Post by brasilbear on Sept 15, 2020 10:08:24 GMT -6
Wanted to collect stuff for my own sake, but thought I'd post it here. I'll add new stuff as I find it to this first post. Also looking for game clips from twitter/internet. Please add them below.
Post by brasilbear on Sept 15, 2020 10:14:04 GMT -6
Was Peterson running wild a function of the DL or LB? In that clip, Bears line up in
Gibson (OLB)--Hicks (DT)--Nichols (NT)--Robertson-Harris (DE) Johnson (CB)
Gibson Sr (S)--Smith (ILB)--Trevathan (ILB)---Mingo (OLB)
Jackson (S)
As the play is away from Gibson and Gibson Sr, they aren't blocked. Hicks is cut blocked to the ground and out of the play taking the RT and RG with him. Nichols is blocked one on one by the C. Robertson-Harris is blocked on a combo of the LG**-LT. Mingo is blocked by the TE. The LG releases on Robertson-Harris and blocks Trevathan into Smith, taking out both ILB with one block. Johnson is dancing with the WR.
It looks to my eye (and I don't study much film) that Robertson-Harris over pursues and the LT is more than willing to keep pulling him that way. Mingo, Robertson-Harris and Johnson end up on one side of the hole, Trevathan, Smith and Nichols on the other. If the FB had gone straight into the hole as well (he turned to seal off pursuit from behind) and gotten ahold of Jackson, Peterson would have been off to the races.
IMO--lots of fail all around on that play. 1.Robertson-Harris needs to eat both blockers and not get pulled out of position. He was doubled. 2. Smith needs to not run into DannyT. 3. Mingo can't be blocked by a TE.
Was Petterson running wild a function of the DL or LB?
[Disclaimer: Yes, I know Nick Kwiatowski went out Sunday with a pec injury (turns out it wasn't a tear so he will be back soon) but that's immaterial. Nick has been pretty durable his whole career and Danny T got hurt last year as well. Nick's minor injury Sunday was unpredictable.]
As I said during the offseason, I think Ryan Pace made a poor judgment call in re-signing Trevathan and letting Kwiat go. Danny T was clearly the better player in 2017-2018 but last season I'd say it was about a wash. Trevathan had the edge in 2019 in pass coverage (though Kwiat improved noticeably there from the prior year) while Nick K was the better run stuffer and blitzer. When it's a close call like that, I'm always in favor of keeping the younger, ascending player over the older vet who is at, or maybe even past, his peak. Kwiat is 4 years younger.
On Sunday Trevathan looked like what we used to knock Nick K for a few years ago -- slow and late to react in pass coverage. He was frankly awful and got burned badly several times, including on the 2nd-to-last play of the game when, if not for a lucky drop, we would all right now be bitching about losing to a Lions team we should have beaten. Hopefully it was just one bad game and not the start of a trend, but if Danny T is starting to decline, Pace's decision to keep him over Kwiatowski will look like a really bad one.
As far as NT goes, pretty much every time Goldman isn't playing the overall run defense suffers noticeably. He isn't much of a pass rusher but he's a damn good 2-gap run stuffer which is what a 3-4 NT is supposed to be primarily. If Barkley runs all over us this Sunday, I think Pace has to look for help at the position. Jenkins isn't Goldman and it showed.
There were two consecutive plays with Cordarrelle Patterson that I absolutely loved watching. They line him up at RB and he guts the defense for a really big play. Nice. Then the Bears line up with CP in the same place on the next play and you can sense that the D was bracing for CP to run again... but Trubs completes a beautiful pass play instead. CP at running back is going to force defenses to respect how lethal he can be, and that is going to help the passing game.
Post by britishbearfan on Sept 15, 2020 13:01:32 GMT -6
I'd love us to sign Snacks but I also thought that John Jenkins looked pretty good against the run when. For me, RRH should only be in for clear passing situations.
Post by brasilbear on Sept 16, 2020 10:21:16 GMT -6
Tweet Thread from Jonathan Wood
Posted the first tweet an then cut and pasted:
Dug into the lineup data to see how Bears used their TEs yesterday. Not going to focus too much on efficiency because it's a lot of small sample sizes, more on what they tried to do.
Bears had 3 TEs on the field for 11 snaps yesterday, and threw it on 7 of those. Looks like they were trying to catch the defense thinking run and exploit that.
They had 10 plays with 2 TEs, and ran it 8 times. That's about what you'd expect for a jumbo package.
They had only 1 TE on the field for the other 44 snaps (mostly Graham with 34 of those). Only ran it on 10 of those snaps, though I don't know how much of that is due to needing to throw in the 4th quarter (data is only available for full game).
My biggest takeaway is how many snaps we saw with 2+ TEs. It was about 1/3 of the snaps yesterday, and I'm guessing closer to 40 or 50% before they went to almost exclusive 1 TE sets while having to air it out during the late comeback.
Bears only had 2+ TEs on the field for 108 snaps last year. They're on pace to hit that in only 5 weeks this year.
That's a massive shift in the offensive approach. It puts them more in line with what KC did last year; they had 2+ TEs on the field for ~400 snaps (25/week).
Again, I'm not going to dig into the effectiveness of those different lineups yet, because the sample sizes are too small, which makes them skewed by 1-2 plays (either good or bad). I'll take a closer look at that after maybe a month or so.
To illustrate what I mean by one play skewing the results: the 34 plays with Jimmy Graham as the only TE on the field look like they were pretty inefficient passing, but that's largely because of the 28 yard sack/fumble.
And those Graham as the only TE formations have great running stats, but that's because of the Trubisky scramble + 15 yard penalty (1 of 10 runs in these looks, ~50% of the yards). One play in each that had nothing to do with Graham completely skews the results.