Two of the three baseball elimination games turned out to be clunkers, but I hope the respective League Championship Series games opening this weekend will be as thrilling as they promise to be. Otherwise, I’m not totally sure what I will find myself watching during the bye week.
Speaking of which, the bye week throws things off for me just enough to mess with my sense of time. When things go off the rails, I often remind myself that athletes are creatures of habit. But rarely do I take the time to remind myself that I can be the same way. So what am I supposed to do on a Friday that doesn’t feature a Game Preview? Guess I’ll have to power through the rest of these Bullets and figure it out.
Bleacher Report’s Chris Roling rolls out a list of rookies who have yet to meet the high expectations that came with them earlier this season, and I was a bit surprised to not see Bears running back David Montgomery make the cut. Montgomery is averaging 3.3 yards per carry and doesn’t seem to have found his footing to this point. Perhaps Roling is cutting Montgomery some slack because the offensive pieces around him have struggled mightily, which has stunted his growth as a rookie.
Between an offensive line that isn’t clearing space and a quarterback whose struggles to stretch the field vertically have allowed opposing defenses to clamp down on the running game, there simply hasn’t been much room for Montgomery to scamper. The hope is that the Bears re-assess things in their off time to get Montgomery (and the rest of the offense) in gear.
Even still, how have your expectations for him changed, so far? Are you buying what you’re eyes are telling you (and considering the issues along the line), or do you think his stats are closer to his actual, expected production?
(Photo by Jack Thomas/Getty Images)
Over at NBC Sports Chicago, Bryan Perez sorts through the offensive line’s troubles — and there have been plenty through the first five games. We have discussed Kyle Long’s issues to this point, but he isn’t riding the struggle bus alone. Left tackle Charles Leno Jr. has been flagged more times through five games than he did all of last season, signifying a step back for a player who played at a high level and earned a trip to the Pro Bowl. Right tackle Bobby Massie is one of the lowest graded players on PFF’s grading scale just five weeks into a four-year extension he signed during the offseason. And while the James Daniels-Cody Whitehair position swap hasn’t been disastrous, it hasn’t been game-changing. I expect the Bears to take a good, hard look at what they have on the line and give this group one more shot at putting it together before making drastic changes. The investments in the line are too heavy to make drastic change for the sake of it. But if this keeps up, the time to make change (for change’s sake) will be coming.
The Bears really need to make changes, but there aren’t a ton of places where you point to and make an obvious shift. Despite last week’s disappointment, the defense isn’t going to get a makeover during the bye week. Bilal Nichols’ return figures to help matters while details regarding the timetable for Akiem Hicks to come back are rather vague. On the other side of the ball, we know the offensive line needs to be better, but do we know that Ted Larsen or Rashaad Coward are going to bring the group to acceptable levels of play? We do know that the keys to the offense will be handed back to Mitch Trubisky after Chase Daniel showed why he is limited in a starting role. Don’t get me wrong … I love change. It’s just that tearing it all down five weeks into the season isn’t logical or likely.
Best class ever? Maybe. We’ll let some more games play out before we get there. But this group has juked enough defenders and would-be tacklers to make a case.
Luis C. Medina, who you can find on Twitter at lcm1986, has been covering the Chicago Bears at Bleacher Nation since 2017. Since then, he has written about 3 head coaches, 5 play-callers, and 11 starting quarterbacks. Previously, Luis wrote about the Cubs and MLB at BN (2015-16) and worked in the Chicago Tribune sports department (2011-16). He also co-hosted a Cubs postgame show, Outside the Ivy, in 2019.
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NEWSLETTER
