Bears coach Matt Nagy told his players to stay off Twitter this week.
He’d be wise to do so the same.
“Is the scheme based off their young QB’s limitations, or is the scheme limiting their young QB?” Hall of Fame quarterback Kurt Warner tweeted, asking about the Bears. “It’s hard to know when I’m not in the meeting room — but it’s a struggle to watch.”
Former NFL quarterback Sage Rosenfels tweeted him back, saying the Bears have the “worst offensive scheme in the NFL.”
“Just drawing plays up and running them,” he said. “No rhyme or reason.”
Watched every snap this morning. Worst offensive scheme in the NFL. Just drawing up plays and running them. No rhyme or reason.
— Sage Rosenfels (@SageRosenfels18) October 22, 2019
Analyst Brian Baldinger, a former offensive lineman, tweeted that the Bears have a “nonsense run game” filled with “college option crap” that “will never win in the postseason.”
“Take your run playbook and rip it up,” he wrote.
.@ChicagoBears take your run playbook and rip it up. This is a nonsense run game. College option crap with tight ends sealing the LOS with crap cut blocks. Pretend like Papa Bear Halas is watching and win the LOS. This run game will never win in the post season #BaldysBreakdowns
— Brian Baldinger (@BaldyNFL) October 22, 2019
The outside world is coming for Nagy. He can feel it, too. Nagy always gets more text messages from friends when things are going poorly. Since Sunday’s 35-26 loss, his phone has been blowing up.
Still, Nagy said Wednesday that he’ll call the plays on Sunday rather than ceding the responsibility to an assistant. That’s no surprise, despite the fact Nagy acknowledged the possibility of a switch moments after the Saints loss.
What Nagy has done thus far this season isn’t working. The Bears rank 26th in scoring, 28th in rushing yards per game and 29th in passing yards per game. They ran seven times for 17 yards last week, as damnable of a play-calling performance as Nagy’s had in his Bears career. Nagy couldn’t blame the second-half blowout, either; the Bears ran only five times in the first half, when the score was still competitive. Quarterback Mitch Trubisky, nursing a dislocated left shoulder, threw 54 times, for some reason. This year, only one quarterback has thrown more passes in a single game.
Something must change. But Nagy’s not ripping his playbook up. He said he can’t.
“There’s not a whole lot schematically that you can [do],” he said. “Before you know it then you’re into a whole different offense. Whether we like it or not, that’s just … you start getting into plays that you’ve never run before and you don’t know where the bones are buried.”
The Bears have better knowledge of their own plays — and their strengths and weaknesses — than any wholesale changes they’d install this week.
They just need to run the plays they know, better.
“It’s about all of us just doing our job, worrying about ourselves to execute it, and to make the right play calls at the right time and all that,” Nagy said. “So, it comes down to just all of us trusting in one another. I think that I really feel strongly in our organization and the people that we have that we can get that done.”
If he doesn’t, the outside noise will only get louder. Nagy knows that.
“First of all, you have to be able to accept the fact that we have a city that is completely ready to go the whole way, and has really great expectations,” he said. “And they want the same thing that we want. Once you understand that, then you can get to the next part. …
”Everybody is, ‘Why can’t you do this?’ We want the same thing, and we know we’re not there, so how do we get to that? And that’s all we can do, control what we can control right now. We can’t control any of the other stuff people say. That’s for everybody else.”
