The Bears gathered Monday to try to fix their running game.
Players from all their offensive positions — and their coaches — met inside Halas Hall. In the first meeting of its kind under new coach Ben Johnson, the Bears discussed what they needed to do to get better on the ground. They watched all their runs from the game against the Cowboys, picking apart what went right and, more often, wrong.
“It was very encouraging,” running back D’Andre Swift. “I think it’s good for all of us being in the same room and watching it together to get on the same page moving forward.”
The Bears are rushing for 113.3 yards per game and 4.1 per carry, both of which rank 15th-best in the NFL. That’s not where Johnson needs his offense to be. In his three years as Lions offensive coordinator, his teams finished fifth, sixth and 11th in rushing yards per game.
More troubling than their stats this season is what they did Sunday — they averaged only three yards per carry against the Cowboys. For all the hubbub about the Bears’ 19-play touchdown drive in which they ran on 11 consecutive plays, the possession would have been shorter had the team done a better job of running the ball.
Playing the Raiders, who give up 6.3 yards per carry, is a good way to get back on track Sunday. Johnson is willing to be patient. His offensive line has three new starters — and will have a fourth Sunday when Theo Benedet starts in place of right tackle Darnell Wright, who has an elbow injury. But the running game’s issues go beyond who’s blocking.
“It’s also for the runners to understand what we intend to do with some of these play calls, where we want that ball to hit,” Johnson said. “And then . . . they take their natural skill set, and they make something big out of it.”
The coaching staff’s goal, he said, is to get the running back to the third level of the defense and force safeties and cornerbacks to attempt a tackle.
“We haven’t been doing that enough, so as a coaching staff, we need a sound plan,” Johnson said. “And then we need to go out there and we need to execute it just a little bit better than what we have been doing. I’m not discouraged at all. I see how close we are from this whole thing coming together.
“That was really the point of the meeting there on Monday; those guys see the same thing.”
Meeting as an offense didn’t allow the Bears to get into the detail they would in their position groups, but there was value in talking about mistakes in front of the entire unit.
The message from Johnson was that his players from different position groups were making errors at one point or another and that they were only that small mistake away from being effective.
“If everybody takes a turn on a different play,” Benedet said, “that’s how you get a series of negative runs or runs that don’t look like what we can do.”
Swift needs to avoid negative runs. He ranks 26th in the league in rushing yards over expected per carry, which measures how a running back fares compared to what’s expected of each play. At -0.5 yards, he’s worse than replacement level. It’s a habit the Bears tried to break this offseason after Swift’s RYOE last year was the worst among all running backs over the last five seasons.
Leading the NFL this year is David Montgomery, who walked away from the Bears — and a similar free-agent offer — to join the Lions three years ago.
“I was shocked when they let him walk,” Lions quarterback Jared Goff told reporters this week.
Swift, now, has to run.
“We’re close,” Swift said.