What Matt Nagy Plans for Camp to Toughen Bears
If people who has seen the Bears practice in training camp at Bourbonnais could travel back in time to the 1980s and watch Mike Ditka's teams practice at Platteville, Wis., they would be astounded.
The amount of hitting in practices then compared to now is entirely different. Getting through a practice then might have been as rough as getting through a game now.
Bears coach Matt Nagy isn't pledging to bring back the days of the Oklahoma Drill or Bull in the Ring, but the Bears have to be toughened this training camp because there are no live preseason games to do it.
It's not the only reason. He also remembers how soft they seemed last year after a placid preseason.
Wearing pads begins Aug. 17 and he promises plenty of live hitting, quite a drastic departure from the coach who said he didn't see a need to use starters even in preseason games last year because he wanted to preserve their health.
"So 2018, we talked about getting calloused," Nagy said in his first camp teleconference with Bears reporters. "We were physical. We got after it pretty good, live in training camp.
"Last year we did some live, but we went the other way, right? And not playing a lot of the starters in the preseason. I told you at the end of the year that I didn't think, looking back, that was a good decision."
Finding that physical edge is going to be crucial now with COVID-19 eliminating preseason as well as the offseason conditioning.
'Had no clue this was gonna play out like this with no preseason games—was excited and looking forward to getting these guys going, not just for the competition, but also for the callous and to get back to that," Nagy said. "So we'e got to create that now. We've got to find ways to do it. We're going to. We have a plan.
"And there's gonna be live. There's gonna be tackling. We're gonna be able to evaluate. It's just not gonna be on TV in front of a bunch of people at Soldier Field all the time, or wherever we're (supposed to be) playing preseason."
Not playing starters last year couldn't have benefited the offensive line, which can always use some live hitting to implement its blocking schemes.
-Bears coach Matt Nagy
Nagy realizes they can't go back to 1980s style.
"But it's gotta be smart," Nagy said. "Because this rampup period with these players, not knowing where they've been 100 percent and what they've been doing, that's where I think the league and the players association have done a really good job at making sure that when they get in here we ramp up the right way.
"Because as we all know as head coaches, we want to protect these players and be smart. It's very important that the hamstring injuries, the soft tissue injuries, all those are a whole separate issue from COVID.'
It's easy to say all this now when no starter has been lost to a knee injury or broken bone because of a tackle on a practice field.
Still, the Bears can't look at it this way because the entire league is going to be hitting more this camp in practices by necessity.
"So, we want to be smart on this process, but there's that balance of having that physicality that we're gonna freakin' get after it in this training camp," Nagy said. "So mindset-wise, when we're goin' and we strap it up and go live and we hit and tackle, there's gonna be a mindset that we're gonna be a tough football team."
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