Bears defense deserves better from this offense
The irony of the Bears' 24-17 loss to the Tennessee Titans Sunday, their third straight, is that statistically it was one of their best offensive performances of the season, and yet watching the game, with the possible exception of the Rams game, it felt like their worst.
The run game was awful again - 20 attempts for 56 yards - but Nick Foles and his receiving crew added 319 yards through the air and the Bears dominated time of possession, 33:54 to 26:06.
Sadly though when you score just three points through the first 55 minutes of any game you are almost certainly going to lose, and while the Bears did add two late touchdowns it was garbage time against a Titans defense playing just to beat the Bears to the final whistle with the lead.
The real shame is the Bears defense is just too good to keep losing games like this.
A Titans team that came in averaging 251.4 yards per game through the air was held to just 136 net yards passing in spite of the fact that the Bears stacked to take away Tennessee's fourth-ranked ground game - averaging 155.6 yards per game - and held it to just 92 yards on 31 carries.
They also took away the game's most dominant back, Derrick Henry, limiting him to 68 yards, with 26 of those yards coming on one play, and most importantly they held the Titans offense to just 17 points with the winning score coming from Tennessee's defense courtesy of a 63-yard Desmond King return to the house of a David Montgomery fumble.
There really isn't that much more to say here as a huge difference in the game was the woeful play of the Bears makeshift offensive line that was to be expected, but a big part of the problem was another really dumb penalty and missed assignments from veteran Charles Leno, a performance from Rashaad Coward that strongly suggested it's time to end the experiment and put him back on the defensive line, and more of tight end Jimmy Graham, who had a much better day catching the ball, doing his best bullfighter waving his cape when asked to block.
We'll look at the tape and see what else we can find but the bottom line is the Bears defense is good enough to beat anybody, the offense is bad enough to lose to anybody, and now at 5-4 Monday will begin the most important week of the Ryan Pace, Matt Nagy era.
Nagy summed it up after the game saying, "We got to right the ship, and we've just gotta do it by getting one win.
"We've gotta be able to - whatever that is, by any measures, find a way to do it. I think that they understand where we're at, it is hard. When you're sitting 5-1, to be 5-4, it hurts. But now we've gotta make sure, whatever those issues are, we just at some point in time get this thing back on track."
Here's why it has to be this coming Sunday vs. the Vikings.
A win sends them into the bye at 6-4 overall and 2-0 in the division with a chance to rest and get healthy knowing there is only one winning team left on the schedule, the Packers, who they'll face twice, including coming out of the bye.
A loss gives them an extra week to think about the fall from 5-1 to 5-5 and knowing if they can lose to the 3-6 Vikings they could lose to them again later as well as the Jaguars, Texans and Lions.
With no certainty whether or not Cody Whitehair, Sam Mustipher or Jason Spriggs can make it back next Sunday, can the Bears get it done?
Allen Robinson says they have to.
"At the end of the day, it is the NFL, things happen, unfortunately players do get hurt and certain situations come up," he said. "But we gotta figure out how we can play our game.
Unfortunately, we dropped three in a row, but at the end of the day we still got a lot of football ahead of us. We gotta put our foot on the gas and keep it going."
If they don't get it started next Sunday there may not be any gas left in the tank.
• Twitter: @Hub_Arkush