UMFan83

This will be the first of 2 games in 5 days as the Bears will quickly return home to prepare for the Commanders next Thursday (and then get a nice break before MNF in New England in week 7 to conclude Chicago's primetime appearances). I'm seeing Vikings -6.5 so far which seems fair because despite being 3-1 the Vikings have looked a bit rough at times

Cobs are back!

Dilfer’s segment on the score today:

Seems to be the general consensus that the top 3 teams in the Big Ten are Ohio State, Michigan and Penn State and probably in that order. My question is: who is the 4th best team in the Big Ten? Candidates are probably Illinois, Maryland or Minnesota. Illinois is playing the best football and their defense is legitimately good. Their best win is a solid win. Yes Wisconsin probably sucks, but Madison is still a hard place to come and win much less completely blow them out. Their loss was at Indiana which is not a great loss but could be worse Maryland has only lost at Michigan, and they kept the game annoyingly close throughout. They looked good in that game. Their offense is good, their defense is not but still seems a little better than many expected. The problem is that their best win was either against MSU or SMU. MSU is in a free fall but SMU seems decent (they lost to undefeated TCU by 1 score after falling to Maryland) Minnesota was likely many people's number 4s before last week. They pulverized their first 4 opponents, which included 2 P5 teams, but came home and lost to a decent Purdue team. Their defense remained really good even in the defeat but it was a bit deflating coming off the MSU road win (further devalued because MSU lost again the next week and clearly seems to not be good) I could be talked into all 3 of them to be honest.

Great to hear re: Fields. I've come to accept that improvements are going to come gradually. I was thinking today that they are probably looking at Fields as a 1-2 year project. And while I'm not sure how giving him nothing to work with and getting destroyed by opposing defenses helps him, I think they are content with doing what they do best (run the ball) and slowly bring Fields around as he (and the team as a whole) gets more comfortable with the offensive system. Maybe the FO never saw him as the answer and are trying to prove it but I also think that the team has so many holes and are committed to building through the draft so the last thing they want to do is use a high 1st on a QB at this point. Seems like a very old school approach to QB development when we've seen quite a few young QBs figure it out quickly (especially ones with multiple years starting at a major P5 school) so don't take this post as me necessarily being on board with the plan. Just trying to make sense of whats happening out there.

I think its more newsworthy when he doesn't melt down

https://www.theplayerstribune.com/posts/jason-heyward-chicago-cubs-mlb-baseball Cool article from JHey. He could have been down about his time in Chicago. I'm sure he heard people critical of him or his contract. But he kept it positive and expressed what seems like genuine love for the Cubs and the city. Says this is his home and will remain his home (I'm assuming that's figurative but I could be wrong). I'm still a little peeved about the vaccination thing, but can look past it enough to say that he seemed universally loved as a teammate and probably made a bigger difference behind the scenes than we give him credit for. Bad contract, disappointing seasons, but (mostly) good dude and I'm glad he had such a great experience in Chicago

Beating a dead horse here but

Yeah, talent helps. But put Kmet's big ass out there or EQ St. Brown, they are good blockers and big enough bodies to muck things up a bit for Pettis or Mooney to get 4-5 yards. Then you just have to worry about Fields actually seeing it fast enough to throw it before a penalty for blocking and then them actually catching the ball. The Bears are just 4 easy steps away from being able to complete a competent NFL offensive pass! Kmet is a good blocker? Here are his PFF pass and run block grades in the first 3 games this year: Week 1: 70.2 pass block, 64.3 run block. Pass block seems solid but everyone had a good grade week 1. Kmets was 4th worst on the team. Run block was actually 5th best on the team. Week 2: 29.6 pass block, 65.5 run block. Pass block was 3rd worst on the team ahead of only Mustipher and Jenkins (Patrick was just ahead of Kmet). Run block was somewhere in the middle of the team Week 3: 51.0 pass block, 55.1 run block. These were both the 2nd worst on the team, behind Patrick in both cases (who was significantly worse than any Bear) I'm leaning towards 'no he's not a good blocker'

Yeah, this is why I don't understand fans who watched yesterday's game and decided "Yes, this game shows Fields is the problem" The line was awful, up and down, both ways, and the reason the Bears lost this very winnable game. Maybe this is what he meant when he said that the passing game improved yesterday and when questioned on the stats said 'stats don't matter'. It improved but didn't show up on paper because of other issues.

More from Brad:

Given this wouldn't it be reasonable to minimize the number of drop backs, if not altogether, at this point, remove them for the playbook in favor of some sort of quick passing game? Something along the lines of run, run, run, then under center, one step throw, I've seen every other NFL QB, even horsefeathering Mitch do this, its possible. Yeah, I said that before the season. But I don't call plays. I watched Aaron Rodgers get absolute freaking layups yesterday against the Patriots. Off coverage? Take the snap and throw it outside for 5 yards. Blitz coming? RB doesn't chip, just goes outside the tackle box for a quick swing pass, gets 5 yards. That's Getsy's former team. He was on the team that did that horsefeathers last year. Why he isn't doing it for his young QB, I will never know. Isn’t that not Fields’ game? I’ve seen him throw quick WR screens and they seem to get thrown inaccurately like 70% of the time. I also feel like he’s not reading defenses well enough to do that right now.

We expected the team to be bad, we didn't expect it to be bad to the point where Fields was providing historically low production (relative to the modern era). Or at least I didn't. I expected to see more flashes than we've seen even with the lack of talent. I expected him to occasionally have a 200 yard passing game, especially with positive game scripts and a productive run game that defenses have to give attention to. I didn't expect him to be good though. Maybe I was expecting too much to think he might play good enough to just look like a normal bad QB, not one the rest of the NFL world was laughing at.

He had a higher QB Rating today than any game in Justin Fields' career. Also QB Rating sucks I know, but its funny how some emergency 3rd string QB can come in and lead a somewhat effective offense. Didn't watch the game, I'm guessing the Patriots actually, like, you know tried at the passing game? Not, all scared of our own shadow deer in the headlight Getsy and Eberflus? I guess. Zappe was 10-15 for 99 yards, 1 TD, 0 INT in just over 3 quarters of play. Nothing crazy, but those are Fields-like numbers with a better completion percentage and 0 turnovers

He had a higher QB Rating today than any game in Justin Fields' career. Also QB Rating sucks I know, but its funny how some emergency 3rd string QB can come in and lead a somewhat effective offense.

This seems shocking to me. Wisconsin is bad, and they had a downish season last year (though they recovered really nicely from a slow start) but I didn’t think he was particularly close to the hot seat just yet.

Because I’m a bears fan for better or worse and I’d like to understand if Fields (or the team in general) is improving or not improving. Doesn’t seem all that crazy To be clear *im* not watching tape because I know horsefeathers all about tape watching. I will be surfing Twitter to let other people tell me I get the pageantry but dude, why do it to yourself? Because sports helps get me through the week and I’m certainly not ready to read about the Bulls or Blackhawks. Fan however you want to fan lol

We used to track touchdownless halves under Nagy/Pace and I think the grand total was somewhere around 40% of Nagy’s halves ended without a TD So far this year the Bears have gone touchdownless in 4 of their 8 halves this year

Agree with much of this. For the 1-on-1 man thing I wonder if this is where not having a dependable veteran receiver hurts him. He doesn’t feel comfortable throwing those “go up and get it” types of passes that you see other QBs throw to their trusted WRs. This is not absolving him of things, just a possible area where addressing WR more in the offseason could have helped him.

1) its probably all of those reasons 2) why would any of it be intersting? Because I’m a bears fan for better or worse and I’d like to understand if Fields (or the team in general) is improving or not improving. Doesn’t seem all that crazy To be clear *im* not watching tape because I know horsefeathers all about tape watching. I will be surfing Twitter to let other people tell me

Bears called 35 passing plays vs 25 rushing plays. Fields got off 22 passes, scrambled 7 times and was sacked 6 times. Interested to see the tape to see how much is bad o-line play, how much is indecisiveness from fields, how much is receivers not getting open and how much is bad play design/play calling

Right. This is kind of why I’m disappointed they won the 2 games they won. If the Bears were 1-3 or 0-4 the Bears would say horsefeathers it we have to see what we have here. But at 2-2 they’re gonna continue to try to win ugly ass games

Velus i don't think ran any routes but as a kick returner he had one decent return, bobbled one catch and then muffed a kick that led to the Bears losing the game. Kyler Gordon continues to be bad in the most obvious ways but I still have faith that he'll develop Bisker got burned once that I could see but played solid and had at least 1 nice TFL Ebner is sub-JAG level player so far, brought nothing to the table Not sure how Braxton Jones did today but the pass blocking was terrible as a line today so I have to guess he probably did poorly. Overall not a great day for Poles' first draft class though I continue to have hope for several of them.

And thus ends the last time the Bears will be over .500 until like 2026

For a second I legit thought they had something