At the end of Week 2, the Chicago Bears welcome the Seattle Seahawks – and want to forget the bitter bankruptcy in Green Bay. Can Khalil Mack and Co. Russell stop Wilson? In the SPOX Coin Toss is discussed, you can see the game from 2.15 a.m. live on DAZN!
mySPOX-User BearDown91: After last week’s already sure victory was given out of hand, the Bears now want to make amends in front of their home crowd. In addition, fans will be given another reason to celebrate at the award ceremony for team legend Brian Urlacher on the occasion of his admission to the Hall of Fame.
In the offense, quarterback Mitchell Trubisky will be in demand for this project to succeed. He must show a better understanding of the game and ensure a better execution of the offense. At the same time, Matt Nagy will have to relieve his quarterback much more than he did against Green Bay.
However, the Bears at least have the necessary ingredients for this. Allen Robinson gives Trubisky a big and physical goal, the running game around Jordan Howard and Tarik Cohen works (after Football Outsiders in week 1 the second-best running offensive with a VOA of 33.4 percent) and the offensive line played mostly convincingly. In addition, Trubisky was to play Trey Burton against the decimated linebacker corps of the Seahawks in the middle of the field.
On the other side of the ball, after their dominant performance last week, the Front Seven can even be expected to take another step forward. This is mainly due to two personal details: Roquan Smith and Khalil Mack.
Smith indicated his enormous potential last week and will now have significantly more time to play. Especially in coverage, Smith is a significant upgrade to Nick Kwiatkoski and should help to better defend short passes. If the Bears manage to prevent these short passes, Mack’s time has come: he celebrated a custom-made debut last week and is now allowed to play Germain Ifedi. To call this duel a mismatch would probably be the understatement of the year.
On the other side of the defensive line, Leonard Floyd is likely to be used as quarterback spy and entrusted with the task of keeping Russell Wilson in the pocket. If Kyle Fuller can learn how to catch a ball by Monday night, that would also help.
Since no huge leaps in performance can be expected from their own offense within a week, the Bears must rely on a dominant idea of their defense. But it is definitely able to do that against the Seahawks.
Adrian Franke (SPOX): There is a bit of doubt about Chicago’s offense – and I can only share that for now. Yes, the Bears looked creative and unusual with their formations with the new coaches and took Green Bay by surprise at the beginning.
But that died down quite quickly and Chicago became more and more conservative, with few downfield passes and generally little courage offensive. It was one reason why the Packers were able to come back at all and the big question is whether Chicago, after the (presumably) scripted plays, ran out of ideas in the heat of the battle. That wouldn’t be a good sign.
Seattles Defense was to follow up and Trubisky took the easy reads, Green Bay had success with man coverage here. Seattle had problems against Denver in the pass rush, but that has to change against Chicago; the Seahawks should consider playing more aggressively on the line of scrimmage in general, after all, Bobby Wagner is now on top of all that.
Seattle must therefore be careful that Chicago does not dictate the game in the run game. Trubisky has not shown that he is very good with pressure so far – against Green Bay the exact opposite was the case (2/5, 28 YDS, 4 sacks). Three of the four sacks didn’t go against the lightning, so Seattle has to get Trubisky into long second and third downs.
The problem from Seahawks’ point of view: Wilson also had big problems against Denver with Pressure (5/12, 72 YDS, INT, 6 Sacks) – but was also much more aggressive in the downfield passing game. Without injured Doug Baldwin, the Seahawks’ short pass timing game will have problems; Seattle must take out Khalil Mack elsewhere.
The way there can work by some only too known ways: Bootlegs on early downs to get Wilson out of the pocket clean, as well as run pass options to take Mack out of the game as an unblocked defender – the Seahawks have to be creative here.
This could also open the door for an offensively aggressive game plan to get Tyler Lockett, Jaron Brown and Brandon Marshall Downfield into some good matchups. The Bears hardly dared to flash Aaron Rodgers once against Green Bay. If the issue continues against Russell Wilson, Wilson could punish him. But he’ll have to: The run game about Carlson had some good moments in Week 1, but much more can’t be expected against this Bears front.