Building Bears Offense from Ground Up
The claim at the outset from new offensive coordinator Luke Getsy built hope.
The Bears would assemble their offense to suit the strength of their players, although the blocking in the run game would definitely be the popular wide zone scheme so important in attacks like those run by the 49ers and Packers.
With OTAs and one minicamp done, and a final mandatory minicamp coming Tuesday through Thursday, tight end Cole Kmet said it's becoming more apparent how Getsy is forming the attack.
"I think you kind of see that in practice, so I think within the last two months we've been doing this," Kmet said. "I get more this route, more that route, you get a feel for what guys are good at and putting them in situations like, 'Let's see this again, let's do it again.'
"So, you're starting to see guys form into that role. You definitely see that and that's definitely encouraging going into training camp where we're going to keep building on it."
Building plays for a bigger receiver like Velus Jones, Byron Pringle or Equanimeous St. Brown will look different than for Darnell Mooney. The same is true at tight end.
"I think you see how it's worked across the league, this type of offense," Kmet said. "I mentioned it before, in San Francisco, Minnesota, and there's different ways to kind of go about it, and how friendly it can be really for everybody across the board from offensive line to running backs, tight ends and receivers.
"Across the board it can be really friendly and I think everyone's kind of seeing that right now."
The Bears won't run wide zone all the time on running plays because it's not as easy to coordinator it with run-pass option plays, and one of Getsy's strengths while he was offensive coordinator one year at Mississippi State was said to have been blending in RPO.
The Bears do have a running back who should be better at inside zone and RPO in David Montgomery. However, when they said they were building the offense to suit their players' strengths they were also referring to offensive linemen as well, and not just the backs.
Ryan Poles did not bring in a bunch of offensive linemen in the draft who weigh 310 pounds or less because Getsy wants to run inside zone plays. The lighter, athletic blockers are for wide zone scheme and they'll run this. Montgomery will simply need to adapt, and he's a versatile enough runner to find the holes in the wide zone.
This is difficult to see now, however.
"For sure, like I said, it's hard to really do the run game how you want to do it and how it should be looking in a game right now without pads on, but you can see where this run game can go with the outside zone and things along that nature," Kmet said. "And the running backs we've got with David, Khalil (Herbert) and all the other kids that we brought in, you can see where it can go and we're all excited to get to camp so we can really put the run game to the test and start really building upon it."
Considering the Bears offense has been 21st or worse in yards and in scoring seven of the last eight seasons, there will be plenty of curiousity over what the attack will eventually look like.
No doubt it's barely going to be visible at training camp because no NFL team does real hitting then, even if they are wearing pads. In preseason, they rarely present their best stufff. The real change in blocking the running game will be apparent early in some preseason games and then finally regular season.
The change in passing to suit the talent available will depend on who's actually available.
There's much to decide on that end as there is still plenty of work for coaches to do in seven weeks before the start of camp.
Twitter: BearDigest@BearsOnMaven
