Bears Offense Failing to Sweep the Shed

When the Bears started their season, coach Matt Nagy talked about the need for everyone to "sweep the shed."

It was a reference to a book about a rugby team and their philosophy about how no one is above doing the smallest things to help the team win. The Bears even named a weekly award for the phrase this year.

Whether it's the symptom of something bigger or the root cause of their 3-5 record, the inability to pay attention to detail and a lack of discipline seem to plague the entire Chicago Bears offense.

Simply, the Bears aren't getting the shed swept.

The easy target has been quarterback Mitchell Trubisky, but the whole offense is affected and it might even be seeping through to spread across their entire roster.

This would be a good way to explain Kevin Pierre-Louis' running-into-the-kicker penalty against Oakland or the four offsides penalties the Bears defense committed on two possessions last week.

The really scary part for the Bears heading into a do-or-die game with Detroit is no one seems to have a solution.

"You don't really scheme discipline, right? You own it," Bears offensive coordinator Mark Helfrich said. "And we all play a part in that, whether it's just a lack of a perfect technique, perfect alignment, perfect assignment, communication, all those little things that add up to instead of second-and-2 it's second-and-9 or whatever. "So those are all just, it's accountability — personal accountability by everyone, players, coaches everyone involved, and then again just owning the issues whatever those may be."

For a team with a problem at quarterback in Trubisky's inconsistent play, one of their biggest headaches this season is dropping the passes he does throw accurately.

The Bears last season dropped 14 passes, the fewest in the NFL according to STATS Inc.

They have 14 dropped passes again, but it's only the halfway point in this season. They're No. 1 in the league again, but this time they're leading in most dropped passes. Tarik Cohen leads the NFL with six dropped passes.

They've already committed two more offensive holding penalties and two more defensive offside penalties than they did all last season.

None of this even begins to approach the lethargic running game which has nine runs of 10 yards or more, which is 19 less than last year at this time.

One thing they haven't done is commit many sloppy turnovers, but if there is a progression to this type of illness then they can expect this to happen at some point.

"It's very frustrating and then at the same time very simple," Helfrich said. "If I’m a front-side guy, why am I jumping offside on first down when we have a huge play? The drops ... you're not designing a play and saying, 'hey, let's drop the ball" or whatever the miscue is.

"Us as coaches we take 100 percent ownership in what our issues were and may well be. That's the key, identifying and then owning: 'OK, this is why this didn't work, let's fix it.' The frustrating part is that it's not one easy fix."

Nagy believes players are still paying attention to detail and says coaches are making sure of it.

"That's the No. 1 thing that I've learned as a coach in general — forget head coach — is that details matter," Nagy said. "If you don't take details serious on this team, not just the offense, you're going to struggle.

"And then you can't even get complacent with the details and think you know it all. We've always hit on that."

Nagy remains upbeat and players say they are, as well. They think the offense is on the verge of clicking, although this seems rather naive considering the way the offense has dropped statistically week by week.

"We believe it's close," Nagy said. "But what happens is all-in all regardless of any changes that you would end up making, it really does come down to just some success somewhere that can kind of build off each play or each game or each week, and that hasn’t happened with the offense."

The hope Nagy has had is one positive play or series acts as an impetus to a late surge. Nagy recalled how this happened early last year.

"We had some good stuff going," he said. "You could feel the vibe, the energy, everything was rolling. It snowballs. It snowballs in a good way and that's downhill. You're rolling and no one can stop you.

"Now this year it's been the opposite so far. We just haven't had that good thing happen to where it's positive, you get the wins, and it's been snowballing the other way. So we've got to stop that snowball and get one good thing to happen and then see where that leads us."

Soon, they could be too far gone for it to matter.

Twitter@BearsOnMaven