Bears defense sees room for improvement
After five weeks of subpar showings, the Bears’ defense finally turned in a performance it could be proud of in Sunday night’s victory over the Minnesota Vikings.
So why wasn’t anyone whooping it up after the game?
“It was just a step in the right direction, and there’s still a lot of work to be done,” said defensive end Israel Idonije, whose third sack of the season was one of 5 by the Bears. “The focus now is to put up another great game this week and continue to stack those really great performances back to back and be consistent.
“We started slowly, but we still believe in who we are as a defense. We believe in the defense and how good we can be. We’re still working toward getting out of the hole we put ourselves in.”
Thursday night, the Bears take their show on the road when they fly to London for Sunday’s game with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
That would seem a great opportunity to build on the Week Six accomplishments, considering the Bucs aren’t significantly better than the Vikings offensively, at least on paper. Tampa is 25th in scoring, 16th in total yards, 14th in passing yards and 15th in rushing yards.
But the 4-2 Bucs sprung a 26-20 upset Sunday on the New Orleans Saints, who whipped the Bears 30-13 in Week Two.
And the Bears are a long way from becoming as dominant on defense as they were last season. Despite their stingiest effort of the season on Sunday, they rank 28th in total yards, 25th in passing yards and 22nd in rushing yards allowed.
The silver lining is that the Bears defense is 11th in points allowed. But even after holding the Vikings to 53 rushing yards on 17 attempts the Bears are No. 32 in average gain allowed per running play.
“We did have a slow start, (but) it’s about what we’ve done lately,” coach Lovie Smith said. “We saw improvement from last Monday night to Sunday night. I think you would say we made improvements.”
Smith is pleased that his defensive unit isn’t satisfied after one impressive outing, and he admits the defense remains deficient in one very important category.
“You want them to talk about still getting better onra lot of things we did wrong during the course,” he said. “But if you play hard — as much as anything that’s one of the things that we did a better job of — you get more guys around the ball. If one guy loses a gap or misses a tackle, you have someone else there to make the play. We did a better job of gang tackling (Sunday night).
“But we don’t want our defense to talk about how good they played when you don’t have any takeaways. We have to do a better job of that. We’re not pleased with the amount of takeaways we’re getting. It’s hard for us to really be excited about a defensive effort if you don’t take the ball away a little bit more.”
For all their other improvements, the Bears did not force a single turnover Sunday night for the first time all season. In three other games, they’ve collected just 1 turnover. Their minimum goal each week is 2, which they had against the Green Bay Packers, and they forced a season-high 3 against the Atlanta Falcons in Week One.
That’s not impressive for a team that leads the NFL with 243 takeaways since Smith became head coach in 2004, an average of just over 2 per game. Last season the Bears had 3 or more takeaways in eight games and 2 takeaways in three others.
“We’re happy, but we’re not satisfied,” said tackle Amobi Okoye, who had his second sack of the season Sunday. “We still feel like there’s much more we can do as far as bringing quarterbacks down. We had a lot of missed opportunities over there.”
The Bears’ 5 sacks against the Vikings were 1 more than they had in the previous four games combined.
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