It’s unbelievable how the Chargers find new and unique ways to blow games. Like, it’s literally difficult to believe. Other teams go years without a loss like the Chargers today, but they have a game like this about once a month.
Had it not been for the surprise retirement of Andrew Luck, you might have been able to add Indianapolis to that list.
I feel for the Chargers. It seemed like they had their one dream season last year, and they came up short. Last year was probably Philip Rivers’ last chance, and that’s too bad. I’ve liked Rivers.
After a nice win against the Raiders, the Packers sit stop the NFC North at 6-1, but the resurgent Vikings are breathing down their necks at 5-2 (and with a better Points For/Points Against). It’s looking like it could be a dogfight for the rest of the season.
It was fantastic to see, for probably the first time this year, the return of Aaron Rodgers’ dominance. He ended up with a perfect passer rating this game, going 25 for 31 for 429 yards and 5 touchdowns, 0 interceptions, despite a critically hobbled wide receivring corp. The Packers offense under Matt LaFleur has been pretty stagnant so far this year, but it was hard watching the game to tell if it was the offensive plan, or just Aaron Rodgers being Aaron Rodgers. Hopefully, it’s both.
The defense is still struggling against the run, which is troubling (especially when it comes Vikings time). The defense is very aggressive, which led to a couple of big plays this game, but I like it. If both sides of the ball can click at the same time, this team has a shot a another championship (NFL leading 13 NFL Championships, thank you very much).
The Vikings are looking really good though. I was a bit surprised the defense didn’t show very well against the Lions, but part of that was game script I think. After a horrid start to the season, Kirk Cousins has shown his value with his 3rd straight 300+ yards, 130+ passer rating game in a row. Add in Dalvin Cook’s amazing start, and this offense is pretty damn good. Add in a pretty solid defense, and this team too has a shot at the Super Bowl. There are some concerns for the defense going forward, but it might just have been an off game.
The Bears have hit a rough patch, losing their second in a row, and having a (lets be generous here) struggling offense. The margin for error for their defense and special teams is minimal, and unless that defense gets turnovers or special teams gets TD’s, it could go badly. They allowed another 100 yard rusher, but I think that’s more of a “we’re fucking exhausted, man” and the loss of Akeim Hicks thing than a huge flaw.
Your reigning NFL Coach of the Year Matt Nagy is getting crushed by the media and fans. And I get it. They’ve sucked. Part of it isn’t his fault (Trubisky certainly has given no one a reason to think he’s not an enormous bust), but he hasn’t found a way to make his offense work in the NFL. If the Bears have the ability to admit when they’ve fucked up and they go out and get even an average NFL QB to run the offense, they may still have a shot this year. But if they continue to trot Trubisky out there, I think Nagy may lose his team. It certainly looked like the defense gave up in the 4th quarter yesterday.
The problem isn’t just Trubisky, though. He’s shown he can garner wins if he only has to the minimum necessary. The Bears have made some problematic investments, including relying on Charles Leno, trading big to rent Mack for a year, and using 2nd round picks on Adam Shaheen and Anthony Miller. There certainly is time to turn this around, but I honestly expected more coming off the bye than the Bears offense delivered. Still, they were 3-3 to start off last year, so it could happen again. But the goodwill that Nagy and the offense had after last year is eroding very, very quickly.
The Lions have shown a good deal of improvement this year, but I don’t think they’re ready for the big boys yet. Yesterdays’ injury to Kerryon Johnson was a big blow (although he certainly hasn’t impressed me this year), but it was the collapse of the defense that has to be more worrying. Stafford is still Stafford, so you kinda know what to expect from here on out. Sorry Lions fans. Luckily, they get the woeful Giants next week, so there is a good chance to work out some things both offensively and defensively.
Next week the Packers play the Chiefs on Sunday night. I’ve been looking forward to that game all season, but it loses its luster with the injury to Patrick Mahomes, Get well soon, dude.
Oh, and Go Pack Go.
Can anyone justify the new onside kick rules?
I rather doubt it. I think that everyone, including the league, acknowledges that the rules changes for kickoffs have made converting an onside kick too difficult for the kicking team – it shouldn’t be easy to convert an onside kick, but it also shouldn’t be a near-impossibility.
I have to imagine that the rules committee will tinker with it again this offseason, but I don’t have much confidence that they’ll be able to get back to anything resembling the balance in the old rules for onside kicks.
I don’t have much faith in the Vikings but maybe they’re trying to make up for last year when several people pegged them to make the S.B. and they flopped. I’m still not sure that Kirk Cousins is the guy they need to get them there, though.
That was pretty much my point in referencing Sid Luckman earlier in this thread - that even here in the 21st century “Da Bears” still don’t seem to be particularly good at drafting QBs.
I have even less faith in the Lions than I do in the Vikings. Not having won a league title in over half a century (the “Curse of Bobby Layne”!) and having been only marginally better at drafting QBs than “Da Bears” have been over the decades will do that. In short: the Lions in the Super Bowl - I’ll believe it when I see it.
With {ahem} a little help from the refs in that Thursday night game.
The Chiefs have kind of owned the Packers ever since S.B. I. I believe the Packers won the last meeting between the teams but it had been a long time since a Packers win in that series before that so we’ll see how the next one goes. I have to believe that the Packers have the advantage with P.M. being out but we’ll see.
Amen to that.
As of right now my favorites to get to the S.B. from the N.F.C. are “Nawlins” and San Francisco. The Packers have looked good (for the most part) but I consider them to be a lot like the Seahawks in that they have a good record but haven’t been totally convincing.
Heh, heh, heh
I was listening to the radio during the Seahawks’ loss yesterday and the color commentator (former LB Dave Wyman) broached that very subject near the end of the game by pointing out that onside kicks are a very small percentage of the plays in football so there should’ve really been no need to change the rules surrounding them in the name of “player safety.” I think he made a good point.
To be fair, R.W. isn’t the only quarterback and the Seahawks aren’t the only team in the N.F.L. that’ve “benefited” from the N.F.L.'s apparent goal of never letting another QB go down injured.
Does anyone think that the Eagles will get rid of Wentz and Pederson if they fail to make the playoffs this year?
Remember, sports is not about loyalty and autonomy anymore—it is about what have you done for me lately.
This past offseason, the Eagles gave Wentz a contract worth at least $128 million and possibly up to $144 million, with $66 million fully guaranteed at signing and $107.9 million in guarantees. There is very little chance they’d “get rid of” him, let alone after a year where he still has a 90+ passer rating and top 10 QBR. Pederson is in his second year after winning the Super Bowl and made the playoffs last year, winning one game before falling to the Saints. The Eagles are one game out of their divisional lead. Barring a complete and utter meltdown the rest of the season, I can’t imagine they’d get rid of their highly paid, franchise QB and Super Bowl winning coach this year.
Oh please, spare me the overinflated rhetoric. Again, barring something insane like the Eagles not winning another game or Wentz caught raping a bus full of penguins, the Eagles aren’t getting rid of those two this year.
Teddy! Teddy! Teddy!
Hmmmmm. . .Should Bears pursue Cam Newton?
Cam is 30, and he’s been beat up for the past few years; I’d be surprised if he’s ever able to get back to anything close to how he played a few years ago. Even if the Bears decide that Trubisky isn’t their QB of the future, I’m not at all convinced that Newton is that answer.
Let me correct the record here. The goodwill is totally and completely gone. The pitchforks are out. Nagy is catching way more heat than Mitch is, justifiably.
As I was wallowing last night I looked at the Bears schedule for the rest of the season. In all seriousness, we could be looking at a 5-11 finish this year.
Let’s take a quick look:
Week 8: Chargers
Week 9: @Eagles
Week 10: Lions
Week 11: @Rams (SNF)
Week 12: Giants
Week 13: @Lions (Turkey Day)
Week 14: Cowboys (TNF)
Week 15: @Packers
Week 16: Chiefs (SNF)
Week 17: @Vikings
On that list you can probably circle the Giants game as a likely W, but of course if our offense remains a clown show anything is possible. The Chargers and Eagles are both snake bit, but I don’t feel confident in beating either team right now. Mahomes will be back for that SNF game, so we’re probably in trouble there. The Lions match up pretty well against us so getting a split against them would feel like a lucky break. We kinda own the Vikings, but a week 17 road game is a coin flip at best and that team may have sorted their shit out by then.
Fuck me.
The defense has looked pedestrian the last couple weeks and I’m not sure how to react. Yes, the offense has done NOTHING and that group is both exasperated and exhausted, but they’ve been making a lot of unforced mistakes too. Eddie Jackson looks like a guy that doesn’t give a shit which is not something I predicted. None of the LBs, Mack included, have been reliable tacklers. Running Backs all season have been consistently falling forward for 3-4 extra yards after first contact. The turnovers haven’t been coming. They just seem to lack an aggressiveness that they had under Fangio. The defense is still plenty good enough to win a lot of game with, but right now they aren’t playing well enough to carry a “don’t screw it up” offense to victory.
On offense, I mean, holy shit. I was seriously thinking to myself, “do you think we could lure Cutler out of retirement?” Everyone is going to be killing Mitch, and you can’t really defend him, but he’s not close to the most frustrating thing about it. Our offensive line is fucking terrible. The running game doesn’t seem like it has any chance of working, ever. The play calling is stuck in a horrible self-defeating cycle. We’re so incapable of running the ball I don’t blame Nagy for ditching it, but we don’t have the QB or pass protection to survive that way.
We ran the ball on the first play of both halves. The first one was a Cohen run between the tackles for 1 yard which set up a 3 and out. The second drive of the first half was also a run by Cohen for no yards. The first drive of the second half was a 4 yard run by Montgomery which was of course fumbled. So yeah, if you’re Nagy and you are dying to buy your defense a rest, do you really want to keep running the ball and setting up 3rd and long over and over again?
As to why is the running game so fucking broken? No idea. Is it the OL coach? Is it Nagy’s playbook? Is it a lack of OL or RB talent? I really don’t think it’s a personnel problem, there’s a lot of mediocre blockers and runners out there and they aren’t this bad. I think it’s Nagy’s scheme, the guy just doesn’t know how to draw up a run and when he calls them they are totally predictable. We never catch the defense off guard. Is it 9 man fronts due to no respect for the passing game? Probably some of that, but even still it’s more than that.
Whatever it is, they got worse after the bye week. So I have zero optimism for improvement.
Nagy was Coach of the Year last year. Trubisky made the Pro Bowl.
I point that out not to defend them, but to point out how ridiculous those awards were for them last year. I do not think they somehow got worse at their jobs over the offseason; I think that a defense that gets 36 turnovers (5 more than any other team) can cover up for a lot of mediocrity on the offensive side of the ball.
Personally, I think Mitch simply isn’t smart and/or experienced enough to dissect NFL defenses and make the right decisions, especially down the field. Sure he can throw those 4 yard hitches and stare down wherever Allen Robinson is, but that’s about it. Because of that, Nagy can’t run his usual offense, and is thus dependent on the defense to win games. Which can work (see 2018), but this year the turnovers aren’t coming at the rate they were last year, and they’re not as lucky with injuries. Those can certainly change over the rest of the season, but that may be a big ask.
5 out of the next 6 games the Bears play are against teams with losing records. That will help the Bears a lot. I certainly hope they continue to suck and that Bears fans are done glorifying Matt Nagy, Mitch Trubisky and even Ryan Pace (Leonard Floyd has never lived up to #7 and Mitch before DeShaun and Patrick looks just silly now), but, like most things in the NFL, things tend to even out.
Bad calls happen. The admitted wrong call only gave the Packers a chip shot to win as time expired, instead of a slightly longer chip shot with just over a minute on the scoreboard - with an offense that put up a whopping 73 yards in the second half and no timeouts. It was a shit call, but to act like there was no way the Packers win without it is pushing incredulity.
Given that they play once every fourth year, I don’t think the series means that much. For the sake of facts, the Chiefs had a whopping ONE game win streak in the series before 2015. Not exactly an ass-kicking.
But they were still two awful calls and it VERY much gave the “look” that the league was trying to help Aaron Rodgers and the Packers out at the expense of the (hapless) Lions.
Green Bay went from 1987 to 2007 without beating Kansas City. What was that you mentioned about “facts”? All Matchups, Green Bay Packers vs. Kansas City Chiefs | Pro-Football-Reference.com
Chicago doesnt have the draft picks to get Cam unless they trade their two second round picks. Lose Bears, Lose! I would love it if the Raiders got a 5-11 Bears number one pick this spring.
The Patriots are pretty good at making teams look pathetic. The Jets are pretty good at making themselves look pathetic. This game could end 70+ to 0.