3 and Out: Bears/Chiefs, Preseason Week 1
A win is a win, except when its preseason, so what makes this a decent start for the Eberflus era?
NFL preseason games are made to be taken for granted. Winning said games are not events to celebrate, I repeat, they are NOT to be celebrated.
But there is such a thing as getting too used to losing.
Take the Detroit Lions, for instance (please, take them…Canadian Football League, y’all got space, right?), whose Super Bowl era of irrelevance makes them one of the few teams the Chicago Bears can reliably look down upon at all times. Detroit’s regular season mediocrity and relative obscurity in the postseason is joined by a current preseason loss streak that dates back to 2018.
In nine preseason games since, counting their loss Friday to Atlanta (and not counting any preseason games in the 2020 COVID-impacted season), the Lions have gone through four coaches (two interim) and have been continually rebuilding, as is their reputation. Losing or winning in August means nothing for Detroit, but the Lions having less points than their opponent exists as one long continuum of suffering that can either evoke a special type of hopeful resilience in a true fan or an average type of apathy in everyone else.
The Bears, for some reason, don’t evoke apathy, definitely not in the residents of Chicagoland, nor in the ex-pat fans across the country and not in the so-called impartial media who seems to love needling the team and Bears fans when they have any chance to predict that the team will be bad. In a league where the Jaguars exist, the Texans exist, the Jets and the Browns exist — who wants to see Deshaun Watson lead them to any success or let alone believe that it’ll actually happen? — somehow the Bears are currently being seen as the most reliable under bet for win totals in the NFL and among, if not the worst, bet for the Super Bowl.
Now, let it be clear, I don’t at all think that the Bears will get anywhere close to the Super Bowl in early 2023, they likely won’t get to the playoffs either. But in my 30+ years watching the Bears up close just about every time they’ve initially sparked some success out of a down period occurred when they came into a season looked at as one of the NFL’s worst teams and in many of those occasions they were sparked by brand new, or relatively new coaches, which is what they have now in Matt Eberflus. The other times, btw:
1994 - 9-7 wild card berth in Dave Wannstedt’s second season, made it to division round to be massacred by the Niners: was 7-9 in Wanny’s initial season and 5-11 in Da Coach’s last season, leaving nothing to be expected at the time.
2001 - 13-3 NFC Central division winners, lost to Philly after bye: Dick Jauron somehow made it to a third season after going 11-21 in his first two (have to figure low expectations played a part) but his first (and only) breakthrough helped get Chicago through the post 9/11 doldrums. Things got back to normal with a 4-12 record in 2002, Jauron was out the door by 2004.
The only significant Bears coach post-Ditka, Lovie Smith, comes next. Like Wannstedt, he broke through in his second season with an 11-5 team that flipped the record of his debut team (5-11) and won the now-NFC North but loss again in the divisional round to the Panthers, who were in the process of making their second NFC championship game in three years.
The likes of consistent winning as far as the Bears are concerned came after this season. First came the Super Bowl berth from the ‘06 team, then came 3 years of crap - 7-9, 9-7, 7-9 - and then another Big Game tease in ‘10 ended appropriately by Aaron Rodgers and then two seasons with good starts that ended horribly and with Lovie being fired with a 10-6 non-playoff season as we entered 2013.
I’ve written enough about the five years that followed and the half-wit (Marc Trestman) and half-dead (John Fox) coaches that accompanied them, you can search for that stuff at weareregalradio.com, including the time when I gave up on Bears fandom completely…good times.
And that brings us to 2018, which again is the last year that the Lions won in August. It was also the last time there was just about a universal positive outlook for the Bears entering a season. Armed with a supposed quarterback whisperer and offensive maven (Matt Nagy) in his first head coaching position and in the second year of an athletic and hard-throwing No. 2 overall pick that was his to mold (Mitchell Trubisky), the Bears didn’t let up there, they went and took what was already a top-10 league defense exiting ‘17 and added the NFL’s most intimidating pass rusher in Khalil Mack just before Week 1 in a rare moment where it seemed like the Bears got the drop on the rest of the league and set itself up for an unprecedented (in the Super Bowl era, at least) run of dominance.
Well, the next 16 games were mostly fun and until the “double doink” there was plenty of reason to think that the Bears could bull rush their way to reclaiming the George Halas trophy, if not the Lombardi, but alas…
Sometimes the chemistry just isn’t all the way there, like Luther’s curl.
So what does knowing all this allow one to take from the Bears’ 19-14 victory over Kansas City today at Soldier Field. Reading history gives one encouragement — the Bears won’t likely be as bad as everyone believes they will be in ‘22, but that could be assumed if one has any knowledge of how betting trends are manipulated by the Vegas sportsbooks and how mass opinions are manipulated by the national outlets, particularly in football, where the average fan’s grasp on playing trends and how they manifest themselves on the field is looser than it is with any other sport.
Vegas wants Bears-related action to trend towards the six or so games that are believed to be the team’s high water mark and ESPN and the like want to provoke the national fan base that the Bears have, one that is as active as any on social media, to interact with their platforming, to do so out of hate or love doesn’t make them any different so they’ll gladly trot out as many former NFL pros as possible to exhibit worry for Justin Fields’ body as it stands behind the projected offensive line and with the supposed barren receiver corps that has no chance of making plays to save him as he desperately evades capture every down.
The sucky thing about preseason games, especially opening ones, is that we don’t get any type of sample size worth analyzing that can shut down the widely-held beliefs surrounding the Bears. That won’t occur with anything early in the regular season either. For 2022 to approximate any of the special seasons outlined above we’re going to collectively have to look up at some point in November and see an unlikely 7 or 8-win Bear team be thrust into the A and B blocks of “Get Up,” “Undisputed,” or “First Take” and then see them scrutinized as pretenders for the postseason, which they’ll likely be, but at least we’ll know then that the ride has still just begun and that wins then can actually be celebrated and that we still aren’t the Detroit Lions.
Key drives: The most successful drives of the day really came in the third quarter with back-up QB Trevor Siemian. The 16 points engineered in the third quarter by the Bears allowed them to overtake a 14-0 lead that KC built in the first half, they also came against reserves, cause KC had pulled out most of their defensive starters by the drive that started with approximately 90 seconds left in the first quarter.
Still it was nice to see such a double-digit explosion of offense in any quarter for the Bears, as well as ironic given it was done in the presence of Nagy.
What was nice about Siemian’s drives was how professional he looked while at the same time looking nothing like a starter. Siemian is a backup, a good one with seemingly good grasp on how to run the offense with the backup personnel around him, should he need to work with the starters at any point (God willing, he wont) that’ll be all the better for him, especially given his experience starting in New Orleans, but there is no gray area about the QB position for the Bears this preseason, that makes it already a more enjoyable preseason than the last few Chicago has had.
As for the current franchise QB, Fields did fine in playing through the first quarter (4 of 7 passing, 48 yds; 1 rush, 10 yds). Not much of the playbook was revealed yet, though we did see a couple rollouts, something everyone would like to see more of in a calculating manner this season.
The first designed rollout Fields executed ended with a complete pass, though only for 3 yards, but what happened on the next play - a deep 26-yard completion to Darnell Mooney - is what can be classified as tantalizing. Another similar sequence started with Fields connecting with Tajae Sharpe on a dazzling 19-yard completion on third down deep in Bears territory. Immediately following that play was Fields’ only run, a 10-yard scramble for a first down, and immediately following that came an eight yard gain off a reverse that ended up with Equaninimous St. Brown.
Both Brown and Sharpe likely got their shots today with Fields because of the training camp injuries of several WRs above them, including former Chief Byron Pringle and former Patriot N’Keal Harry. Its nice to see the “next man up” resolve in the receiver corpe as well as the possibility that the group could be more talented to a man than they’ve been given credit for, especially in the hands of a increasingly capable leader in Fields, who still hasn’t led a scoring drive in ‘22, but is looking more like he has the ability to do such things more with just a little more common sense instilled in the play calling and strategizing of his coaching.
Quick hits:
Defense - I may not be the best reader of this, but I thought the rush did well in getting to Patrick Mahomes while he was out there, touching him up a few times and forcing movement of his pocket.
Of course they didn’t get the ball out his hands or out the hands of his receivers - speed may still be an issue for the Bears in coverage, especially against elite offenses like KC, and they showed little containment beyond line of scrimmage against the Chiefs’ starters.
It was clear for everyone watching though that imminent starter Jaquan Brisker (strong safety) and likely special teamer Jack Sanborn were big-time additions in their first games as Bears. Brisker stands a chance to be a star and can live up to the expectations that will come for a player who was used for the pick that the Bears got in trading Khalil Mack while Sanborn, an undrafted free agent from the Chicago suburbs who attended Wisconsin, can be an easy fan favorite if he keeps his effort up and penchant to make plays near the ball up like he did today.
Broadcast: Good to see Adam Amin and Jim Miller back, they’re a good team. Amin is just dope and can call anything (make sure to see him call the White Sox game on NBC Sports Chicago Sunday, btw, wink..)
Normally don’t care about stuff like this, but I also liked the specialized graphics FOX 32 has for these games, they’re different from the typical Fox broadcast look, at least I believe they are ( just realizing maybe they will be a part of the network broadcasts as well…). If they are it’ll be nice given that so many other preseason games use lesser versions of the network graphics depending on what affiliate is broadcasting them (NBC, FOX, CBS, etc.).
One last thing: Make sure to stay connected with WARR Media on all our platforms (Twitter, IG, YouTube, HERE and maybe even some new ones) as we get back on the grind with Bears coverage and coverage across both pro and college football. We’ll have new collaborators this season and new fresh content each week, including new 3 and Outs after each Bears game. Not many of them will be as freaking long as this one, I promise.