The Chicago Bears defense was unveiling a form it hasn’t had in a long time. There’s nothing like watching that navy blue flying around Soldier Field on a cold night in December. It gave one memories of that great even back in 2005 when Brian Urlacher and his crew shut down the mighty Michael Vick at the peak of his powers. Smothering the Rams as they did, there’s no longer question this defense is for real.
The numbers prove that. They held the Los Angeles Rams, the #1 offense in football, to six points. It was the lowest total of the Sean McVay era. Todd Gurley ran for a season-low 28 yards and did not score a touchdown. Jared Goff threw a career-high four interceptions. It was a clinic of defensive football against a team that had scored 54 points less than a month ago.
Head coach Matt Nagy admitted even he was surprised by how great the defense was and couldn’t say enough about their effort. So how in the world did it happen? According to Albert Breer of the MMQB, the seeds for this domination were actually planted a week earlier following the crushing loss in New York to the Giants.
Giants loss motivated Chicago Bears defense to crush mighty Rams
Everybody remembers what happened the week before. The Bears defense went into the game against a 3-8 Giants team that looked soft on paper. They could do their thing and take care of business. Except they forgot this is the NFL and it doesn’t always work like that. After a strong first half, things went wrong in the second. Saquon Barkley got going on the ground, finishing with 125 yards and New York scored 17 points.
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It was a humiliating sequence. One that Nagy said they were starting to address even before getting back to Chicago.
So … could Nagy see this coming? Sort of. The coach was curious all week about how the players would manage a heart-breaking loss to the Giants the previous Sunday. He saw them handle it on the flight home from Jersey with a “we got this” ownership that he’d witnessed after previous losses. He also got a good week of practice out of them. But it wasn’t until Saturday night at the team hotel that he really knew.
“You know what it was? I noticed a looseness, and a calmness, which I thought was really neat,” Nagy said. “Going into a game like this, where you get flexed, and it’s against one of the best teams in the NFL, we haven’t been in that situation before. So for them to react the way that they did—I could feel it out on the field, they felt confident, they felt good playing together.”
One of the common aspects of good units is they play pissed off after having a bad game. In 1985, after allowing 38 points to the Dolphins in their only the loss of the season, the Bears defense allowed just 43 total in their remaining six games including the playoffs. After giving up 338 yards and 23 points last week, this Bears defense responded by allowing 214 yards and six points to the best offense in the NFL. That’s beyond impressive.
