energized team taking the field, the Bears imploded. Penalties, penalties, penalties and turnovers killed the Bears. The Bears did far more damage to themselves than anyone in a Falcons’ jersey.
Cutler’s arm seems to have beguiled Ron Turner into abandoning the run. However, the picks are coming all too frequently (Cutler’s had seven in five games) as a result of the overzealous passing. And unfortunately, Matt Forte seems to be in some kind of sophomore slump: forgetting to pick up his feet, making little headway on rushing, stepping on his own feet. The Bears are ranked 15th of the 16 teams in the NFC in rushing. Perhaps it’s not so much that Turner has forgotten the run, but that he has lost some faith in the Bears’ ability to execute it. Forte’s back-to-back fumbles in the third period cost the Bears a shot at a touchdown and didn’t help the case for the rungame. And to further complicate things, the offensive line is offering little to no help in opening holes for Forte. Whether it be a running back problem, a line problem or a problem calling from the booth remains to be seen.
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For the last two decades, the Chicago Bears have given fans reasons to be cautiously optimistic. We don’t see the football landscape through rose-colored glasses. So, perhaps it could not have been more befitting that the Bears were sporting all kinds of rosiness (shocking pink sweatbands, gloves and helmet stickers to be exact) in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness Month on Sunday when they played the Detroit Lions. Amongst all that pink was one bugglegum-sweet win, made of several sweet plays that all point to a team that is giving fans a reason to feel giddy.
If anyone felt a need for atonement after the disappointing loss to the Packers in the season opener, it was special teams. Remember Patrick Mannelly’s direct snap to the Garrett Wolfe? Special teams decided to make amends in this Sunday’s huge 48-24 win over the Lions. Punter Brad Maynard kicked 4 punts that pinned the Lions inside their own 20. Robbie Gould set his career record high with a successful 52-yard field goal kick. And perhaps in the most thrilling Hesteresque moment, rookie wide receiver and sometimes kick returner Johnny Knox ran back the second half’s opening kick 102 yards for a touchdown. Since the beginning of the season, Knox has dropped little hints in his playing that he might possess the kind of speed that landed Hester in the record books. Having back-to-back weeks of touchdowns, both as a receiver and a return man, it’s beginning to feel like we can truly believe Knox is not just lucky. He is someone special, and dangerously fast.
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Fans have reason to embrace Cutler. Photo: Jamie Ramsay
It’s been decades since the Bears have been able to put up a W after a game at Qwest Field: since 1976 to be exact. Though early on it looked as though they might continue that streak, a defensive rally in the second half, a banged up Seahawks starting lineup, and a quarterback in Jay Cutler, who is cocky enough, or maybe competitive enough, to fight under fire, brought the Bears a 25-19 win.
This may be the game that endears Cutler to a quarterback-shy Chicago. After a rocky, pick-filled season opener at Lambeau, it would take more than last week’s win against Pittsburgh to set Bears fans at ease. The masterfully executed final drive of the game proves to Chicago fans that Cutler can take his lumps and perform in a pinch. He may get lippy with 
refs, and may have an arrogant reputation, but what comes with that competitive bravado is the pride to pull out a win. Cutler has the confidence to pull off the two-point conversion, and guts enough to run the ball and chew up the clock to avoid scoring too early at the end of a game. Chicago’s not used to that assuredness. Last year, the Bears had to treat completed passes as a happy accident. The last five minutes of Sunday’s game gave Chicago fans one thing they haven’t had in a quarterback in over 20 years: trust.
The other great things to come out of this game: Read more »
Jay Cutler, Photo: Jamie Ramsay
After months in the honeymoon phase with the Bears’ off-season trade, golden child quarterback Jay Cutler, Chicago fans were slapped with a hefty dose of reality via a 15-21 loss to the Green Bay Packers. The immediate reaction of fans could be to blame Cutler and lump him with the 23 other hacks Chicago has had at quarterback since Jim McMahon. But the blame lies primarily in a lingering problem in the wide-receiving core that the Bears have unsuccessfully addressed over the last two years. Cutler’s a good quarterback. He’s a great quarterback. He just doesn’t have anyone reliable to whom to throw.
Chicago fans have been force-fed the rhetoric that good buddies Cutler and tight end Greg Olsen had an on- and off-field chemistry that would translate to huge offense in ‘09. But Cutler’s bromeo Olsen dropped an on-target pass, which easily could have been a first down at the end of the first quarter. After that, Olsen didn’t see any action until the end of the fourth.
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