Windy City Gridiron
Yes, I put coaches on my list from time to time, and considering the Chicago Bears didn’t do much on the defensive line this offseason, there’s a lot riding on Dennis Allen to get his scheme humming.
The Bears are basically bringing back the same group of defensive ends, and at defensive tackle, they swapped out Andrew Billings for Neville Gallimore. They churned out the bottom of the depth chart on the d-line, but nothing of major significance was added. The Bears feel they have the right guys in place, so it falls on Allen to take the same group up front and figure out how to improve on their 35 sacks (tied for 7th fewest), 84 QB hits (tied for 8th fewest), and 66 tackles for loss (tied for 4th fewest).
It also begs the question: If they feel they have the right guys in place, then what happened last year?
At their post-draft press conference on April 25, head coach Ben Johnson was asked how the pass rush would improve with the same guys on the roster as last year.
“Well, we’re certainly going to coach better than what we did a year ago,” he said. Coaching better was a theme he alluded to throughout that press conference, so when Allen had his moment in front of the media in May, he was asked about Ben’s message that the staff needed to be better.
“There’s nothing that Ben said in here [the Halas Hall Press Conference Room] that he and I haven’t talked about,” Allen said. “We’ve had all these discussions, and I think when you look at things, the first thing you have to look at is, okay, what could I have done better? And then, what could we, as a staff, have done better? And we had a lot of discussions this offseason about a lot of different things. And one of the things that we identified was, you know, me.”
We went a few years where a Bears’ defensive play caller refused to take any accountability, so Allen’s remarks were refreshing.
“We focused so much on installing all the scheme last year because it was brand new, and we do have a high volume of things that we carry in the defense. We focused so much on that, we lost sight of some of the fundamentals and techniques that it takes to function to do those things. I don’t think we were as fundamentally sound defensively as we need to be.”
Allen asks his front seven to move around a bit, so if they are off on their fundamentals and aren’t hitting their marks, the timing of the stunts suffers.
“So, how do we have to coach it better? Well, let’s minimize how much we’re focused on the scheme, okay, and let’s focus on not what we’re going to do, but how we’re going to do it. I think that’s how we’re going to improve.”
Allen’s defense lost every defender who had multiple interceptions in...
