Thomas Brown gathered his offense on Monday, less than 24 hours after the Bears’ gut-punch loss to the rival Packers, and delivered a message in his signature direct style.
“There are no atta-boys in this game,” he said. “We play the game to win. We came up short.”
There was room for kudos for Brown, though, after he emerged from yet another chaotic week at Halas Hall to design a Bears’ offensive attack that, for the first time in a month, made sense.
Rookie Caleb Williams delivered the ball quickly and on time. The Bears’ once-ballyhooed receivers were dynamic once they caught the ball. The Bears’ run game was steady with flashes of electricity.
Brown cleared the lowest of bars — being more creative than Shane Waldron, whom coach Matt Eberflus fired last week.
“The game was called more the way that we hoped in the past,” receiver DJ Moore said.
The Bears’ season has devolved into this: the coach in charge of the most essential aspect of the franchise has been in his current role for just a week and has about a half-season’s worth of NFL play-calling experience. He’s just 38 years old — younger than tight end Marcedes Lewis.
Brown oversees Williams and a sputtering Bears offense. Keeping the former No. 1 overall pick’s development on track will go a long way toward settling the most existential question lingering inside Halas Hall. Finding a way to score points along the way will determine, more than any other factor, how many wins — if any — the Bears total the rest of the season.
That’s not the stability that the Bears sold to Williams in the spring. The Bears thought it was so essential to give the quarterback a head start in the NFL that they spent time during their predraft visit to USC and his trip to Halas Hall installing Waldron’s offense. It was a smart, progressive idea at the time — and then the team fired the man who designed the scheme.
Brown didn’t change the playbook Sunday as much as he tweaked it to emphasize what he felt was important. Whether he would have preferred to start from scratch schematically is beside the point — he didn’t have time to.
“I think it’s simple,” Brown said. “It doesn’t matter what I’m comfortable with. I don’t play. So, I can always adapt or adjust. To me, it’s my job as a coordinator to adapt and adjust to our players, to what our guys are doing. So, whether it’s Caleb, whether it’s the O-line, whether it’s the receivers, tight ends or backs, it’s our job to design a plan to obviously attack a defense but also to play to what we do well.”
Brown used pre-snap motion two-thirds of the time — more than the Bears had under Waldron — to gain a numbers advantage on run plays and to give receivers an edge when they released at the line of scrimmage.
“Trying to do a really good job of putting a seed of doubt in the minds of the defenders before the ball is snapped to give us an advantage to go play more aggressive … ” Brown said. “Attack the defense to get our guys involved early in the game, spread the wealth around. Obviously make those guys have to defend every blade of grass when it comes to the vertical passing game, to keepers, to screens, to the run game as well.”
Brown gave Williams short throws and encouraged him to be decisive in releasing the ball.
“How many ways can we design unsackable plays?” he said.
One way: hand the ball off. The Bears averaged 5.3 rushing yards per game, their second-most all season.
“Football’s a violent game,” Brown said, “and it rewards those who play the game violently.”
The Bears felt the energy shift last week. They appreciated Brown’s directness on the practice field and in meetings.
“We didn’t reinvent the wheel for those three or four days that Thomas became the offensive coordinator and play-caller,” Williams said. “I think the decisiveness, I think all of that came from, one, our meetings, and how we’re going to do things. I think it came from being able to get play calls in faster and being able to get up there and not feel like you’re rushed or not feel like you need to hurry up and get the ball snapped and things like that.
“I think all of these small things — details of routes, details of the blocking, details of the path of running backs and how we’re going to do things — I think that led into all of what happened last week.”
What happened last week resulted in just 19 points. But it felt like a start.
“I felt like we were more in control, especially with the play clock and understanding what play was coming next,” Moore said.
Now Brown has to do it again on Sunday against the Vikings.
“The wrinkles I want to add is to do what’s best for our team,” he said.” Regardless of what I may want to do – because it’s not about me – I think about what we are right now and what guys have time on task with, and what we’ll continue to put in place as far as throughout the entire season. Kind of marrying some stuff up and dress it up differently to give the defense [a different] presentation, while still working with what we’ve had time on task with.”