Bears Victory Somehow Leaves Blah Aftertaste
The Bears held their Club Dub celebration Sunday, as always after a win.
Four weeks of losing didn't diminish their taste for busting a move.
With their 20-13 victory over Detroit ended, and the media finally entering the locker room, it was all business and the expected talk about being back in a race for the playoffs never came up.
To their credit, the Bears weren't about to try to fool anyone with playoff talk because they only would have been fooling themselves.
They hung on to win over a team playing a quarterback who just signed with them in mid-September, not Matthew Stafford. Jeff Driskel made his sixth NFL start. He has lost five of those.
No one on defense was beating their chests after this. They freely admitted it made a difference not having to face Stafford.
Prince Amukamara mistakenly referred to Driskel as Drexel once, but said the Bears did have to account for the backup's mobility.
"He's a baller," Amukamara said. "His number was called and he stepped up and he played great. Usually when a backup like that comes in you just want them to run the offense and you don't turn over the ball and he had a great first drive against us."
Drexel, or rather Driskel, took the Lions down to a field goal on the first possession and later another one before the Bears awoke.
Even when they did surge on offense, it came all at once and then after this not at all. It was much like their victory over another struggling team, the Washington Redskins. And make no mistake, the Lions are struggling with five losses now in six games.
The Bears had all their scoring in a brief period. It came all in a period of 5:27. Then they did nothing else.
Inconsistency still plagues Mitchell Trubisky and the offense. After taking a 20-6 lead, they had six possessions and went three-and-out on five of those. Just when the Bears defense could have used a little help, they got exactly that—very little.
David Montgomery rushed for just 60 yards on 17 carries and they had 81 rushing yards. They converted only 2-of-12 third downs, had eight fewer first downs (21-13) than a Detroit offense quarterbacked by a backup.
The change of positions for Cody Whitehair to center from left guard and James Daniels from center to left guard could hardly be called a smashing success for the Bears after Trubisky was sacked five times by a team with only 14 sacks for the entire first half of the season.
If the Bears take a performance on offense like this to Los Angeles next Sunday night, there's little reason for optimism. Their defense will have difficulty holding its own against the explosive Rams offense, and with Danny Trevathan now lost to injury and Akiem Hicks already out, with all due respect to Nick Kwiatkoski the task becomes all the more difficult.
On Sunday, though, they wanted not to dwell on the future but on the past and what just—the losing streak.
"Four games is a long time," Nagy said.
He chose, instead, to talk about the Club Dub celebration, and added: "There's still a lot of things that we need to get better at. We understand that.
"But you step back in those moments and you say, this (Club Dub) is why we do what we do."
If they're dancing after the next one, then maybe they can talk about the possibility of getting back into the playoff chase.
Twitter@BearsOnMaven
