Bears offensive line struggled. Now comes the repair job.

[soulman]

Bears offensive line struggled. Now comes the repair job.

Charles Leno (72) and his Bears offensive linemates had a rough time in the season-opening loss to the Packers. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune )

By Rich Campbell

When offensive line coach Harry Hiestand reviewed the Bears’ loss to the Packers last week, he identified two opponents his guys struggled to block.
One was the Packers’ formidable front seven, led by nose tackle Kenny Clark.

The other, more abstract foe was the reason the veteran line languished as part of the offense’s rotten season debut.

“When the expectations are high for all of us as players and coaches, and you’re not having the success you’ve anticipated, I think it doubles down a little bit,” Hiestand said Tuesday. “That was the sense I got, and we just couldn’t work our way out of it.”

Hiestand’s postmortem of a lamentable performance revealed an offensive line that was destabilized by expectations. Players focused too much on negative results piling up instead of reverting to blocking fundamentals to help the offense gain traction, he said.

The Bears surrendered five sacks, were flagged four times on the offensive line for holding or illegal use of the hands and openly regretted not running the ball more.

“You have to be able to focus on things that help you and don’t focus on, ‘Jeez, we should be gaining more yards than that,’ or, ‘Jeez, he just got sacked,’ ” Hiestand said.

“Just focus on doing your job and using the technique that you worked on. Play together as a unit and you’ll work your way through it. We just never worked our way through it.”

Hiestand’s repair job began with self-criticism regarding one of the game’s low points for the offensive line.

The Bears had third-and-1 in Packers territory in the second quarter. They were driving to retake the lead after the Packers had scored a touchdown to go ahead 7-3.

Coach Matt Nagy called a handoff to kickoff returner Cordarrelle Patterson, a personnel choice Nagy defended by citing Patterson’s proven toughness as a ball carrier and ability to break tackles.

“We could’ve had Walter Payton back there and he wasn’t getting anything,” Nagy said Friday. “It wouldn’t have mattered.”

The reason? Clark swam past new center James Daniels and tackled Patterson in the backfield.

Clark normally plays a two-gap technique, meaning he accounts for the lane on each side of the center. But he stunted on the short-yardage run, jetting past Daniels with quickness that belied his 314-pound frame.

“I didn’t prepare him for that pressure in that front,” Hiestand said. “He was playing it like a normal two-gapper … so that one looked really, really bad on him.”

Daniels, meanwhile, processed it as one of several learning experiences in his first start at center since two seasons ago at Iowa.

“I have to expect that he’s going to do something like that,” Daniels said. “When you’re blocking a player like that, you know every play you have to be on or he’s going to beat you.”

The list of negative plays was too long for anyone’s liking in the offensive line’s meeting room.

The holding penalty against Kyle Long. Right guard Cody Whitehair getting blocked back by Clark into the path of tight end Ben Braunecker, which wrecked a potential shovel pass. The hit on quarterback Mitch Trubisky that turned a potential late-game touchdown pass to running back Mike Davis into an underthrown incompletion.

“We were pressing a little bit, trying to make the big play,” left tackle Charles Leno said. “You’ve got to let that stuff go, just take care of the simple stuff and execute the technique that’s used.”

For Hiestand, that will be the focus of practice this week.

Fundamentals such as targeting a block in a specific part of a defender’s body to prevent him from taking a quicker, inside route to the quarterback.
Linemen regrouping their hands as a play progresses to ensure Trubisky has time and space to throw downfield on plays that take a bit longer to develop. And, of course, making sure run blocks are solid so Nagy has confidence in calling runs.

“It’s important that our pads are lower than their pads,” Hiestand explained. “You can’t give (defenders) a lot of surface to grab onto or hook onto. Because it’s easier to grab when you’re higher and moving laterally than it is when you’re lower and moving forward.”

As the Bears see it, these are problems within their control. Fixing them fast is the only way forward because the expectations for this season aren’t going anywhere.

“Hopefully we limit the human error and the mental lapses,” Long said. “The game is hard enough. Make it so they have to beat us. Don’t beat ourselves.”

[soulman]

FWIW here's what Harry Hiestand and the OL themselves had to say about last Thursdays game.

I'll let you all draw your own conclusions from this read but I already have mine.

1) They were rusty and too laid back based on their own expectations.  (the long layoff didn't help)

2) A lack of proper preparation for GB. (that's on Hiestand and the rest of the staff)

I can't draw many other conclusions than not playing at all in the preseason had two separate impacts.

1) They were rusty, very rusty.

2) The message from that made them believe they were better prepared for battle than they were.

 

And FWIW it looks to me like Charles Leno needs to push himself back from the table sooner and skip the seconds.  That spare tire around his gut tells me so.  He's typically in better shape than that.  To be blunt I really don't think a 4 week layoff with no game type contact helped these guys one little bit.  They may have been 100% healthy but they ended up becoming about 90% useless.  JMHO

 

[GBHalas]

I don't have a problem like many about not playing starters during preseason, BUT I wouldn't be opposed to getting OL and DL first units regular preseason snaps just to get their timing down.  So much of line play is tempo and timing that getting as much as possible practice with contact would hopefully ensure this doesn't happen again.

[abstract_thought]

They practice with contact throughout camp.

[G08]

It's different when you're coming off and hitting your own guys as opposed to opponents.

Oh well. They better get their **** together or this offense is dead. I don't care if that's Tom Brady back there, no QB finds consistent success with no protection or run game.

[WindyCity]

We pay way too much money on the OL for that performance to ever happen. They looked like lost rookies.

[soulman]

On 9/12/2019 at 7:46 AM, abstract_thought said:

They practice with contact throughout camp.

Not the kind of contact that comes in an actual game.  In fact the CBA even limits contact and the number of full dress contact practices a team can have.

To believe that having virtually no game snaps in 4 weeks had no impact on what happened against GB is awfully naive and an excuse I'm simply not willing to accept.