Lovie Smith already is making promises about his new offense.
“I didn’t get it right the first time. We’ll get it right this time,” he said.
There are a lot of different ways the Bears coach must get “it” right after firing offensive coordinator Terry Shea after their first season in Chicago.
However he does it, the offense had better show significant improvement in 2005. If it doesn’t, Smith and general manager Jerry Angelo will have a hard time convincing anyone Shea wasn’t simply the scapegoat for an injury-riddled 5-11 season, during which the Bears started 10 different offensive linemen and four quarterbacks.
Smith’s plan? It’s one as old as football in Chicago. Run the football.
Although Smith’s offense finished 32nd and last in the NFL in total offense and passing offense, he sounded like a coach more concerned that his team finished 25th in rushing.
“I said all along we want to run the football first, and we got away from it this year, but that’s what you need to be able to do here,” Smith said. “In Chicago, with the elements and different things like that, that’s what we’ll try to get this time.”
So Smith is junking the system he desperately wanted to bring to Chicago. The one he saw work in St. Louis and Kansas City, where Shea was the quarterbacks coach.
Even though the Rams and Chiefs have had excellent running games, the system wasn’t the solution for the Bears.
“When I said we’re going in a different direction, that entails quite a bit,” Smith said. “I would like to see us become more of a running football team. So the system will be something along those lines.”
Shea’s biggest failure was his play-calling, which so often seemed to be of the grab-bag variety. Shea was trying to be unpredictable and wound up failing to utilize the running backs. The Bears gave up a team-record 66 sacks. It wasn’t all because of injuries on the offensive line.
Thomas Jones shouldered his share of the load, carrying 240 times for 948 yards, a shade under four yards per carry. Anthony Thomas had 122 carries (3.3 avg.), but 82 of them came when Jones was out with a toe injury. Thomas had only 40 carries in the other 13 games, a waste of a quality back who’s on his way out of town as a free agent.
While other teams were using two running backs regularly, the Bears weren’t. Jones and Smith carried the ball more than six times each in only one game. They each carried 15 times in the Dec. 5 victory over Minnesota, the Bears’ only win in their last seven games. But a healthy Thomas sat out the last two games.
The use of personnel raised all kinds of questions, not all of which were answered Tuesday.
Smith’s news conference ended after nine minutes, before many questions could be addressed, such as:
– How involved will Smith be in the offense? How involved was he in 2004? He appeared to write Shea a blank check that bounced. Will Smith give the new offensive coordinator that much freedom?
– Will Smith be more involved in how personnel is used? Or was he content to see Thomas waste away and promising second-year receiver Justin Gage disappear? The questions loom large.
Smith’s coaching background is on defense. He was the Rams’ defensive coordinator before coming to Chicago and before that the Bucs’ linebackers coach. If a coach’s experience is largely on one side of the ball, he needs to hire well for the other side.
Smith is 0-for-1.
It will be some time before we know whether pulling the plug on his offensive plan was the right move. If Smith had a gut feeling he might have to do this a year from now, he’s right to do it now and start over quickly.
Still, his start is chillingly similar to the first couple of years of Dick Jauron, whom Smith succeeded.
Jauron is a defensive coach, too, and he hired Gary Crowton as his offensive coordinator. Crowton’s wild schemes didn’t work and he left before the end of his second season to coach Brigham Young, which just fired him.
Jauron promoted from within to replace Crowton, and that’s how John Shoop became offensive coordinator. The Bears went 13-3 in Shoop’s first season as coordinator before everything fell apart.
That 13-3 season has gone down in history as one in which the doctors and trainers should have received game balls. It was virtually injury-free.
Shea’s critics still have to deal with the fact that in the three games Rex Grossman played, the offense scored six touchdowns, ranked 12th in yards, fourth in rushing and 19th in passing and 13th in sacks per pass attempt.
Without Grossman, the offense scored only 13 TDs in the next 13 games and fell to the bottom of the league in all those other categories except rushing, where they were 25th.
It’s from those depths that Lovie Smith is starting over.
