Happy Thursday everyone! The Bears’ defense reportedly showed out in their first joint practice with Indianapolis, giving the Colts’ offense early and finishing well in the late 2-minute drill. They’re playing with energy, finishing drills, and trash talking throughout practice — Adam Jahns writes that the unit has an ‘edge’, and that’s exactly what they’ll need throughout the 2023 season.

But which players are catalyzing the Bears’ defensive attitude shift? What worked last Saturday? What didn’t? To find out, let’s dissect the opening drive of last weekend’s preseason game and see what Alan Williams and the Bears’ defensive starters are cooking in prep for the 2023 season.

Our first two episodes of Dissecting a Drive covered the offense exclusively, so it’s about time we dive into the Bears’ defensive scheme! Lucky for us, Saturday’s Bears game provided us with a 12-play Tennessee touchdown drive that’s ripe for reviewing.

Keep in mind that because it’s the preseason, this is the most vanilla flavor of the Bears’ defensive structure you’ll see all year. That said, I can confirm that the Bears’ defensive bones are still in place throughout the drive — you’ll see a healthy dose of Cover 3, Cover 2, and Tampa 2 throughout this video and throughout the 2023 season, regardless of how the Bears tailor their calls to each opponent going forward.

In this drive, we see:

• A calmer, much-improved Kyler Gordon
• How Tennessee used pre-snap motion to create leverage for their run blockers
• The good, the bad, and the ugly from Dominique Robinson, Andrew Billings, and Rasheem Green
• Jack Sanborn’s big hits, big misses, and the impact Tremaine Edmunds will have on this defense
• TJ Edwards’ physicality and presence within the Bears’ defense
• How Alan Williams used subtle shifts within the Defensive Line Front to create mismatches for his DTs
• Tyrique Stevenson’s ups and downs
• And much, much more

Check it out and let me know what you think!

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Editor’s Note: In the future, we’ll make have a GameDay post and a Postgame post of some sort — it’s preseason for all of us, and those two articles totally slipped my mind. Thank you for bearing with us as we transition!

It’s official: The 2023 Chicago Bears are undefeated!

Joking aside, the Bears got their first taste of 2023 football as they took on the Tennessee Titans last Saturday and plenty of players showed out for Chicago as they did. The Bears’ offensive starters scored easily on their only two drives (which somehow still set Twitter aflame) and the defense recovered from giving up the opening touchdown to muster 8 sacks, 4 takeaways, and a pesky performance overall.

To break down everything that happened in one article would create an illegible beast, so in an effort to keep things clean we’re going to split the analysis across Monday and Tuesday — we’ll start today with the Defense and continue with the Offense tomorrow.

Editor’s Note: Check back with this article throughout the day — as I produce more All-22 cutups, I’ll update this article to include more analysis 

Saturday’s Standouts:

• Rookie CB Tyrique Stevenson had as impressive a debut as a rookie could have, especially given that the Bears played so much vanilla Cover 2 and Cover 3 that any outside CB would’ve struggled to shine. Last week on DBB we dove deep into Stevenson’s toolkit, and you could already see a notable improvement in his tackling form on Saturday — despite often needing to charge downhill and make tackles underneath, he completed every tackle he attempted, which is saying something when you end the day with 7 solo tackles!
  • Stevenson received a warm welcome to the NFL in only his first play, but I loved the resiliency he displayed throughout the rest of the half. He set the edge in the run game, he played sticky in limited man coverage reps, and gave Bears fans plenty to get excited about in his debut action. I love this kid & can’t wait to watch his growth.

Welcome to the NFL, Rookie!

The big gain that #Bears CB Tyrique Stevenson allowed came on a Titans mid-play adjustment — Stevenson blanketed his man early (even cutting in front for the ball) but never saw the WR's spin-to-space coming.

Better now than Week 1! pic.twitter.com/e7irvFdk2Z

— Robert Schmitz (@robertkschmitz) August 14, 2023

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In part one, we found that the Bears actually had a respectable pass rush for the first part of the year, but trading Robert Quinn had a profound impact, leaving them with the worst pass rush of any NFL team in the last five years post-trade.

In part two, we found that Trevis Gipson is a quality second defensive end, but only if there is a quality starter opposite him, which the Bears will need to find this offseason.

The Inside Men

The Bears had four defensive tackles with at least 150 pass rush snaps in 2022, and three of them – Armon Watts, Angelo Blackson, and Mike Pennel Jr. – are free agents, so it will be very easy to remake this position substantially if they want to.

The table below shows how those four performed in a variety of per-snap metrics, including how they ranked compared to the 104 defensive tackles league-wide who had at least 150 pass rush snaps. All data comes from Pro Football Focus (PFF). (Side note: Pass Rush Productivity is a unique PFF stat that accounts for all sacks, QB hits, and pressures on a per-snap basis, with an added weight given to sacks; a higher value is better.) Values in the top 25% are highlighted in green, while those in the bottom 25% are highlighted in red.

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Wrapping up our look at returning players and new veterans on defense, today we’re going to explore stopping the run.

This can be difficult to quantify, because much of what goes into run stopping doesn’t get measured. When Eddie Goldman holds his own against two blockers, he frees up a linebacker to make the tackle, but nothing Goldman did there shows up on a stat sheet. So I want to be clear from the start that this is not going to be a perfect science, and I make no claims that it is.

However, Pro Football Focus (PFF) does track some data that can give us an idea of how often a defender is directly involved in stopping a run play. We’ll look at basic metrics that are fairly self-explanatory, like how often a player makes a run tackle or misses a tackle, but also some more advanced data including how far downfield the average run tackle they make is.

One unconventional stat PFF uses that I want to briefly discuss is a “run stop.” PFF defines this as a solo tackle that counts as a “win” for the defense. I can’t find anything definitively saying what makes a play a “win,” but you can imagine this is probably similar to success rate, where it keeps the offense from picking up a certain % of the yards needed for a 1st down. In other words: a defender made a tackle to keep the run short and force the offense behind the chains.

I will examine every Bears defender who had at least 200 run defense snaps last year, whether in Chicago or somewhere else. This allows for a large enough individual sample size that the values have some meaning, but also a large enough sample size for comparing players from a position to their peers. The 200 snap threshold gave a sample of 74 interior defensive linemen (2.3/team), 52 edge defenders (1.6/team), 66 linebackers (2.1/team), 75 cornerbacks (2.3/team), and 70 safeties (2.2/team). That adds up to 10.5 defenders/team, or roughly those who played starter-level snaps.

Interior DL

Let’s start with a look at the defensive line, where the Bears return Angelo Blackson and added Justin Jones in free agency. The table below shows how they both fared in a variety of run-stopping metrics last year, as well as their rank compared to 74 interior defensive linemen who played at least 200 run snaps. To give a broader frame of reference, the best, average, median, and worst values among that 74-player sample are also provided for each statistics. Categories highlighted in green indicated the player was in the top 25% relative to their peers, while red indicates the player was in the bottom 25%.

A few thoughts:

• Angelo Blackson seems like a decent enough, if not great, run defender. He’s not overly good or bad in any of the areas. His missed tackle rate is a little higher than you would like to see, so hopefully that can improve a bit going forward.
• Justin Jones is very active in run defense, as evidenced by his high amount of run-defending tackles. However, he struggles with missed tackles, and very few of his tackles count as “wins” for the defense, which means they’re happening farther down the field than you would like.

Edge Rushers

Let’s switch gears and examine the edge rushers now, where the Bears have three notable players: returnees Robert Quinn and Trevis Gipson and newly signed Al-Quadin Muhammad. The table below shows their performance against the run in a variety of metrics, including their rank compared to 52 positional peers.

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Almost everything I’ve looked at so far this offseason has been about the offense, so now I want to shift gears and give some attention to returning players and new veterans on defense. That starts today with a closer examination of the pass rush.

In order to do this, I’m using data from Pro Football Focus (PFF) that examine pressures, wins, sacks, and pass rush productivity. Here’s a quick explainer of what PFF means by some of those that are less obvious:

• Pressure: This is a measure of how often a player bothers the QB – makes him move off his spot, hits him, or sacks him.  It will be defined through the % of pass-rushing snaps that count as a pressure, QB hit, or sack.
• Win: this is a measure of how often a player beats their block to impact a play within 2.5 seconds. It will be defined through the % of pass-rushing snaps that count as a win.
• Pass Rush Productivity: this accounts for all sacks, pressures, and QB hits on a per-snap basis, with an added weight given to sacks. PFF doesn’t give an exact formula for how much extra sacks are weighted, but generally a higher number is better.

I’ll examine both all pass rushing snaps and only what PFF defines as true pass sets. These are basically set up to only look at 4-man rushes on standard passing plays, so all screens, play action, designed rollouts, blitzes, 3-man rushes, and exceptionally fast (ball thrown in <2 seconds) or slow (ball thrown in >4 seconds) plays are removed. PFF says that these values tend to be more stable year-to-year, since they are more indicative of actual pass rushing ability.

Edge Rushers

Let’s start by examining edge rushers, where the Bears have three notable NFL veterans: returners Robert Quinn and Trevis Gipson and newly signed Al-Quadin Muhammad.

The table below shows how all three fared in a variety of pass rushing stats in 2021, as well as their rank compared to 93 NFL edge rushers with at least 200 pass rush opportunities. To give a broader frame of reference, the best, average, median, and worst values among that 93-player sample are also provided for each statistic.

Categories highlighted in green indicated the player was in the top 25% of edge rushers (top 23), while red indicates the player was in the bottom 25% (bottom 23).

A few thoughts:

• If you ignore sacks and look more at the pressure and win rates – which are more stable season to season – Quinn was more good than great as a pass rusher in 2021. That feels weird to say for somebody who finished 2nd in the NFL in sacks, but the extremely low pressure/sack ratio tells us that he produced more sacks than expected based on the pressure he generated, and pressures are generally more consistent than sacks.
  • This tracks with other data showing that Quinn generally took longer to get to the QB than the NFL’s elite pass rushers.
  • Quinn also has a fairly established track record of season-to-season inconsistency. He’s never produced an above-average pass rush productivity ranking in two consecutive years during his career, and he hasn’t had back-to-back seasons with 8+ sacks since 2014.
  • Add it all up, and I think a regression from Quinn is highly likely in 2022. The Bears would be wise to sell high on him now rather than waiting for the trade deadline if they are hoping to get value in return.
• Trevis Gipson honestly was fairly comparable to Robert Quinn in most of these statistics, which is pretty impressive. He had a very solid year in 2021. His sample size was much smaller (229 pass rush snaps vs. 402 for Quinn), so I’m eager to see if he can repeat that performance. It’s worth noting, however, that his pressure/sack ratio was about as low as Quinn’s, so he could play better this year and still see a dip in sacks.
• Al-Quadin Muhammad is a bad pass rusher. I really hope the Bears aren’t planning on him doing much to bother the QB, because 2021 was actually the best season rushing the passer of his career, and it was still bad.

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