I had a brilliant plan to re-arrange my bedroom over the summer and give myself a little more space to walk. The idea was to shift my bed to the wall near the windows, which would also give me natural light to wake up to every morning. Sounds neat, right? Well, not so much when the temperatures are so cold that superlatives don’t do it justice.
So because it’s significantly cooler on my bed near the window than it is at any other part of the house, I decided to sleep on my basement couch that pulls out into a sofa. As I was putting it back together this morning, I saw something I hadn’t seen in three years – my iPod mini that I assumed was lost on one of my many trips in 2016. It probably needs a charge and an update, but finding something you thought you lost to start the day is a win.
You probably didn’t need a reminder of how frigid it is outside in Chicago, but my friend Jordan did a wonderful job capturing the essence of the thing:
Here’s a warm thought: Leonard Floyd picking up a sack at the Pro Bowl in Orlando. Predicting Leonard Floyd’s breakout. Bleacher Report’s Gary Davenport pegs Floyd as the Bears player who is the best candidate for a breakout season. Floyd finished the 2018 season better than he started it. Because while Floyd collected just four sacks, nine tackles-for-loss, and 11 QB Hits, that he was able to put it together in the second half during the team’s stretch run en route to winning a division title isn’t lost on me. After going without a sack in his first eight games, Floyd’s final eight games featured four sacks, eight tackles-for-loss, and nine quarterback hits. Extrapolate that sample over a full 16-game season and we’d be talkin gabout a player who had eight sacks, 16 tackles-for-loss, and 18 QB Hits. That’s the type of high-end production one would expect from a 2016 first-round pick. Seriously, where do we sign up for that?
We trumpeted Floyd as a potential breakout candidate last offseason and the numbers he put together in the second half leads us to believe that we would have been on the nose had a broken hand not stunted his development. Remember, Akiem Hicks believed Floyd had a Pro Bowl season in him before the 2018 season began. And now that Hicks has been to a Pro Bowl, perhaps he will share some pointers with Floyd on how to get there.
If you’re old enough to remember VH1’s Pop-up Video, then you’ll appreciate this:
Mitch Trubisky’s 2018 season was fun. He scored 27 total touchdowns, had eight multi-TD performances, and six games with a passer rating of 100 or better. Sure, there were games where turnovers were a bug. Trubisky had four multi-INT games, but the Bears still found a way to win three of those four, with the one loss being a narrow defeat against the Patriots. And even in that game, Trubisky threw two touchdowns and scored another on the ground. I can’t help but wonder what would have happened in that game had the Bears not allowed a pair of special teams touchdowns.
OK, now I see why Olivier Vernon was Khalil Mack’s replacement at the Pro Bowl:
Khalil Mack is awesome, but you already knew that.
Over at the Tribune, Brad Biggs explores the pass-rushing position that Mack elevated, and thus, lifted the Bears into an elite defense. Sure, the price tag was hefty. And it’s not out of the realm of possibilities that the Raiders tear-down and rebuild takes off thanks to the picks they received from the Bears (and Cowboys), but I have long been a believer in that the best trades are the ones where both teams get what they desire. If this happens to be one of them, so be it. So far, so good from a Chicago perspective.
An Anthony Miller breakout in 2018 would be fine by me:
We saw what a major second-year leap looked like when Eddie Jackson transformed into a Pro Bowl safety in his second season in Vic Fangio’s scheme. And while I’ll come short of predicting that Miller will have that type of impact as a second-year receiver in Matt Nagy’s offense, let’s keep in mind how much growth we saw from Trubisky in-season during the 2018 campaign. A healthy and hungry Miller could be on the road to bigger and better things in 2019.
Trust me … you’ll want to get one of these books for the Packers fan in your life:
NEWSLETTER
