See defender. Run past him. Catch the ball.
Celebrate.
If the instructions for new Bears wide receiver Devin Hester are much more complicated than that, the team risks turning a necessary position switch into a failed experiment.
Don’t issue Hester an offensive playbook. Give him a cocktail napkin with doodles. The simpler it is for Hester, the harder it will be for opposing defenses to stop one of the fastest players in the league.
“There are only a few guys in the league who can make people miss and do the things [Hester] can do with the football,” coach Lovie Smith said.
It has been a while since the Bears had one of those guys playing in their offense.
Hester’s meeting at Halas Hall with wide receivers coach Darryl Drake last week dropped a big hint that Hester likely would stop playing cornerback and start playing offense.
Confirmation of one of the Bears’ smartest off-season moves came Monday when the team took the unusual step of releasing news of the position switch on its Web site.
Maybe the Bears were so excited they didn’t want to wait for the news to break elsewhere and had to share the information before Friday’s mini-camp.
The only question is, what took so long? The short answer is Hester, who fought the switch until recently.
Until the Bears’ coaching staff got through to Hester, he always imagined himself developing into a lock-down cornerback like Deion Sanders, his mentor.
“There’s no ‘I’ in team, and however I can help the team I’m willing to do it,” Hester said Monday.
Moving Hester continues an off-season that’s going much better for the Bears than perception would have people believe.
Drafting cornerbacks Corey Graham of New Hampshire and Trumaine McBride of Mississippi put the Bears in position to move Hester.
The Bears didn’t enter draft weekend looking to bolster depth at cornerback, but Graham and McBride were the two best players on the board in the fifth and seventh rounds, respectively. Early indications at the rookie mini-camp did nothing to make the Bears regret those choices.
The crowded depth chart left little room or need for Hester, whom the Bears want to keep happy so he can keep returning kickoffs and punts for touchdowns.
Now he can catch passes for points too. Using a basic easy-to-learn package of plays, the Bears could line up Hester in the slot or even in the backfield and put him in motion in order to get a mismatch. Think Reggie Bush.
“Definitely, our creative juices will be flowing,” said offensive coordinator Ron Turner.
