Sneakers O'Toole wrote:
veganfan21 wrote:
Lovie's worst teams were below average. They never collapsed and became a circus show like this year's team, or the defenses of the past two years.
True that his worst team's were only below average, and he's never lost the locker room. That said, Tampa's defense this year is giving up 1.9 less points per game than the Bears, and the Bears have given up 17 less yards per game...not really a big difference there. The Bucs gave up 56 points to Falcons (the Falcons!!) and 48 to the Ravens. While the Bears were absolutely humiliated this year by the Patriots, the last time a Lovie-led Bears team played them, they still gave up 33 by half time, and that was with Urlacher, a younger Briggs, Tillman, and Peppers.
Lovie can put together an excellent defense when he has a pro bowl caliber pass rusher, middle linebacker, weakside linebacker, and corner. Take away one or two, and it quickly becomes mediocre, unless it's the pass rusher, and then it's barely mediocre. He has never shown much ability to adapt his defense to the players he has, and I seriously doubt our defense would be significantly better or less circus-y this year if Lovie was coordinating it, given the lack of talent on the roster.
I think your last point ignores how they specifically drafted players like Tommie Harris to do what the system demanded from those particular positions. So Tommie Harris had a certain skill set that Lovie optimized, and the same with players like Tillman and Briggs. Besides, a defense collapsing if you take away pro bowlers from two or three positions would be true of any defense, not just Lovie's.
In any case, yes the Buccaneers are nothing to write home about this year, but I'm willing to give him a pass this year. Eventually I am confident he'll get things in order on one side of the ball. It is my belief that the best the Bears can do on defense had Lovie been here is average. They would have never had the inexcusable communication errors that lead to wide open pro bowlers jogging into the end zone for TD after TD.
And yeah, Lovie got humiliated in that Patriots game. But these Bears get humiliated, if not by points given up, by just lack of execution all across the board almost every week.