Kansas City Here We Come

It's not the worst thing in the world for the Bears, just not anything close to what they aimed to achieve when the offseason began.

Andy Dalton still has a live arm at age 33 and if given protection he can sling it as well or better than most quarterbacks.

The dispointment of not seeing Russell Wilson in Chicago keeps anyone from being overly excited about the "Red Rifle" and Nick Foles lining up behind center at the start of the 2021 training camp.

They tried. According to an NFL Network report, they thought they were in the running for Wilson until Trey Lance's pro day when Ryan Pace found out the Seahawks just weren't going to trade Wilson no matter what. None of that matters now, really, other than to indicate they made the effort.

The more important issue is where they pivoted and what this all means to the Bears offense and the team's direction.

Matt Nagy Gets His Wish

This might be the quarterback offensive coordinator Bill Lazor worked with in Cincinnati, but make no mistake. This move has Matt Nagy's scheme stamped all over it, and it's not the scheme the Bears succeeded with last season.

Whether this is good or bad is yet to be determined but if something like this happened in past seasons, it proved a near disaster.

Nagy's great desire is to turn the Bears offense into something more along the lines of Kansas City's, with an RPO flavor and spread formations. He won't admit it, but he doesn't need to now. Dalton is proof, as if some was needed.

In two straight seasons, the Bears offensive line and the quarterback running the offense showed the personnel could not achieve Nagy's offensive vision.

Instead, Mitchell Trubisky had minor success in 2019 over the final four weeks of the season running plenty of bootleg action and throwing with a moving pocket.

Last year the Bears had no offensive identity and struggled to run the ball, so Nagy went back to the bootlegging and quarterback movement, but added a twist in it with an outside zone running game like places such as Tennessee, San Francisco and Minnesota use. The inside zone didn't work and the Bears then also failed to execute the RPO passing game. But this outside zone and bootleg let Mitchell Trubisky move and throw from outside the pocket.

It played to his strength, or at least let him avoid his weakness.

Nagy wouldn't say it. He seemed to be biting his tongue throughout the run to a playoff berth using this style. But this isn't his offense.

In fact, after the season he went so far as to say this was no longer the Kansas City offense, but the Bears offense.

"When I first got hired, you come into this thing and obviously Mitchell being our young quarterback that's coming in, learning the system, being able to give you the dual threat that can run but also has the arm and ability to make every throw in the playbook, which he does," Nagy said. "You start off there and you say that. But then as you go through it and you start to see where your team is at with your players and their strengths that they have and how it fits. Now you start kinda tweaking your offense a little bit to turn it into the Chicago Bears offense and not necessarily the Kansas City offense.

"There's stuff that we liked from that offense that we brought here, there’s stuff we've gotten away from, there’s stuff we've added as far as this year in 2020."

So Long Mitchell

Guess what? Young Mitchell isn't there anymore.

Watch how fast this becomes the Kansas City offense again.

Kid: “Mom, can we get Russell Wilson?”

Mom: “No, we have a QB at home.”

The QB at home: pic.twitter.com/w6zniSNZZB
— NFL Memes (@NFL_Memes) March 16, 2021

Whether Dalton is at quarterback or Foles wins the starting spot makes no difference.

Neither of these two quarterbacks is twinkle toes. They aren't passers who move all over the place like Trubisky, although Dalton has a little more quickness to his step than Foles.

Neither one is going to run a steady diet of bootleg passes and rollouts with handoffs coming deep within the backfield. They're not turning their backs to the line of scrimmage, moving out to one side before reading only one half of the field.

That's not Nagy's style. It's not the Chiefs style. The Bears style will be the Chiefs style and Nagy's style again.

Both quarterbacks are veterans who can read the full field, unlike Trubisky.

This is going to be a more straight-arrow Kansas City style West Coast offense now with the spread attack. There will be much less quarterback under center.

With formations like they'll use for this spread, employing outside-zone run-blocking concepts will be difficult.

The Bears will draw back away from the style of running attack which led to their late-season success against the Jacksonville Jaguars, Houston Texans and the Minnesota Vikings that led to the playoffs.

They'll return to the running style which stagnated two straight years.

Whether they can execute it this time will depend on whether the revamped offensive line can do a better job blocking the inside zone run, and the pass rush gives quarterbacks more time to look for bigger gains downfield.

Spread and the Gun

Dalton and Foles have the arms to stay in the pocket and execute this style out of the shotgun. The question is whether the line can provide the time to let them, and also block the different types of runs for David Montgomery so they have a counter to the pass like last year.

By bringing Dalton on board, Nagy has essentially decided that if he's going down with the ship in what could be his final season then he's firing the guns off the way he wants to fire them off and not some way he considers uncomfortable, foreign or even distasteful.

The Red Rifle lets him do this. So does Foles.

This is going to be a lot more interesting than some think, even if it's not Wilson at quarterback.

Twitter: BearDigest@BearsOnMaven