Tuesday’s two-minute drill …
Danieal Manning was raised to be a polite Texas gentleman. He never would pound a fist and make a selfish demand that could help fix the Bears’ defense and also save his career from spinning out of control.
But Bears coaches need to start showing Manning more respect before they ruin the young player. The Bears have turned a promising rookie safety in 2006 into a tentative defensive liability without a niche six games into his second season.
Their mishandling of Manning, combined with the stunted growth of high draft picks Cedric Benson and Mark Bradley, might start to raise questions about whether Bears coaches can develop talent that isn’t clearly All-Pro caliber, such as Devin Hester’s or Mark Anderson’s.
First, they overreacted to Manning’s blown coverage that resulted in a TD catch in the Super Bowl by punishing him with a demotion that wrecked any confidence built up in 14 starts as a rookie. Instead of bringing back Manning as the starter at free safety who would benefit from learning a tough lesson, the Bears installed new signee Adam Archuleta at strong safety and supplanted Manning with annually injured Mike Brown.
Brown and Archuleta should have been battling at camp for the strong-safety spot alongside Manning, but the Bears put faith in the veterans that now seems blind.
Archuleta has a broken hand, but the Bears benched him in the second half Sunday against the Vikings for the same reason the Redskins benched him for the final nine games of 2006. He can’t get off the hash mark to make a play on downfield passes.
Brown just can’t get off the injured list.
Meanwhile, Manning has been shuttled back and forth between cornerback and safety so often, he currently does neither job particularly well. The Packers exposed his inexperience at cornerback for a TD pass, and the Vikings exploited the reality that Manning didn’t practice all week at safety but switched there when Archuleta was replaced.
“I’m not complaining about [playing both],” Manning said. “I’m having a good time with it. I just want them to let them know ahead of time to get reps and prepare, [but] that’s no excuse. I don’t think that’s the problem.”
Actually, it is. The four scoring plays of 35 yards or more by the Vikings all came down to a defensive back failing to make a play. Players in a secondary still learning their roles forgot how to tackle.
Tackling requires attitude, awareness, confidence and all the intangibles the Bears’ defensive backs lack due to the way the coaching staff has pushed the wrong buttons. A Cover-2 defense needs to rely on its safeties, not hope to hide them.
Solutions? Let Manning stay at free safety, his most natural position, where he has the most experience.
Until Nathan Vasher returns at right cornerback, install Ricky Manning Jr. as the starter. A guy valuable enough to sign to a $21 million contract possesses too much value to be limited to nickel-back duties. Start Manning Jr. before players start to wonder about defensive coordinator Bob Babich’s judgment, though it might be too late for that.
On nickel downs, insert rookie Trumaine McBride, who needs to get more physical, at right cornerback and slide Manning Jr. inside.
That would leave Archuleta and Brandon McGowan, two disappointments who play the run better than the pass, to compete for the strong safety job or rotate every couple of series.
Putting both on the field at safety at the same time dares quarterbacks to beat them deep. And as the legendary Tarvaris Jackson showed every quarterback left on the Bears’ schedule, it’s a dare worth taking.
The Vikings exposed and embarrassed every facet of the Bears’ defense. But the proven personnel among the front seven suggests the line and linebackers will improve and puts the biggest onus on the secondary, which can erase every mistake if it’s good enough.
Fixing the defense, a rare chore on the to-do list in Chicago, simply requires the same approach as boarding a plane: Back to front. …
If the play that resulted in the 81-yard touchdown pass to Hester has been in the game plan for a while, as quarterback Brian Griese said after the game, then why did the Bears wait until they were desperate to use it? Couldn’t the Bears have tried that earlier in the season or the game, like in the final two minutes of the first half?
“We had the same play called earlier in the game but got a different coverage,” offensive coordinator Ron Turner said.
Perhaps, but it was as indicting as it was impressive to see the Bears use Hester as a deep threat with 1 minute 38 seconds left in a game the way fans have been clamoring to see him used since mini-camp in May. …
Hester’s touchdown made it moot and other questionable decisions deserved more scrutiny, but did anybody else wonder about Smith’s decision to attempt an onside kick after coming within a touchdown with 2:36 left? The Bears still had two timeouts left and the ability to stop the clock a third time with the two-minute warning. The Vikings took over at the Bears’ 39 — nearly field-goal range — but lost 7 yards in three plays before a punt pinned the Bears at their 19. …
Hope is not totally lost, Bears fans, but start alerting the search party: Since the NFL playoffs expanded in 1990, 124 teams have started the season 2-4. Only 12 of them made the playoffs, according to the Elias Sports Bureau. …
The longer Brian Urlacher doesn’t look like Brian Urlacher, the more it suggests the back injury that kept him out of practice in training camp continues to nag him. Neither Urlacher nor the coaching staff would ever say so, but the lack of impact plays lately from No. 54 rates a concern. Whenever Urlacher isn’t the Bears’ most dominant defensive player, and he hasn’t been, people wonder why. …
Guess this isn’t a good time for a revisionist history lesson examining whether the Bears should have taken the Redskins’ offer of the No. 6 pick in April’s NFL draft for Lance Briggs and the Bears’ 31st pick in the first round. That’s a steep price, and tight end Greg Olsen looks terrific — but Adrian Peterson was still on the board. The Vikings took Peterson, the steal of the first round, at No. 7. …
After a reporter informed Peterson on the field after the game that he had just made history with a single-game Vikings record of 224 yards rushing, Peterson entered the locker room, took off his jersey and gave it to a member of the equipment staff. According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Peterson then said, “Keep this someplace for me, and don’t wash it.” …
Memo to those who operate the video board at Soldier Field: Stop showing ’06 highlights of Rex Grossman hitting deep passes to Bernard Berrian or the Bears’ defense forcing takeaways. The video only serves as a weekly reminder of how bad this season has turned and that the players who produced those highlights are still here, but mysteriously the production isn’t.
———–
dhaugh@tribune.com
