Whenever the Chicago Bears have the ball on offense, that’s a good time to get a snack, take a bathroom break or get your steps in. You won’t miss much. Don’t be gone long though, because it won’t be long before the Bears are punting again.
The Bears have tried to fix their unwatchable offense with personnel tweaks. They switched out Mitchell Trubisky for Nick Foles. They drafted David Montgomery. They shuffled their receiver lineup to give rookie Darnell Mooney more run. They acquired what seemed like a dozen tight ends.
The one constant is coach Matt Nagy, and at some point you have to wonder if he can ever turn the Bears’ offense around. The NFL world got to watch how bad the Bears offense is in a hideous 24-10 loss to the Los Angeles Rams on Monday night. That dropped the Bears to 5-2, and the Rams improved to 5-2. A fumble recovery return by safety Eddie Jackson was Chicago’s only touchdown. That was fitting.
Imagine how frustrating it must be to play on the Bears defense, which is actually pretty good.
Bears defense tried to keep them in the game
It’s not like the Rams did much on offense. The Bears didn’t allow many big plays. The Rams’ best play on offense was a 10-yard run in which Malcolm Brown refused to go down and his teammates kept pushing him and the pile to the 1-yard line. The Rams scored a touchdown on the next play to make it 17-3.
Realistically, that ended the suspense on who would win. The Bears aren’t good enough on offense to come back from a two-touchdown deficit. There’s no running game. There aren’t many creative ways to get anyone open. Foles consistently was way off on deep passes. The best offensive plan the Bears have is to throw it up in the air and hope, which isn’t exactly a strong foundation.
When the Bears finally put together a drive late in the third quarter, Nagy dialed up a play with Foles rolling to his left, and he threw into heavy coverage in the end zone. Troy Hill deflected it, Taylor Rapp intercepted it, and that was that. It was a poorly designed play and the execution was even worse.
That’s the 2020 Bears offense in a nutshell.
Can Bears improve on offense?
Nagy was the NFL’s coach of the year for the 2018 season. That’s not aging well.
That season the Bears had a phenomenal defense and did enough on offense. The defense has been very good but not quite to 2018-level great, and the offense isn’t close to doing enough. The Bears won a lot of close games to get to 5-1, but the tight-wire act in the NFL is hard to sustain. Eventually you need to play well on both sides of the ball to win a division title, and the Bears aren’t going to win the NFC North with the offense playing this poorly.
Nagy doesn’t seem like the right coach to fix it. He came in with a reputation as an offensive whiz but that has never manifested itself. He has not been able to maximize a talent like Allen Robinson, has not played to Foles’ strengths and seemingly has no idea how to get Montgomery going in the run game. After falling behind 24-3 the Bears got no yards on a fourth-and-1 run to Cordarrelle Patterson and Foles was sacked on a fourth-and-four pass attempt that took way too long to develop. The game was really over when Foles threw another reckless interception to Jalen Ramsey in the final few minutes. The Bears have no reliable buttons to push when they have the ball. That’s a problem.
The Bears are 5-2. It’s not like their season is over. But without a little more offense the Bears will have trouble staying in the playoff race. It’s hard to figure out where that offensive improvement will come from.
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