A lot of this week’s coverage of the Bears has been negative, from the multiple failures in the final 43 seconds of last weekend’s loss to the Los Angeles Chargers to the short-term and long-term shortcomings of Mitch Trubisky.
Taking a step back, we probably should remind ourselves the Bears are 3-4, not 2-5 or 1-6. 2019’s halfway point comes Sunday in Philadelphia; plenty of teams have reversed a disappointing start over half a season.
Like: The 2015 Kansas City Chiefs, which started 1-5 only to rip off 10 consecutive wins and not only make the playoffs but win a postseason game. Matt Nagy was the Chiefs’ quarterbacks coach that year, while Philadelphia Eagles coach Doug Pederson was the offensive coordinator. Both current head coaches have referenced what they learned from that 2015 Chiefs team, and in how Andy Reid handled a rough start to the season.
Pederson put those lessons into practice a year ago when the Eagles fell to 4-6 after a 41-point loss to the New Orleans Saints. And it paid off: Philadelphia, against all odds, made the playoffs (and you know what happened next, so we don’t need to re-hash it).
“Leaning on that experience in 2015 was the fact that we just had to trust our process, trust what we were doing,” Pederson said. “I had to trust myself as a head coach, the leadership of myself with the team, trust the leaders on the football team and really again just kind of get back to the basics.
“… Sometimes going simple is a positive and guys are allowed — really it frees their mind to play fast and to execute the offense or defense.”
Nagy has taken to that “don’t change anything” mantra with the tone he sets inside Halas Hall, which has remained positive even in face of a three-game losing streak. It’s why if the Bears do win on Sunday against the Eagles you should expect to see the return of Club Dub for the first time in over a month.
“When you start changing everything, to me that’s a sense of insecurity, it’s a sense of somebody not having confidence in themselves,” Nagy said last week. “X’s and O’s wise, do you have to change? Yeah, because that’s a part of what you’re trying to do. But the other stuff? Nah, I’m not into that.”
The X’s and O’s part is interesting since Pederson talked about simplifying things and getting back to basics. The “Football 202” version of Nagy’s offense has not produced the results expected of it, and while last year’s more remedial offense was league average at best, it was better and more efficient than what we’ve seen in 2019.
So perhaps that means going back to more “Football 101” concepts?
“For here, we don’t necessarily use the word simplify, but we want to focus in,” quarterback Chase Daniel, who was on that 2015 Chiefs team, said. “We want to lock in even more on the details.”
The Bears don’t feel like that simplification or focus needs to be significant. And Daniel doesn’t believe the Bears are all that far off from turning 2019 around, the same feeling he had for the Chiefs in 2015. That team had a couple of close losses — including an 18-17 home defeat to the John Fox Bears — and felt like it was one spark away from turning things around.
When that came in a 23-13 win over the Pittsburgh Steelers in Week 7, the Chiefs wound up playing the kind of football they expected to play for the rest of the season.
“With (Reid), he just stayed the course,” Daniel said. “He didn’t change. His message didn’t change, his attitude didn’t change, he didn’t start pressing, the locker room stayed loose and he was just like hey, let’s just go 1-0. Let’s just get this first win and worry about week by week.”
Nagy is preaching the same stay-the-course mentality to his players, the majority of whom contributed to 2018’s 12-4 season. The Bears could realistically be 5-2 right now if a few (albeit self-inflicted) mistakes didn’t happen in losses to the Chargers and Oakland Raiders.
Those mistakes happened, though, and the Bears are 3-4 and nearing a point where their season will be lost. But they’re not there yet.
And until they are, their coach can continue to apply the lessons he learned in 2015 to his team in 2019. That means staying positive and believing in his team's ability to pull out of this rut and accomplish what it intended to this season.
“We just gotta go out there and do it,” Daniel said. “Bottom line, we haven’t played our best football. It’s a long season. We’re halfway through — not even halfway through. There’s a lot of games, a lot of games left. I’ve been on a team that’s lost five in a row and I’ve been on multiple teams that have won nine, 10 in a row.
“I think we’re trending up. This team is super tight, everyone’s stayed super loose, which is cool to see. It’s nice to see. There’s no panic. We know it’s in us. And talk’s over with. You just gotta go out and do it.”
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