Post by mpbears68 on Oct 31, 2020 1:57:56 GMT -6
Better but still not good.
I've posted this multiple times here before to refute those who magically believe the Bears offense was "good" in 2018. It wasn't. It was merely NOT AS BAD.
The defense that season was otherworldly as I'm sure you recall. It lead the league in turnovers and defensive scoring...by far. When you normalize out the short fields, the takeaways, and the defensive TDs, you find the actual offensive production of the 2018 Bears was low-average in NFL rankings. And keep in mind even that includes one outlier game vs Tampa where Trubisky threw for 6 TDs and we scored 48 points in a rout against the league's worst defense that year.
As a particularly apropos and illustrative example, we beat the 11-2 LA Rams that season, the team we just got trucked by, by a score of 15-6. I was there in the stands and remember it well. We did it with 1 TD, 2 FGs, a Safety, and 4 INTs. Trubisky had 110 yards and 3 picks. His "TD pass" was on a 2-yard gadget play to Bradley Sowell.
I don't think I need to go into what the offense looked like Pace's first 3 years under John Fox when all we had was JoHo running over people. I stand by my assertion that Ryan Pace hasn't produced a decent offense in his entire tenure as GM.
I've said this many times here: Pace has done a heckuva job on defense but he's failed massively on offense. I want a GM that can construct a well-rounded team that can win consistently, not just when the defense wins the game 90% on its own.
"I don't like the results so I'm going to add a bunch of other things to help change the results to something I like".
Thats what you've just done there. The offense doesn't control where it starts. It's job is to put points on the board. The defense doesn't control where it starts...it's job is to keep the other team from scoring. They either put points on the board and stop points from being put on the board or they don't. What you're trying to say is that if they had to go a longer distance they wouldn't have been as good. Except there's no way to prove that.
I think we're more in agreement than disagreement though.
Bears 0ffense in 2018 was:
20th in yards/game &
21st in yards/play
Only thing it was above average in was in total points which includes, and is skewed by, 6 fumble/pick-6s and a safety by the defense. We led the league by far that season in takeaways and defensive scores.
2018 Team Stats
Look, there's no question the 2018 Bears offense was significantly more productive than the shit product we have seen on the field in 2019 & 2020. Nagy's gadgets and gimmicks worked generally well year 1 of his tenure and haven't worked hardly at all since. Mitch also was far more successful scrambling that year than he's been since. Rest of the league adjusted and Nagy has been left gasping for answers since.
But the offense that year was hardly "good". It was just "good enough" with a stifling defense to win a lot of games. Measured purely on it's own, it was a medium-low level offense.
It is a really steep uphill climb trying to defend either Matt Nagy or Ryan Pace on their stewardship of the offense.