Bears Blitz

Published by Gary Davenport on June 15, 2016
Article Source: Bleacher Report - Chicago Bears

There may not be a team in the National Football League facing more questions on offense than the Chicago Bears.

Top wide receiver Alshon Jeffery is coming back from an injury-plagued disappointment of a 2015 season. Ditto for No. 2 wideout Kevin White, who didn’t play a snap as a rookie.

Tight end Zach Miller and running back Jeremy Langford have the tall task of replacing productive veterans. There’s a new offensive coordinator in Dowell Loggains.

Oh, and Jay Cutler.

For all those questions, however, there is also something else. There’s hope and potential.

The potential for the Chicago offense to light up the league in 2016.

For all the problems the Bears had during a 6-10 first season for head coach John Fox, the offense was something of a bright spot. A ranking of 21st in the NFL might not bear that out (so to speak) at first glance, but given the injuries that ravaged the skill positions, it could be argued that ranking was a coup for offensive coordinator Adam Gase. A career-high 92.3 passer rating for Cutler certainly was.

The problem is that coup landed Gase a head coaching job of his own in Miami, leaving Fox with a hole to fill on his staff. Fox went the in-house route, promoting Loggains from quarterbacks coach to OC. At the time of the promotion, Fox told Patrick Finley of the Chicago Sun-Times it was a move that would provide the team with a measure of continuity:

Dowell played a critical role on our offense last year. He’s an excellent coach with experience as a play-caller and a broad knowledge of offensive football. He has earned the respect of our players because they know he can help them get better.

As I mentioned at the end of the season, our systems are in place. We will always look to evolve because the NFL is fluid and adapting is key to good coaching. Dowell will help us build on what we started as we head into the 2016 season.

However, Gase told Brad Biggs of the Chicago Tribune that he also expected Loggains to put his own stamp on the offense:

Dowell will have his spin on the offense and I don’t know what they’re going to do but it sounds like they will be in the same realm of what we were doing. Dowell was a good play caller when he was at Tennessee and he did a good job for me during games as far as suggestions and kind of knowing when certain situations came up and having those ideas, “Hey, don’t forget about this.” It was stuff we had talked about during the week.

It might not be known just how different Loggains will be from Gase as a play-caller, but we do know this—Loggains isn’t hurting for confidence.

It’s been noticed by pundits like Chris Emma of CBS Chicago:

And by players like offensive guard Kyle Long, per Zach Zaidman of the Bears Radio Network:

That confidence might be borne of Loggains’ experience as a play-caller for the Tennessee Titans from 2012-2013. Or from his thorough knowledge of an offensive system that the Bears had success with last year.

Or it might be that Loggains knows the pieces are there for the Bears to make some real noise offensively in 2016.

The crown jewel is Jeffery, who will play in 2016 under the franchise tag. After back-to-back 1,000-yard seasons, the 26-year-old was limited to 807 yards in nine games last year, and there were rumblings out of the Windy City that Jeffery isn’t especially happy he doesn’t yet have a long-term deal.

Still, Jeffery signed his franchise tender a few days after being tagged, and when mandatory workouts got underway this week, he was there and reportedly ready to get after it:

If Jeffery is ready, then White is positively chomping at the bit. The Bears made the former West Virginia Mountaineer the seventh overall pick in the 2015 draft, but a stress fracture in White’s shin wiped out his rookie year.

Now, however, the youngster is healthy, and he told Jenny Vrentas of The MMQB that he’s eager to make up for lost time: “Whether it is jump balls, route running, being a deep threat or intermediate routes, I just want to be the best player I can be. I want to maximize that. Wherever the coaches put me, I will do my best to make myself and them look good.”

Many have forgotten after the lost season, but there were some who thought White was the best wideout of the 2015 class—better than Amari Cooper of the Oakland Raiders. A 6’3″, 215-pounder who ran a 4.35-second 40-yard dash at the 2015 combine. A player who (in theory) gives the Bears a pair of big, athletic targets capable of hurting defenses both over the top and underneath.

Vinnie Iyer of Sporting News wrote recently that he expects a breakout campaign from White in 2016:

It’s a reset for the most promising wideout prospect of the 2015 class after his rookie season was wiped out by his leg/shin injury. He’s back healthy and ready to fly around at full speed during all of Chicago’s offseason practices. Working opposite Alshon Jeffery, White’s dynamic skills will be a handful for No. 2 cornerbacks. All the promise of what could White do last year comes to fruition this year in a pass-heavy offense.

White isn’t the only second-year pro the Bears are counting on a big season from in 2016. After showing signs of decline last year, the Bears bid adieu to Matt Forte, who is arguably the best running back in franchise history not named Walter Payton.

It will now fall to Langford, who tallied over 800 total yards for the team as a rookie, to carry the mail in the Chicago backfield. Langford told Adam Jahns of the Sun-Times that he’s well-aware the pressure is on this season—but he feels up to the task.

“It’s a lot different,” Langford said. “It’s up to me, how I deal with it. Last year, it was more, ‘Let’s see what he can do,’ and now it’s, ‘We need you out there to make plays.’”

Langford may be confident, and he had some moments as a rookie. But he also averaged less than four yards a carry, and per Sheil Kapadia of ESPN.com, no back in the NFL averaged fewer yards after contact than Langford’s 1.13 last year.

That’s where rookie Jordan Howard, a 230-pound bruiser who rushed for over 1,200 yards at Indiana last year, comes in.

As running backs coach Stan Drayton told Jahns, Howard’s strength is Langford’s weakness. Simply put, Howard likes to run people over. As Drayton said of watching tape of Howard, “You saw people not wanting to tackle him.”

The Bears may no longer have one “do it all” running back. But as Drayton explained, in Langford, Howard, Ka’Deem Carey and Jacquizz Rodgers, the team possesses a stable of runners who all bring something different to the table.

“I can’t sit here and say that there’s one guy doing everything great,” Drayton said, per Jahns. “But I do have a bunch of guys with their own individual skill sets that are going to be productive for us on offense. But everybody better be locked and loaded every single day, there is no doubt about it.”

Frankly, that stable fits Fox’s philosophy better than a bell cow. Whether it was in Carolina or Denver, his tenure as a head coach has been marked by committee backfields.

So far, most of the talk about the new-look Bears has been about new faces—youngsters that the team is depending on to step up. But there are also a couple of veterans in that same boat.

After clashing with teammates, the coaching staff, fans, the media and everyone else last year, Chicago traded tight end Martellus Bennett to New England in the offseason. That leaves the lead role at the position to Zach Miller, a 31-year-old journeyman with less than 1,000 receiving yards for his career.

Those stats may not bear it out, but Miller insisted to Jeff Dickerson of ESPN.com that he can be a weapon for the team in the passing game:

I think everyone, as a playmaker, you expect to be [a top weapon], I’m going to have an opportunity to show that ability and really kind of just take over, kind of how we left off last season. I showed there were opportunities where I could make plays. That’s kind of how I’m going to approach how we begin the year.

This isn’t to say that Miller is suddenly going to become the next coming of Rob Gronkowski. But before you roll your eyes too wildly at his confidence, I have one number and two words.

The number is five. That’s the number of touchdown grabs Miller had last year. That led the team and was more than he had in every other season of his career combined.

The two words are Gary Barnidge. As in Cleveland Browns tight end Gary Barnidge, who exploded from obscurity with over 1,000 yards in his age-30 season in 2015.

Of course, in an NFL offense, all the skill-position talent in the world does you no good if you don’t have a quarterback. The Bears have Cutler, who may well be the single most maligned and polarizing signal-caller of the past decade.

Yes, Cutler’s contract is an abomination. This picture is even worse:

But dig past the hatred, and the fact remains that Cutler had a good season last year. In addition to that career-best passer rating, Cutler posted a touchdown-to-interception ratio of plus-10 for the second straight year. That’s also a career best. His 11 interceptions were a career low in a season in which Cutler played more than 10 games.

In short, a quarterback best known for making mistakes with the football hasn’t been making mistakes with the football.

Gase received a lot of the credit for Cutler’s success in 2015, but as the Tribune’s Rich Campbell reported, Cutler expects the good times to continue rolling under Loggains:

It’s going well. I’ve known Dowell like I’ve known Adam — for a long time. Not a lot of change. The backbone of this offense is still the same. Even if Adam was here, I think we still would’ve changed some stuff and gotten better in certain areas. We’re kind of continuing down that road.

Cutler also remarked that the Bears’ reshuffled offensive line is coming together well, telling Campbell: “I think we’ve got a really good group.”

It’s a line that was shaken up in the offseason. Kyle Long—a top-15 guard, according to Pro Football Focus, who played out of position part of last year at right tackle—will kick back inside with the addition of Bobby Massie, who, like new left guard Ted Larsen, came over from the Arizona Cardinals.

Jermon Bushrod, who opened last year protecting Cutler’s blind side, is now in Miami. The task of anchoring the line now falls to third-year pro Charles Leno, who told John Mullin of CSN Chicago he’s learning from his new teammates.

“[Larsen is] a veteran,” Leno said. “He knows the game. Me and him talk. We pick up on different things all the time. We help each other out in the meeting room and on the field.”

Make no mistake, the problem with Cutler was never his arm or his ability to make the throws. In fact, it was the opposite. He relied too much on his arm, on his ability to fit the ball into a window he never should have tried to fit the ball into.

However, in 2015 at least, that wasn’t the case. Cutler played within both himself and the limitations of a banged-up offense. The results were positive.

Should you start penciling the Bears in for playoff tickets? Let’s not get nuts. There are a good many things that will have to go right. Not the least of which is the team avoiding the very injuries that contributed to their demise in 2015.

Jeffery will need to return to form. White needs to demonstrate both that he’s healthy and some of the promise that made him a top-10 pick. Miller will have to build on last year’s success and show himself able to perform consistently as a No. 1 tight end.

Whether it’s Langford, Howard or a committee approach, the Bears will need to establish some measure of a run game lest the offense become one-dimensional. The last thing Chicago wants is Cutler pressured into believing that he has to carry the offense, either literally or figuratively.

That means a Bears offensive line that ranked seventh in run blocking and 12th in pass protection in 2015, per Football Outsiders, has to at least tread water relative to last season. If they can improve on those rankings, all the better.

Then there’s Cutler, who will have to both build on 2015 and walk something of a tightrope. With the weapons at his disposal, the 11th-year veteran will be capable of hurting defenses vertically, of making the sorts of “chunk” plays that open up the run game and get defenses on their heels.

He just can’t try to make them at the expense of the sorts of turnovers that so defined him earlier in his career.

That’s more than a few “ifs.” A menagerie of “maybes.” A warehouse full of “what ifs.”

But they aren’t staggering reaches or wishful ignorance in the face of reality. We’ve seen Jeffery play at an All-Pro level. Miller played well last year. White was a top-10 pick for a reason. And behind a top-10 line, there’s little reason to think Langford and/or Howard can’t at the very least keep opposing defenses honest.

It’s still early, but the prevailing school of thought seems to be that the Bears, while an improving team, are closer to competing for last place in the NFC North than first.

Calling them a playoff team may be a stretch, but the Washington Redskins showed just one year ago that the prevailing wisdom can sometimes be wrong.

And the Bears have the weapons on offense for just that sort of surprise in 2016.

 

Gary Davenport is an NFL analyst at Bleacher Report and a member of the Fantasy Sports Writers Association and Pro Football Writers of America. You can follow Gary on Twitter @IDPSharks.

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