Big Blue View
The New York Giants will start their run through the NFC North this week when they travel to the Windy City to take on the Chicago Bears.
The Giants are coming are coming off three straight losses and carrying a 2-7 record as they enter the second half of the season.
The Bears are currently 5-3 on the season, coming off of a 47-point explosion (against an admittedly horrendous Bengals’ defense). Their own offense has only 25, 26, and 16 points in the three prior weeks. The Bears’ defense, meanwhile has given up 24, 14, 30, and 42 points over the last month.
Can the Giants’ offense score enough to win?
Apologies to Wan’Dale Robinson, Theo Johnson, Tyrone Tracy, Devin Singletary, and pretty much everyone else; Jaxson Dart is the Giants’ offense.
Barring a defensive collapse (which is beyond the scope of this piece), the Giants will go as far as Dart carries them. So it obviously follows that defenses are beginning to experiment with ways to stop rookie quarterback Jaxson Dart. We knew it was going to happen, but now the rookie’s continued progress will rest on how he adjusts to opponents’ adjustments.
Case in point, the Philadelphia Eagles tried blitzing Dart in their first meeting back in Week 6. While rookie quarterbacks are often vulnerable to the blitz, Dart excelled and made the Eagles pay for being aggressive. The second time around, they played more to contain Dart and keep the Giants’ depleted offense in front of them. That tactic worked, and the Giants only scored 17 points (or 24 points, if you count the late touchdown which was called back).
The San Francisco 49ers adopted a similar style of play, using a high rate of Cover 4 looks to keep the Giants’ offense confined to the short to intermediate area of the field, or keep the ball in Dart’s hand. When he did scramble, his propensity to try to will his team to success led to some massive hits.
The Giants should expect the Bears to use the concepts employed by the Eagles and 49ers in their respective games.
Now, the question becomes whether the Bears will be able to do so to any effectiveness.
The Eagles and 49ers prefer to sit in Cover 4, relying on a four-man rush to generate pressure. At a surface level, the Bears have a pretty even split between man and zone coverages. They play each roughly 50 percent of the time, though to wildly different effects.
The Bears call Cover 4 at the second-lowest rate in the NFL, and when they play zone coverage, it’s usually Cover 3 or Cover 2. Interestingly, the Bears are pretty good at playing quarters coverage, with the NFL’s 11th best EPA — though that could also be the effect of a small sample size.
Overall, the Bears are one of the worst zone coverage teams in the NFL, with the fourth-worst EPA the league when playing1 zone.
By contrast, the Bears...
