How Bears Handle Surprise Element from Different Lions Coach
The great mystery for the Bears Sunday is what they can anticipate facing a team with Darrell Bevell as head coach for the first time, after the Detroit Lions ownership decided to stop following the Patriot way following their last loss.
The question offensively is easily solved by looking back over his past calling plays against the Bears, and also by looking at what the Green Bay Packers and Minnesota Vikings did to the Bears the past two games.
"I know Darrell Bevell, I have a lot of respect for him," Bears coach Matt Nagy said. "I know that he'll have those guys ready."
On the other side of the ball is where the bigger mystery could exist.
"That's always a factor in a situation like that, but at the end of the day you can't overwhelm yourself with that factor, or what that may be," Bears wide receiver Allen Robinson said. "You know, it may be something, but you can't try to really prepare around the unknown.
"We know what their DNA is. We know what they like to play. For us, we just have to be prepared to adjust to whatever change or whatever that difference might be."
Bevell has been the Lions offensive coordinator the past two years, and his offense has made an extensive point of trying to establish the run against most teams, particularly against the Bears. So without the constraints of Patricia, it would be easy to anticipate he'll take that emphasis on the run to an extreme.
Throughout his career as an offensive coordinator, his teams have done this whether it was with the Vikings when they had Adrian Peterson or Seattle with Marshawn Lynch or now in Detroit.
With the Vikings, Bevell's offenses ran for an average of 143.6 yards against Lovie Smith's defenses. When he went to Seattle and faced the Bears three times, they ran for a 131.7-yard average against the Bears.
The Lions in 2019 with Bevell as offensive coordinator tried this again and it didn't work so well, with 98 and 105 yards rushing. However, they were persistent with it.
In this year's season opener they came out running and used Peterson well, piling up 138 rushing yards before they blew a big lead.
Bevell just saw the Packers roll through the Bears for 182 yards rushing. The Vikings tried it, too, but with less success.
Still, Minnesota did have success with play-action passing off of the run fake.
The key here could be the Bears getting Akiem Hicks back on defense. Their run defense had solidified after over a stretch of three games before his hamstring injury, and the Packers had no problem blowinig the interior of the line out without him.
On the other side of the ball, the great issue facing Mitchell Trubisky is how much zone and how much man-to-man coverage the Lions will play.
Traditionally a man-to-man team, the Lions crossed up the Bears in the opener by zoning Trubisky more early than in the past. Some of this could have been the influence of their first-year defensive coordinator, Cory Undlin, the former Eagles secondary coach.
When push came to shove in the fourth quarter, the Lions reverted to their true nature as a man-to-man team and Trubisky burned them. It doesn't mean they won't revisit the zone but quarterback Trubisky says it could be too late for a measurable deviation from the norm.
"I think you have to expect that because that's who they are and that's what they've done for the last 11 weeks," Trubisky said. "But you gotta expect the unexpected with the new coach being in there. They might throw some different looks at us so for us it's just worrying about what we're doing on the offensive side of the ball, being in the right place at the right time, executing our plays, trying to take another step forward from last week, and obviously my focus is ball security and taking care of the football.
"But yeah, you gotta expect the unexpected but that’s who they've been the last 11 weeks so to change during a week, we'll see, but you gotta be ready for it."
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