Bears Almost Rise to the Opposition

Grading the Bears: It might have been the best game the Bears played this season and still left plenty of critical flaws to pick at.

Apparently Bears coach Matt Eberflus reached his limit for tight losses.

Sunday's 25-20 loss to the Philadelphia Eagles was their seventh by a touchdown and conversion or less.

Or perhaps it was the fact they did numerous things they needed to do in order to upset the league's top team, such as hold the Eagles to 112 rushing yards, but managed to foul it up with a few bad plays on third down or otherwise.

For whatever reason, Eberflus was extremely honest and unusually insightful afterward almost to the point of doing this analysis for everyone.

It was one of those days when you could just print the full transcription of his press conference and be done with it. Everything came out in the wash, so to speak.

Even Justin Fields didn't escape unscathed when Eberflus did his analysis.

When explaining why the Eagles got six sacks, Eberflus said: "A lot of time that's getting rid of the ball, handling the stunts as the offensive line versus that defensive line. They do it well. They're aggressive. They're violent. They have talent, a lot of talent up there."

Hint to GM Ryan Poles for the draft and free agency next year, and beyond that, there's another reason for some of those sacks left unlisted. One is that Alex Leatherwood just couldn't pass block well.

Eberflus was very candid in criticizing Velus Jones Jr., kicker Cairo Santos and especially safety Jaquan Brisker for blitzing to the wrong gap, leaving the middle or "A gap" open for Jalen Hurts to jog 22 yards to the end zone.

If Brisker went to the middle instead of the left side of the line, Hurts might have been flattened or at least tackled. Or, he could have made a fake, pulled Brisker out of his shoes, and then jogged into the end zone.

Eberflus even seemed to challenge his coaching staff afterward by talking about the mistakes by Brisker and others.

"It's not only them, it's the coaches," Eberflus said. "Who is coaching that guy? Are you responsible for this guy? You are. It's a partnership. When your player plays great, man, that's a partnership. If your player ends up doing some things that you got to get it corrected, it's a partnership. It's the coach and the player."

He kind of lost everyone when he was talking about the tight losses and the 3-11 record going forward, though.

"Everybody has to go through this," he said. "We're in the process of doing that right now."

Not everyone goes through THIS, not to this extent.

It's seven straight losses. The Bears have been around 103 seasons and when they lose to the Buffalo Bills on Christmas Even, then at Detroit on New Year's day, they will have done something no other Bears team ever did and lose nine in a row. To find Bears teams that lost more than eight straight, you need to trace losing streaks back over more than one season.

Looking at one season is quite enough for everyone. Looking at this season is quite enough for everyone.

Here are the grades for this week, because Eberflus stopped just short of assigning actual letter grades, satisfactory or unsatisfactory, or check-plus and check-minus.

Running Game: B-

The only Eagles defensive flaw has been handling the run and without Teven Jenkins, possibly their best blocker this year, the Bears still managed 157 yards rushing. But let's not fool ourselves. Running back David Montgomery was held to 53 yards, although he did average 4.4 yards a carry. The 5.2 yards a carry the Bears averaged as a team was inflated by the 39-yard scramble Justin Fields made, and actually a product of their passing game. There were plenty of Fields designed runs, when he wasn't running to the locker room to get the IV he was supposed to have had before the game.  And what's up with that anyway?

Passing Game: D+

This doesn't all go back to Fields. The six sacks allowed accounted for 42 critical yards in losses and not all of those could be blamed on his holding the ball too long. Notice how no one seems to mind him holding the ball a long time and then running it for 39 yards or running out to his right and throwing 35 yards to a wide-open Byron Pringle for a TD. It's just holding it and then getting sacked. Either way, the offensive line struggled to keep Fields clean from a dominant defensive front. Leatherwood, Braxton Jones and even Cody Whitehair missed on some pass blocks. The other problem with attaching too much blame to Fields in the passing game was who exactly he was supposed to be throwing it to as there was no Darnell Mooney, no Chase Claypool, no N'Keal Harry and a few plays into the game no Equanimeous St. Brown. That's 75 receptions on the sideline, or the total one good receiver has for many teams. Well, there was always Nsimba Webster.

Run Defense: C+

If you look at totals, they did a remarkable job of keeping 1,000-yard rusher Miles Sanders and Hurts bottled up. In terms of situational run defense, they stunk. They couldn't stop the Eagles' low-and-tight, 1-yard sneak formation that has taken the league by storm. Of the 112 yards, 22 came on one Hurts run that easily could have been stopped. In fact, the safety blitz they called might have been the perfect scheme for stuffing Hurts in the backfield and forcing a field goal try if Brisker didn't run to the B gap instead of the A gap, as Eberflus said. The problem with it wasn't all Brisker, though. Everyone else got blocked on the play, too. The A gap looked like a four-lane interstate and not a 5-foot area in the middle of the formation.

Pass Defense: D+

Giving up 315 yards passing is never desireable. The Bears get plenty of credit for Jaylon Johnson's gutsy coverage on AJ Brown, and both Kyler Gordon and DeAndre Houston-Carson are deserving of accolades for ending an interception drought dating back to the loss to Dallas. However, Hurts was throwing all manner of downfield lob and Brown came away with 181 yards on nine catches while DeVonta Smith had 126 yards receiving on five catches. The third-down conversion rate of 56% (9 of 16) was largely the result of poor pass defense on critical downs and also the lack of a pass rush at all. Linebacker Joe Thomas had their only sack and it was unclear whether he was blitzing or came up when Hurts decided to scramble but was trapped behind a blocker and another rusher.

Special Teams: C-

Another week of the special teams roller-coaster ride: A 58-yard kick return allowed as a huge momentum boost for the Eagles coming out of the locker room at halftime; Trenton Gill's excellent punt-and-pins to the 4 and 9; Cairo Santos' missed extra point and poor onside kick; and Eagles drives that started back at their 18 and 22 after kickoffs. Just when they make headway, they do something entirely terrible.

Coaching: B

This was easily the best game plan on both sides of the ball and even much of the execution wasn't entirely lousy. The Eagles spent a chunk of the game trying to pull away unsuccessfully against a defense that had put a cork in most of Hurts' attempts to improvise. They forced him to beat them from the pocket, as a defense should. And he did. Luke Getsy, along with Fields, squeezed water from a rock. They got 152 receiving yards out of Cole Kmet, David Montgomery, Byron Pringle, Nsimba Webster, pre-concussed Equanimeous St. Brown, Dante Pettis and even 3 yards  from Velus Jones Jr. That's creativity and good quarterbacking. Eberflus' honesty and context regarding everything was much appreciated.

Overall: C

This might have been the best game the Bears played all season, which explains an awful lot about seven straight losses and 10 in 11 games.

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