Chicago Bears: Matt Nagy overcorrects on offense

The Chicago Bears won but the offense still looked stagnant. It must get better quickly for the team wants to compete for a playoff spot.

Following the loss by the Chicago Bears to the Green Bay Packers on opening night, one thing became abundantly clear — Matt Nagy’s play-calling needed to improve the following week against the Denver Broncos.

Specifically, the run to pass ratio was incredibly imbalanced, as the Bears ran the ball only 12 times while slinging it all over the yard 45 times. In a one-score game, Nagy’s abandoning the run was puzzling, to say the least.

Well, he certainly addressed that disparity on Sunday, bringing the run to pass ratio back into balance with 29 runs to 27 passes. On a superficial level, it seems like Nagy had a great day calling plays for the offense. However, a deeper dive suggests Nagy may have overcorrected from Week 1.

Now perhaps Nagy’s gameplan the whole time was to dink and dunk with quick passes to neutralize the terrific pass-rushing tandem of Von Miller and Bradley Chubb. That’s possible, and to some extent probably true, but Nagy didn’t even appear to consider throwing the ball beyond 10-yards. That’s fairly puzzling considering the Broncos’ secondary, outside of Chris Harris, is pretty pedestrian and was seen as an opportunity to exploit before the game.

What was even more telling was the Bears touchdown drive. In the third quarter, the team marched down the field on a 9-play, 80-yard drive. There was a 10th play which was a pass by Mitchell Trubisky on 3rd and Goal from the 2-yard line that was negated by a defensive pass interference. That pass was the only one of the possession for Mitch. The nine plays of the drive were all runs. There were even runs from the goal line in a three-wide receiver set.

Watching the game yesterday, it did not feel as though Nagy wanted Mitch to throw. It felt like it would come back to haunt the Bears in a close game — and it almost did — as Trubisky was forced to rev things up with just 31 seconds left in the game and was suddenly forced to sling it to get into field goal position. Fortunately, he made enough plays to get them into position to win the game.

Nagy will have to go back to the drawing board before they face the Washington Redskins on Monday Night Football and figure out a way to not just have a better balance of runs and passes, but within the passing game, have a better mix of plays. But Nagy isn’t the only one who needs to be better. Of course, Nagy can’t call those deep pass plays if Trubisky can’t complete them, so Mitch has to be better (much better) or it won’t matter what plays Nagy sends in.