Bears need to steel themselves
Let’s call today’s game in Pittsburgh what it is: A must-win
Matt Nagy did his best early this week to sidestep the idea that Monday night’s game against the Pittsburgh Steelers is a must-win affair.
He has talked about remaining in the present as a mantra for this season dating to the start of training camp, when he borrowed from what Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo said.
“When you focus on the past, that’s your ego,” Antetokounmpo said. “And when I focus on the future, it’s my pride. … And I like to focus in the moment, in the present. And that’s humility.”
You don’t have to peer into the future to determine whether this Bears season will be in trouble if they lose to the Steelers. They enter having lost three consecutive games, and another defeat would mark the third straight season with a losing streak of four games or more. Conversely, the Steelers have won three in a row after opening 1-3.
Entering Week 9, the Bears are only one game back in the win column from the No. 7 seed in the NFC at 3-5. With a win, they would stay in the hunt with the open date ahead to help some key players such as Khalil Mack and Eddie Jackson get healthy. A loss would leave them four weeks — in a best-case scenario — from being able to claw their way back to .500.
With a win the Bears would be in the mix with a chance to improve as rookie quarterback Justin Fields continues to develop. The Bears didn’t hit turbulence last season until after a 5-1 start.
“There’s definite urgency, and I think that’s OK,” Nagy said. “You need to have that. We always talk about the fork in the road and going left or going right . ...
“The only thing that matters is making sure we get that win. The wins change everything. It definitely deodorizes things that you don’t do well.”
If the Bears are going to stabilize things, the first thing they need to do is reverse a troubling trend on defense in which they’ve been unable to stop the run. Since Week 6, following the road victory against the Las Vegas Raiders, they have plummeted from 12th in run defense to 25th, and the Steelers would like nothing better than to pound them with rookie Najee Harris.
Opponents have battered the Bears every which way on the ground. Against a six-man box, opponents are averaging 5.44 yards per carry, the fifth-highest figure in the NFL. When the Bears stack the box with eight defenders, they’re allowing 5.27 yards per carry, the highest number in the league. It has been big plays galore for opponents
Problems stopping the run are across the board. Nose tackle Eddie Goldman hasn’t played well. Akiem Hicks has missed time with a groin injury, and he’s not the disruptive force he was earlier in his career.
Robert Quinn and Mack have made some nice plays against the run but also get caught flying upfield at times, which makes them easy to wash by in the run, and in the case of Quinn he also has played with poor pad level at times. The safeties have not tackled well, a topic that has been well-covered, and the cornerbacks aren’t particularly good tacklers.
Add it all up and the Bears have been gashed.
“We had four plays that we gave up in that game in the run game for about 100 yards, and that is alarming,” defensive coordinator Sean Desai said. “And then the other however many rushes they had were under 2.2 yards a carry.
:So it’s those four plays that we have to get fixed, and the offenses and the good coaches — and there are lot of good coaches in this league — around the league see those four plays and they’re going to try to hit you on those over and over again. We have to make sure we resolve those plays from a schematic perspective and from an individual technique and fundamental perspective.
“That’s not the brand of football we want to play. That’s not what we pride ourselves on, and we will be and we need to be better at that.”
On the other side of the ball, the Bears have to threaten opponents more consistently with their passing game. The team has been negligent in getting Allen Robinson involved, and eight games of failing to challenge defenses with him is troubling.
The Bears thought enough of Robinson to use the franchise tag on him at a cost of $17.8 million, and they have used him like the investment was $1.78 million.
Robinson was targeted 11 times in the season-opening loss at the Rams and 33 times in the seven games since. He has only 26 receptions for 271 yards. There’s blame to go all around, and more important than determining who is at fault is finding a solution.
One easy way to create quarterback-friendly throws for Fields is to play Robinson in the slot more, something that it looked like the Bears would do when they jettisoned former second-round pick Anthony Miller.
Robinson has run 91 of his 212 routes from the slot. He has been targeted 13 times (14.2%) and has seven receptions for 74 yards.
Playing him in the slot is one way to get isolation matchups versus zone or man. If the defense is playing zone, he can run speed outs when the corner gets removed by the No. 1 receiver on the outside.
He can get matched up against a linebacker in zone. If the defense is playing zone coverage underneath, Robinson can bump inside in 12 personnel with a tight end outside, and now there is a linebacker who has to cover or match to him in the middle of the field. That’s an easy way, especially in critical down-anddistance situations, for Fields to throw a choice route, an angle route or a speed out.
That’s how the New Orleans Saints set up Michael Thomas one-on-one under Sean Payton over the years with a running back or wide receiver outside. They put him inside to get matchups.
The Bears have failed to use Robinson as a matchup piece, and while the ground game has developed nicely, the offense has to find some balance and ways to be more explosive downfield.
“Every day we talk about it as far as, as we game plan the red zone for (Saturday), as we game plan third down (Friday) morning, what are the best things for him to be on? How do we get him the ball?” offensive coordinator Bill Lazor said. “The reality is the way we’re playing football right now, there are a lot of unhappy pass catchers, but they’re being professional and they’re trying to help us win.
“When you run the ball this much, certain people are happy about it. But we’re not happy when you don’t score the points. And usually in this league passing production leads to more points. Until we get the passing game to produce better, we’re going to have a hard time.”
Until the Bears figure out how to start playing the brand of run defense they’re accustomed to and how to involve their highest-paid target on offense as more than a role player, they’re going to find it difficult to sustain any kind of success — which makes something no one will admit is a mustwin game intimidating.
“Right now we need to worry about the present,” Nagy said. “We can’t worry about what happened, we can’t worry about what’s going to happen. We need to worry about this week. We’ve been through this before, so now it’s yet another challenge to be able to recover and see where our guys are at.”