Müs wrote:
Yeah, your O line put on the gimp mask and let itself get dominated.
Chicago's not as good as their record. They beat Detroit with a flukey BS officiating thing, Dallas is *terrible*, and GB beat themselves with 18 penalties.
I think it finally caught up to them.
I'll agree with the Detroit victory, but I'll also say that Detroit is much better than their 0-4 record as well. Dallas is terrible, but their D is still better than than Giants'. The same goes for GB. One thing about the whole "GB beat themselves" argument - Julius Peppers is the reason they had that many holding penalties. They couldn't stop him. He forced all of those false starts and holds. Julius Peppers is a monster. Also, looking to the GB game, Chicago's backup TE dropped a gimme pass from 1 yard out, with zero coverage. On top of that, they didn't put the football in the endzone at the end of the game to prevent GB from getting the ball with over a minute left. I'm not a man that generally uses "we coulda done this," but we easily could've been up another 10 points from what had, making it a 13 point win. I absolutely do not buy the penalty excuse for that win. That'd be like us Bears fans saying "we should have won because you generally don't allow 10 sacks in a football game. On a normal day, we should have won." We lost because the Giants defense was ripping our O-Line apart, not just because we screwed up. The GB penalties were a result of Julius Peppers' domination of that O-Line, not just GB being that terrible. Obviously they're not that terrible, so what made them so terrible that game? Peppers.
After all of that, I do agree that they are worse than their record; but, they aren't worse than their record because of the way they played in weeks 1-3. They truly played well and deserved their last two wins. They aren't as good as their record because they played way better than in weeks 1-3 than they normally on an average day. Their defense is strong again, but their offense outperformed their average day at the field for the first three weeks. Their main problem is their O-Line. We have the worst O-Line in the league, easily. I could've told you that before last night even. I'm sure we'll be talking about the Giants in a few weeks, after another loss where their defense gets lit up, how they only played good against Chicago because we have such a terrible O-Line.
After giving this more thought, and listening to other Bears fans, I feel that it's not worth completely panicking yet. Obviously last night is an anomaly. Even the worst team in the NFL isn't going to play a game that bad very often. The crazy thing though is that we were only down three points, until only two minutes left in the third quarter. How crazy is it that a team with only 29 yards, through three quarters, was only down 3-0? We're talking about a Bears offense that only had five first downs all game, yet the time of possession was still around 45/55. HOW? How can we keep time of possession that close when we only had about one first down per quarter, as well as going 0 for 13 on third down conversions? Our defense actually did very well, that's how. Despite starting with great field position almost every drive, New York still only went 3 for 12 on third downs. NY didn't score a TD until late in the third quarter, when the defense was finally getting tired. Chicago forced, and recovered, three fumbles. They also dropped at least two gimme int's that were floating in the air after being batted up. With the performance of this defense last night, literally ANY form of offense would've won this game for us last night. That's how good this defense is right now, especially now that we have Peppers.
If Jerry Angelo doesn't acquire offensive line help in the next two weeks, he's toast at the end of the year (Our GM), and so is Lovie. It's a shame, because I really don't think it's Lovie's fault. He can't help that the GM won't acquire help at the O-Line position.