Oso planning to go pro
Week 3 and we already have our quote of the year. Jalen Hurts takes blame in loss to Cowboys: "You take you a deuce, you don't sit there and look at it. You flush it and move on. We're going to flush it and move on."
I saw an interesting take yesterday about Nagy and Eric Bieniemy. Much has been made about him not getting a HC job and its continually framed in racism. But maybe teams are taking pause after watching Nagy, and Pederson before him, largely be failures as HCs and pump the brakes on hiring Andy Reid OC/disciples.
I think hiring offensive coordinators who don't call plays is an issue. One of the reasons Matt LaFleur left the Niners for the Titans is so he could call the plays - and he got a head coaching gig a year later.
Thousands of people will drive to the game alone?
I'm not disputing this, but I will point out that two of the NFL's most highly regarded head coaches, John Harbaugh and Sean Payton, were not coordinators.And neither was Ditka, my friend.A head coach is the CEO, and aside from the very few who call offensive or defensive plays, their main job is to manage the entire operation, get the assistants to work well together, deal with players' egos, make the big in-game decisions, etc.I am NOT saying that being a play-caller is unimportant. There are too many outstanding head coaches who were offensive or defensive play-callers earlier in their careers to make such a claim. I'm just saying that a lot goes into being a successful head coach other than having been a play-caller as an assistant.
Ditka was highly regarded? That offense wasn’t what won him a SB.
He did win Coach of the Year twice, something only 11 other coaches have done.And while obviously those were defense-driven teams, he did have six top 10 offenses during his Bears tenure, and two others that ranked 11th.
Heck, I do most weeks. I meet people there.
I think you are misunderstanding my point. If a team has decided that they want to hire an offensive coach to implement a new offensive scheme that they think will fit their personnel, and they have a choice between two offensive coordinators, one who called plays and the other who didn't, the former is going to be seen as a coach with a greater body of work.
This is nit picky, but Payton was an Offensive Coordinator that called plays for the Giants before going to Dallas as Assistant Head Coach. Harbaugh was a Special Teams coordinator. Not sure how far below an Offensive/Defensive Coordinator, but he was a coordinator. Also, they were hired over 13 years ago. I’m not sure we can point to them for future success with as much as the NFL us changed. Granted, there’s still so many coaches that are overmatched (Nagy) who knows what the best process for hiring an NFL coach is. Many thought Lafleur was a letdown of a hire.
My reference to Ditka was supposed to be a joke. I guess I shoulda said “mini-Ditka.” But as others said, he did have a little success as a head coach for whatever reasons one wants to cite.
Of all the interesting tweets, this was my favorite. I hadn’t thought about max protection, but the Browns were collapsing the pocket every snap, and this tweet made me think of the Ravens’ offense, which consistently has among the most concentrated target trees because — and I have not looked this up, so count this as one of my educated guesses — I have to imagine they average the fewest players in a route per dropback of any team since Lamar Jackson took over the quarterback role. They love to use multiple TEs and keep in extra blockers, giving Lamar fewer than the possible five eligible receivers, because after his first or second read his playmaking ability is essentially part of the play design. You more or less have those extra blockers in there because the play can quickly become a run. Anyway, the Bears asked Fields to run a traditional offense without extra blockers, little motion, very few rollouts, etc. There were a few basic RPOs, and that was about it. It was awful, and the adjustment they seemed to make at halftime was to just ask Fields to get the ball out quicker, because they started the second half with three straight drops and quick passes to curl routes. That became a theme, which if you think from the defense’s point of view, is blood in the water. ‘They’ve given up trying to protect and we don’t have to worry about anything downfield, so we can just break on every route?’ Myles Garrett speaking to how bad the gameplan was is about all you need to know. How often do you see an opponent speak on these terms about the opposition?I don’t know that I’ve seen a worse coaching job than this, given the situation (a rookie first-round pick’s first career start) and how far away the execution was from anything resembling helpful. The Bears tried to make everything extremely conservative, and in doing so made everything very predictable for the Browns, which didn’t simplify anything for Fields — it made his job that much tougher. I don’t think Fields was particularly good — Greg Olsen highlighted a play on a rollout where Darnell Mooney (4-1-9) was wide open deep and Fields didn’t see him, throwing instead to a single-covered Allen Robinson (6-2-27) on a pass that was knocked down — but the misses on the very few opportunities were hard to judge him on when he was otherwise just trying not to get killed or throw a bad interception on his 12th-straight first read curl route. It’s not a coincidence that the opportunity to Mooney was there downfield because it was one of, as the first tweet above says, only two rollouts. They actually could have started to attack downfield, because the Browns had basically given up on any route beyond 10 yards. And yet, the Bears couldn’t even recognize that and get some late points; they’d successfully shrunk the field on their own, helping the defense and hurting their quarterback, and they stayed committed to it, like a bad comic sticking with a joke that is clearly not landing. I’m not trying to absolve Fields of all blame here, but Matt Nagy is the Joker. And what was Fields supposed to do? Start calling audibles? Break the pocket when the play call was a straight drop and the instruction very much seemed to be to get the ball out quick?
Apparently half of Bears fans are loners with no family or friends. The other half have no friends but are dragging their spouses to a game. And no one has children or each child is driving separately. Busses, bikers and, walkers are also not allowed
Bears buying Arlington Park #donedeal
Yup, the Sun Times articles this last week led me to believe this was officially #donedeal.I’m still kinda shocked the Bears figured out a way to maneuver here. They are the least politically savvy sports organization I know of.