Bears get OK to practice in pads
A closer look at the challenges Matt Nagy and his staff face with 4 weeks to go until season begins
It’s understandable if Matt Nagy’s Sunday feels somewhat like Christmas Eve.
The Chicago Bears coach said in February he had stopped looking back on the 2019 season that ended with an 8-8 record and was plagued throughout by a brokendown offense. His focus, Nagy explained, was moving forward and identifying solutions and means for improvements.
Those plans have been put on hold, changed multiple times and then adjusted as COVID-19 forced the NFL to alter its summer calendar. Now, Nagy is on the eve of the team’s first practice in full pads Monday at Halas Hall with the season opener at Detroit only four weeks away.
Both Nagy and general manager Ryan Pace have billed competition in training camp as something that would help improve the team. There’s the main event — the quarterback battle between
Mitch Trubisky and Nick Foles — along with a right guard job being contested between Germain Ifedi and Rashaad Coward. The tight end group has been totally overhauled. The wide receivers after Allen Robinson have to be significantly better and playing time is up for grabs. And on defense, the Bears have to choose a starting right cornerback and strong safety, and with pads going on, the team can now assess exactly how it will handle the loss of nose tackle Eddie Goldman, the runstuffing anchor who opted out.
If the Bears are to make the kind of jump on offense Nagy is banking on, they will need to be improved along the offensive line with, at most, one new starter and a new position coach in Juan Castillo. The veteran coach has a unique challenge ahead of him with such limited time to install the techniques and scheme adjustments he wants.
The revised training camp schedule, jointly crafted by the league and NFLPA, limits teams to a maximum of 14 practices in full pads between Aug. 17 and Sept. 6. That’s only two less than the collective bargaining agreement that was finalized in March allowed for. The challenge will be following the many rules — clubs cannot hold padded practices for more than three consecutive days, for example — so actually getting to 14 could be difficult. The Bears are still looking for ways to tweak their schedule to get in as much work in pads as they feel is necessary.
If Nagy wants to have his starters settled in with about two weeks before facing the Lions, particularly at quarterback, decisions will have to be made after 10 or fewer practices in full pads. Nagy said Wednesday that the evaluation period wasn’t going to fully kick off until Monday’s
action with pads on for honest to goodness football work.
It’s a new world from even a year ago when the CBA allowed teams to hold as many as 28 practices in full pads during training camp. Talk to former players about it and they let out a hearty chuckle.
“I was introduced to training camp by George Allen (with the Chicago Blitz of the USFL) and George was not a real physical guy,” said Tom Thayer, the Bears radio analyst for WBBM-AM 780 and a former offensive lineman. “He was a real long mental guy, so you were out there for 3 hours and 45 minutes. But you were not killing each other. You were learning. You had your periods of contact, but the rest of that was at a tempo where no stone was left unturned.
“But then I go to (Mike) Ditka and my first camp with him was 22 straight days of doubles all in full pads. If the guys did things well in consecutive practices and stuff, you might get a night off from meetings, but you never got a day off.”
“Oh my god,” laughed Mike Tice, a tight end for 14 seasons before becoming Minnesota Vikings head coach and then working as a Bears offensive line coach and coordinator. “We had a million padded practices. Every practice was full pads. There were no walk-throughs. That year I had with the Redskins (1989), we were in full pads on Fridays during the regular season. Times have changed. It’s going to be different.”
Thayer, Tice and former Bears Pro Bowl center Olin Kreutz weighed in on the specific challenges the Bears will face this training camp.
Mitch Trubisky vs. Nick Foles: “I’ve never been a fan of 7-on-7,” Thayer said.
“I didn’t care about it because it wasn’t realistic. But I think the tempo and the decision-making process and the accuracy and the proper targeting, it’s gonna make a big deal this year. Maybe a period that we never paid attention to, it’s gonna have a lot to tell the wide receivers outside of Allen Robinson and the quarterback derby.”
What’s ahead for Juan Castillo and the offensive line: “I think at (Castillo’s) introductory press conference, he talked about offensive linemen, and I was part of the same type of group, we got a lot of work done before practice,” Thayer said. “Maybe 15 minutes before we start stretching, let’s come out here and let’s get some double-team work in or whatever. That’s almost the approach you have to have, you’ve got to be able to sneak in those 15 or 20 extra minutes of work time. But I also think Juan can teach the type of fundamentals he wants used in a very specific way and in the way he wants them used. You can get a lot of value out of watching tape if you’re doing it right or wrong.”
“You’re not going to be as sharp technically as you would be with padded practices and working on hitting guys, leverage, getting hands inside because the only way to get ready for football is to play football,” Kreutz said. “Say, Ifedi going against Akiem Hicks. He will probably get some work against him, but not as much as he would have gotten. Go against Akiem, you’ll be ready for anybody on a Sunday. The good thing is every team has to go through that, so every team is going to be facing that. I would imagine football is not going to be played at a really high level early on in the season. It’s probably going to look like preseason for the first three or four games.”
“It’s going to be a challenge,” said Tice, who hosts his own “Odds and Ends with Mike Tice” podcast. “I’ve been talking to coaches around the league almost daily just trying to get a feel for everything. The timing of that offensive line stuff is going to be iffy because offensive line play is almost all combination blocks and it’s very rare, except for the left tackle, where one guy is working by himself in pass protection and that is why left tackles make all the money because they’re the guy on the island all the time. Other than that, guys are passing off games, they’re combination zone blocking.
“I think the zone blocking teams, the ones that are not doing the down (block) and pull, the man schemes, are going to be at a better advantage. If you’re doing down blocking and pulling guys and you have all of these timing things, and all of these technique things that have to be done full speed and in pads, I think they’re going to be a little iffy. So, they’re probably going to be some coaches
Practice intensity with an eye toward helping the offense: “The defense is always ahead of the offense when practice and the season starts just because on offense, everybody has to work together,” Kreutz said. “The defense can kind of just line up and fly off the ball. It will be interesting to see what offenses look like and how far behind they are. No one has really been through this before, but you would imagine they will be behind because an offensive line has to be everyone together, everyone working on the same page, the only way to do that is through reps. These guys are going to have to take a lot of mental reps with each other and I would imagine that Coach Nagy is going to eventually really pick up the intensity in practice to try to get these guys ready because he realized last year that no preseason didn’t help his team at all.
“The interesting thing last year, Nagy was trying to do that in practice because they weren’t playing in preseason, so they were trying to create like a game atmosphere in practice and that didn’t work out for them.”