The Bears Offense

Random thoughts following a Bears none loss.

You cannot ask an offense not to loose the game for you.

Offense has to be able to win games, it has to be able to score points when given the opportunity.

Football is a game where teams take turns trying to score, give or take one possession, you have as many shots as the other guy to score. If you're more successful in your turns you win as simple as that.

The concept of playing conservatively on offense and having your defense "win" the game has always seemed somewhat short sighted to me. If your offense doesn't score touch downs you leave even great D's in a position where a few good plays by your opponents or a couple of mistakes by your D can loose you the game.

Now understand I'm not saying you need to throw the ball or espousing a particular offensive philosophy, just that if you expect to be consistently good you need your offense to score and not simply to manage the game. Great teams have had both offense and defense, when one falters the other steps in.

It appeared early last season that the Bears were a truly great team and had both, when they blew out Seattle during the regular season I loved every minute of it, I thought "they finally get it". But now that's looking like it was more an aberration than a accurate reflection of the team. Grossman became inconsistent and Ron Turner became more and more conservative trying to avoid loosing games with turnovers. This year things are much worse.

Trying to avoid turnovers is understandable, making your offense predictable and conservative to do so is just stupid, it makes the offense less effective, it often leads to playing from behind having to go into a predictable pass happy mode, which in the end puts more pressure on players to make plays, increasing the mistakes and leading to more turn overs, reinforcing the cycle.....

Ignoring the running back situation for a minute, we have many of the same personnel on offense as we did in the heady days of early 2006, something broke somewhere (and before this year started) and I don't believe it was just the other shoe dropping on the Rex Grossman situation, or defenses around the league suddenly waking up. So what was it?

I think the difference is almost entirely psychological, the 06 teams offense believed they could win games for the team, between the media and fan base laying into Grossman, the Superbowl loss and the mauling the Bears got in the second half of the Wk 3 Dallas game and we are where we are. A couple of good 2 minute drives by the replacement quarterback isn't going to fix that.

I think Ron Turner came into the season wanting to give Grossman the best chance to perform, unfortunately he did this by taking the risky plays out of the playbook and trying to play conservatively. Relying on what we now know is a none existent running game to take the load, and as I've said before I don't think this does your QB any favors, he ends up having to predictably throw the ball from behind more pressure, more mistakes etc etc all the way to the bench.

Maybe I'm too much of an optimist but I don't think benching Grossman was the right decision for what it's worth, having said that team psyches are often bizarre things and how a move is perceived within a team is as important as anything else. Unfortunately the Bears are very dead pan to the media, showing nothing but support for team mates regardless of there performance, so it's difficult to get a read on the team dynamics. if the team had really lost faith in him, then I cede the point and benching him was the right move. If they read it as Grossman taking the bullet for what had been sub par performances all around then it was a bad call.

Good offenses aren't pass happy, but they aren't afraid to pass either, they exploit defenses where it works, and keep the calls balanced where it makes sense. Ball control has it's place, it can help let a defense rest, but despite a lot of talk, it doesn't win games, scoring and stopping the other team scoring wins games.

I like Lovie Smith as a coach, but he seems very defensive minded and historically that has been the Bears mantra. But that needs to change we need to be winning minded, that means offense and defense as equal partners. Statements like "the Bears get off the bus running" are just none sense statements, the Bears offensive plan should be built to exploit opponent weaknesses and create mismatches where ever possible, if that means run off the bus great, if that means throw every down do it, and don't worry about matching some historical stereotype in Chicago. With the exception of 85 and 06 to a lesser extent it hasn't been very successful stereotype anyway.