Let's overreact to Week 4 in the NFL: Is the Bears' offense for real?
12:30 PM
Dan Graziano
ESPN Staff Writer
CHICAGO -- Hey, if the football fans in the Windy City want to overreact, who's going to tell them to cut it out? It has been quite a while since the Chicago Bears were fun, and even with the Chicago Cubs back in the playoffs this town is fired up about a 3-1 first-place football team that just put 48 points on the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on its way into the bye. Mitchell Trubisky just quadrupled his season touchdown pass total in one delirious afternoon, and if you're not allowed to overreact to that, what's the point of being a fan?
So let's start with the game I got to see in person as part of my Sunday NFL Countdown duties -- a game that was 38-3 at the half and ended 48-10 as Trubisky buried the Bucs' weeklong QB controversy with six touchdown passes of his own against a Tampa Bay team that couldn't do a thing right no matter who was taking the snaps.
Mitchell Trubisky had the best game of his young career, throwing for 354 yards and six TD passes. Jonathan Daniel/Getty Images
The Bears' offense is now as good as their defense
If you're a Bears fan who has been waiting to see the vaunted Matt Nagy offense that lit the league on fire last year in Kansas City, Sunday was your day. Nagy was scheming dudes open and leaning on mismatches with speedsters Tarik Cohen and Taylor Gabriel, and the Tampa Bay defense had no answers. Gabriel scored two touchdowns, including one on a nifty jet-action shovel pass at the goal line. He and Cohen each had seven catches and more than 100 receiving yards as Nagy went away from between-the-tackles running back Jordan Howard and leaned instead on the super-fast dudes he knew the Bucs' defenders couldn't catch. For the first time, Trubisky looked like a quarterback worthy of the 2017 No. 2 overall pick.
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Graziano's verdict: OVERREACTION. Fun, without a doubt. But the Bucs came into the game 27th in defensive DVOA, are banged up in the secondary and are averaging 34.75 points per game allowed. It's important to understand context. Bears players to whom I spoke about this game said they saw something good coming with Trubisky -- that they believe he has been developing the way they'd hoped he would. But no one here is assuming this is the way it's going to look every week. It takes awhile to master the Andy Reid offense Nagy brought from K.C. Alex Smith wasn't driving a league-leading passing attack until Year 5. One day of mastery doesn't mean everything is hunky-dory. What Bears fans should take from this is excitement and hope that this can be what it looks like, eventually. But the defense -- which, by the way, had another monster game with Khalil Mack wreaking havoc in the backfield -- is what will drive the Bears' NFC North title aspirations for this year at least. "It's like the LeBron effect," Bears cornerback Prince Amukamara told me of the Bears' preseason addition of Mack to an already-strong defense. "He just makes everybody better. When you see greatness like that up close, it just makes everyone else want to be great that much more."
